June 2021. Teenage: The Creation of Youth 1875–1945 by Jon Savage
2007, Pimlico, 551 pages. Written in English, read in English.
At the end of the nineteenth century, the notion of youth, of teenagers, of a certain age group that was no longer a child, but not yet an adult, was as alien a concept as the fact that someone needed to write a book about it in the beginning of the twenty-first century. But a book has been written, and that book’s thesis is that teenagers are an invented concept, and that a specific timeframe can be focused on to understand when, and why, it has been invented.
The success of a non-fiction book dealing with as elaborate a concept as teenagers, is measured, in my opinion, by the speed in which the author manages to throw a novel idea at us. This happens within just a few pages, with an idea not even related to the thesis of the book — that Punk, as a fashion and attitude construct, was just the amalgamation of all of the main identifiers of the previous fashions promoted by youth.
Closer to the book’s core subject, Jon Savage points to three main forces that have created the necessity to construct a new stage in life — the first of which was society’s inability to explain the behaviour of children of a certain age, neither by comparing them to children of a lower age, nor by comparing them to adults. He brings two examples within the first chapter, one of a girl who has written a diary, that has been later published and gained fame, and propelled her to a lifetime as a leading feminist thinker; the other of a boy who has been made infamous by crimes of inexplicable viciousness. Later, Savage provides several additional examples of the changing behaviour of children of a certain advanced age and the attempts of society to throw them into a mould that fits it.
The second was the historical gravity of the era which Savage talks about. He focuses extensively on the two global-scale wars that took place at the first half of the twentieth century, and the additional consequences of each — such as the great depression, the breaking down of specific social constructs and the building of others. Teenagers have first been identified by the need to explain delinquency, and the inability to fall in line with the ideas of loyalty and nationalism. The second world war has had much more of an impact on that age group — the activities that teenagers took part in, during the war, have made it necessary to treat them differently and give them the appropriate share of society and the decisions it needed to make in a new, healing world.
The third was the discovery that teenagers had purchase power, and the ability to make their own, and others’, consumption decisions. Savage goes through various aspects, including music, movies, literature and magazines, clothing and food, in which the discovery of a new cohort created completely new markets and even a completely new vocation — public relations — spearheaded by Freud’s own nephew.
Within the book, Savage focuses on the four main locations in which the modern, western, teenager has been established — the United States, Britain, France and Germany. With short detours to Italy and to Ireland, even to Samoa, he transverses between these countries as much as the emergence and behaviours of their teenagers are important to the narrative, and weaves a fascinating story of an age group redefining itself, bringing itself forward, and claiming the flag from the elder generation, proclaiming their independence and their importance, creating the notion we have today as soon as 1945, the point at which the book ends — that teenagers have always been here and will always be.
The July 2021 selection of the David Bowie Book Club will be The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald.
The August 2021 selection of the David Bowie Book Club will be The Songlines by Bruce Chatwin.
