On Generation S.L.U.T.
I finished reading Marty Beckerman’s Generation S.L.U.T. yesterday. It’s a short read, made all the shorter by the intermittent full-page “S.L.U.T. Stats” and quotes from teenagers around the country, both of which serve to back up the message of the story. The book jumps between a fictionalized, clearly somewhat experiential, story about a group of high-school kids, some of Beckerman’s essays and articles on youth culture, and these smartly laid-out factoids. Everything appears in sequence: where the issue in the story is drinking, so too are the factoids and essays; when the issue is violence, the surrounding materials follow; and so on. It makes for less of a story than an argument, exactly as it should be.
As I touched on in a previous post, Beckerman’s argument is that we’re a generation devoid of purpose, heros, morals, standards, or ideals, and that this has led to shallow kids having shallow, loveless sex in a haze of alcohol and social pressures and hating themselves for it to the point of neurosis, psychosis, and suicide. It’s a hard argument to refute if you are or recently have been a teenager, and hard regardless in the face of his collected statistics.
I have (very) recently been a teenager, and emotionally I found Generation S.L.U.T. a difficult book to digest. Too much of it hits close to home, literally: many of the quotes and statistics come from my backyard. Beckerman excerpts interviews with teens from DC, Baltimore, Rockville, the places I call home. He quotes an Associated Press article about several teens who beat and sexually assaulted an adult entertainer, and those teens attended my former high school, Walt Whitman in Bethesda, MD; I had all but forgotten about that. American University in Washington, DC is Beckerman’s present place of study, and he cites depressing statistics and quotes from the school’s newspaper and tells a sorry story about a frat party there. My mother teaches at AU, and I pretty much grew up on its campus. The young lady I’m taking out Friday night attends AU. All that personal identification and we haven’t even gotten to the story itself.
It’s not a complex plot, nor does it need to be. It’s a tiny snapshot of a few days in the lives of fairly average middle to upper-middle class American “Generation Y” high school students. Most of the characters are believable to the point of reminding me of friends, fellow classmates, and myself. That’s the idea, of course. We watch these kids fumble, in some cases fatally, through sex, drugs, parental pressure, young love, and all the rest of “high school experience.” Some of it is funny, some of it is painful, and much of it is disgusting in the most affecting sense of the word. Even for this stalwart member of the nothing’s-shocking generation, I had a hard time fighting back tears and anger at scenes of gang rape and sexual predation. It’s an affecting story, if nothing else.
But for my money, the story isn’t the best thing in the book. Beckerman is, for now, a better essayist and journalist (of a sort) than a writer of fiction. His youth as a writer is readily apparent in the novel portion of S.L.UT.: he relies on plot crutches like the unbelievable teen millionaire villain Trevor, and is unskillfully and self-consciously self-referential; I frankly don’t care that the book was published by MTV Books, and he should have enough confidence in what he has to say not to worry about losing cred for association with a sell-out brand/institution like MTV. His essays and articles, on the other hand, are hilarious, crazed, gonzo-style assaults on reader and subject matter alike, marred only by that lingering authorial immaturity; even Hunter S. Thompson knew when to dial the gonzo down. Beckerman could benefit from some crisp editing and tighter language, but it’s a fairly minor complaint. It’s clear that as he matures he’ll be an even more poison pen.
My conclusion? It’s not a brilliant work of fiction, nor even a brilliant hybrid story-plus-essay collection-plus-collected statistics-plus-plus. It is, however, a brilliant vehicle for a very important idea: that something is seriously wrong with Generation Y, and that there are some readily identifiable causes for this. What S.L.U.T. doesn’t offer, somewhat to my chagrin, is solutions. One can infer, of course, that some decency and moderation is well in order. But Beckerman suggests through the story’s end that this generation’s chance for redemption was (figuratively) yesterday, and we didn’t take the opportunity. What’s more upsetting than a lack of solutions is that he may well be right.
Related: there’s an interview with Beckerman over at Suicide Girls that’s far more casual and unbiased than the one Salon ran a couple weeks ago. Check it out.