The Amboy Dukes

Rating:
Summary: Before Rock and Roll
Review: In 1945, teenagers were visible as individuals but not as a group. The subculture would come later, with rock and roll, Elvis, and portable radios. Meanwhile there was a depression to work through and a big war to win. Small wonder that kids of that era passed quickly from adolescence to adulthood with hardly time for a coke along the way. The Amboy Dukes is a milestone youth novel of that era. Though not as self-consciously literary as its middle-class competitor Catcher in the Rye, Dukes vividly dramatizes urban despair in a crowded working-class precinct of New York City, and its effect on the Jewish youth gangs spawned there. It was then and remains a classically gritty tale of modern America.

Because Shulman portrays the sexual escapades and pot smoking in candid fashion, it's easy for critics to stigmatize Dukes as a trashy novel. That however neglects the many dimensions to the book, including some very fine writing by the author. Instead, I take it as an honest depiction of what Shulman knew and chose to set out in unusually forceful and unpatronizing terms. Coveted by teenagers of the time for its daring assault on censorship, the language and events may seem tame compared with today's non-existent standards. Yet Shulman's characters and their dramatic narrative remain as fresh and timely as ever, the murder of the teacher standing, in retrospect, as an opening shot in the youth rebellion to come. Substitute Latino or Black for the Jewish Dukes, add a level of drug trafficking, and the story (including the awful conditions that spawned them) remains essentially unchanged from then to now.

Also, author Shulman goes into vivid detail describing the youth fashions and moral behavior of the day, or what kids then considered 'cool'. More important, however, is his sharply drawn slice of class realities, as experienced by pivotal characters Frank Goldberg and his 11-year old sister Alice. Their two wrenching tours through the tonier parts of the city are among the book's memorable highlights. In fact, it is the easily overlooked Alice, and not the more melodramatic gangbangers, who remains the book's most pivotal and sympathetic character. For it is she who's being propelled into a new post-war era with all the sadness and growing sense of entrapment that bedevils the working poor. It is through her youthful enthusiasm slowly succumbing to despair that the book touches a universal chord, as we experience with her the poignancy of a crushing loss of hope. It is here, far from the prurience and rawness of the rest of the book, that Shulman achieves his finest, most revealing moments. I like to think that in the coming years, low-interest loans, Levittowns, and other now much derided assisstance programs redeemed at least some of her innocent dreams. (There's also a glimpse in these passages of the rational basis of consumerism.)

Because of its questionable content, The Amboy Dukes continues to lead an underground existence, overshadowed by the more respectable and refined Catcher in the Rye. But the fact that it has survived the years and continues to be published is testament to a lasting value as social commentary.Though currently out of print, Shulman's book is far more than a teen novel. It is a permanent record of artistic achievement deserving of literary respect, cultural interest, and a continued readership. Pick it up.