The Postponed Generation: Why America’s Youth Are...

The Postponed Generation: Why America’s Youth Are Growing Up Later, Susan Littwin (Morrow: $6.95). Social trend-watchers are rarely in agreement but always in vogue. Two 1986 books about young adults, this one and Wanda Urbanska’s “The Singular Generation,” typify the confusion. Both authors begin with the premise that students and young professionals today are more in danger of downward mobility than their parents. Urbanska, however, finds that the current crop of young adults is meeting the economic challenge; they are, she writes, “the first generation of Americans who aspire to be self-sufficient at some primary level.” Littwin argues just the opposite. The problem lies less with their conclusions than with their research method--personal interviews that reflect the psychology of the young adults interviewed but that capture only part of the social picture. In fact, having been raised by parents who are unusually skeptical of public institutions, students today are either meandering in search of something to believe in (as Littwin suggests) or holding to a pragmatic philosophy that includes the importance of such concepts as faith (as Urbanska argues).

Until her last chapter, Littwin doesn’t seem to understand the difficulty of this dilemma, suggesting through her term “slow-growing children” that self-searching is a waste of time. Toward the book’s end, though, she acknowledges that this generation was not “shoved into adulthood by a conveyor belt, as their parents were. They have had time to think, explore, experiment. Perhaps they will come up at 30 or so, knowing who they are, and they won’t have mid-life crises.” Yet, for the most part, Littwin’s sympathies lie with the parents. This becomes clear in the last chapter, which takes an overtly maternal tone, advising psychotherapy for “slow-growing siblings” and arguing that health-insurance carriers should extend the limit on “dependent children” coverage to age 30.

California: Land of New Beginnings, David Lavender (University of Nebraska: $11.95). The majority of these pages travel through the deserts, mountains and valleys of the state from the late 1500s to the 1920s, profiling individuals who stood tall against the expansive frontier of the Old West. The author then jumps rather abruptly to the present, where, in contrast, pioneers searching for “new beginnings” seem dwarfed by the nation-size state. Lavender is clearly taken with the early settlers--he vividly evokes life in the “tribelets,” self-contained villages of between 100 and 500 people with “a powerful sense of place” and initiation rites that interwove song, story, sand paintings and dance. But Lavender, while a stylish writer, rarely traces the origins of present-day problems. His vignettes are often gripping, but more often disconnected. He charts the history of irrigation, for example, without examining the political dilemma of attracting industry and protecting the environment. I Am One of You Forever, Fred Chappell (Louisiana State University: $6.95). Accustomed to contemporary novels that are often hip because of their sarcasm and irreverence, we’ve grown suspicious of fiction about bygone serenity. The heartfelt joy in these vignettes about a boy growing up in 1940s North Carolina is both plausible and contagious, however, for Fred Chappell-- alternately playful and profound and always original--does not isolate his characters from disappointment. The book begins when a dreamy bridge built by the narrator’s father is washed away by water released by a factory’s floodgates. Chappell’s characters are especially interesting because they find fulfillment not by denying tragedy, but by consciously defying it through a heightened sensitivity to everyday events. Chappell’s description of a baseball game, for instance, is charged with an unusual degree of energy, as the pitcher seems “to disintegrate like flung confetti. How would these scattered limbs ever come together again to compose a man? . . . (The batter) stood watching this human snow flurry with patient amusement and, when the baseball finally floated out of the uproar, swatted it into the blue reaches where the angels dwelt.”

Similarly, Chappell finds affectionate humor in the characters’ “separate darknesses.” A case in point is the narrator’s Uncle Gurton. “As informative as a spoon,” he only spoke after offered a second helping of food, and always to say, “No thank you, I’ve had an elegant sufficiency; any more would be a superfluity.” When the narrator sneaks into Gurton’s room to measure his gleaming dry wavy silver beard, normally tucked secretly in a bib, Chappell turns to fantasy, which is often the most realistic way of portraying childhood memories, and the beard slides in sheets off the bed like a small waterfall: “And now out of that misty mass and down over the edge of the bed came a birchbark canoe and two painted Cherokee Indians paddling with smooth alacrity.” Most of Chappell’s characters retain this childlike sense of mystery, and in not coming of age they find happiness.

Perfection Salad: Women and Cooking at the Turn of the Century, Laura Shapiro (Holt: $8.95). Judicious, funny and insightful, Laura Shapiro takes a curious little question--Why did “domestic scientists” become so haughty about Wonder Bread, toasted marshmallows stuffed with raisins and Jell-O molds?--and turns it into a valid premise for a telling social history. Historians can neither dismiss “domestic science” as insignificant (it opened doors for female chemists, paved the way for federal nutrition programs and helped define American food), nor affirm it as a ground-breaking feminist movement, for the “scientists” made the mistake of “choosing domesticity as a way of getting out of the house and food as a means of transcending the body.” But, most significantly, domestic science created a role for women in the Industrial Age. Before the 18th Century, women produced nearly everything their family consumed.

When textile mills and other innovations assumed the central role, domestic scientists such as Harriet Beecher Stowe came on the scene, underscoring the importance of “being truly noble and heroic in the insipid details of everyday life.” Wives who did not attend to these details (the most important of which was, of course, food, the means not only to nutrition, but to social and moral growth) courted disaster: Over 93 percent of prison inmates were not brought up on oatmeal, read a Quaker Oats ad, while a New York member of a domestic science association exclaimed, “Is it not pitiful, this army of incompetent wives, whose lack of all knowledge of domestic science is directly and indirectly the means of filling our prisons, asylums, reformatories and saloons!” While “Perfection Salad” never explains its implication that women who “play by men’s rules” today are somehow repeating the mistakes of the domestic scientists all over again, this well-written book offers unusual insights into the relationship between science, industry and society.