European Stars And Stripes (Newspaper) - March 5, 1986, Darmstadt, Hesse Page 18 stars and stripes wednesday March 5, 1986 adult childhood Gap narrowed by Ellen Goodman Boston when our children were Little my sister and 1 would occasionally use our own private language " around them a summer Camp Lingo we called Puppy Duppy. Our parents had a More sophisticated strategy to Deal with us polysyllabic words telegraphed spelling messages. Their parents in turn had an adults Only language that had been imported from Europe. What All three generations shared was a desire to keep some information from the Young. There were subjects that came with an invisible Label not in front of the children. Sometimes we applied it for their Protection sometimes for our privacy but it separated stages of child Hood and adulthood. There was nothing unusual about us. There have always been ways for an older generation to shut out the younger to Block their Access to information to apply a rating system. Language is one doors Are another. Children have been routinely removed from the room during grown up conversations or fights or tears. But it is different now. Our grandparents had a whole list of taboos death sex a an be pm on by. Our own Puppy Duppy Era was much Shorter and less serious. Modern parents after All Are much More open with their children. Or so we Tell ourselves. Still at times i wonder whether we Haven t lost the Power to screen the adult world for and from our children. Last week a Friend tells me the talk of the second Grade car Pool was of tylenol. The found out about the cyanide on the evening news. This morning an eighth Grade teacher Calls me in dismay to report the number of her students who have seen adult movies on Cable to or videos. In january the space shuttle exploded before thousands of schoolchildren s eyes. No father broke the news no Mother framed the event no grandparent translated the information. Young and old saw this together. The Best that these elders could do was to react to play Patch up to help children understand what they had seen. The adult screen has been virtually wiped out by the television screen. There is a moment in Joshua Meyrowitz no sense of place a striking analysis of television s Impact on our culture when he describes How to has blurred the lines Between childhood and adulthood. What is revolutionary about television is not that it necessarily gives children adult minds " he writes but that it allows the very Young child to be present at adult interactions. The widespread use of television is equivalent to a Broad social decision to allow Young children to be present at wars and funerals courtship and seductions criminal plots and cocktail parties. Television exposes them to Many topics and Behaviours that adults have spent centuries trying to keep hidden from death a i to re a or As we say in Puppy Duppy perhaps the biggest secret that has been blown is about adulthood itself. When Meyrowitz Analysed programs As different As the 1950s leave it to Beaver and the 1980s one Day at a time he found something similar they both reveal to children the existence of adult weak Nesses and television lets children know what we Are saying in the other language and what is going on behind the closed door. This exposure he writes undermines both traditional childhood naivete and the All knowing confident adult role. In the electronic age the Parent is less of a guide and More of a fellow traveler. We Don t slowly expose our children to the world in a series of monitored Field trips anymore. We Don t control the flow of information into their lives. It comes through a garrulous and permanent guest who does t respond to the command shh the As parents we Are brought the questions raised in our children s minds by the set in the living room. It is both harder to protect those children and harder to pretend to them. When they ask us to explain what is happening in Manila or Dallas we cannot speak in tongues. Our own parents certainly our grandparents kept too much from us. As thoroughly modern parents of the elec tronic age we Comfort ourselves with the notion that we Are choosing this honesty and yes i just Hope that our own children Aren t left More v-u-1-n-e-r-a by a. C Boston Globe Washington Post a Catcher in the Rye for the 80s by George will Justice delayed is Justice denied so Justice demands that someone say this it is not True that Young adults read nothing butt shirts and books of cartoons. You must look All the Way Down to fourth place on the current list of Campus Best Sellers to find a cartoon Book and All the Way to seventh place to find one about Garfield the cat. The Best seller deserves to be. It is Garrison Keillor s Lake Wobegon and Young adults even have a kind of cult Book. It is Jay Mclnerney s novel Bright lights big it has something like the cachet Catcher in the Rye had in the Golden age of College youth meaning when i was in College. Indeed a critic says Bright lights is the Catcher in the Rye of the mba from the royalties Mclnerney bought a Bow naturally. It chronicles one picaresque week in the life of a 1980s Holden Caulfield who is failing life As a fact checker at a Magazine As full of itself As the new yorker. The novel s prefatory quotation is from the Sun also rises " How did you go bankrupt Bill asked. Two ways Mike said. Gradually and then the novel appeals to people mightily concerned about Money consumption and other sources of derivative Iden Tity. It suggests the state of mind Well state of some thing that has been called transcendental acquisition spelled to be a. Something bad is too new Jersey for a grating voice sounds like the new Jersey state Tacky girls have an outer Borough what is Good Bloomingdale a and a a. Press Torso and Twining s breakfast Tea. And always croissants. The protagonist is a downwardly Mobile Young Man with a bad habit of hoovering cocaine and a tedious habit of wondering who he is. The novel begins you Are not the kind of Guy who would be at a place like this at this time of what other kind of Guy in t he when in a disreputable nightclub your presence Here is Only. Reminding yourself of what you Aren yet again you see yourself As the kind of Guy who wakes up Early on sunday morning and Steps out to cop the times and croissants. Who might take a Cue from the arts and Leisure Section the kind of Guy who style and substance merge in the use of the second person pronoun the tone of voice of the self absorbed. It is the voice of those Michelob commercials swarming with baby Boomers merrily be Nitrifying brownstones you have a style in your life. You re on the Way to the top. You be always known just who you Mclnerney s protagonist has t a clue who he is. In a sense Mclnerney is traditional to the Point of being hidebound. Nothing is More traditional than the theme of alienated youth especially youth alienated from vulgar dad. Mclnerney at his worst is nine Yards better than another hot new author Bret Easton Ellis whose less than Zero is the worst novel since the invention of movable Type. It is about yet another alienated Beverly Hills boy who likes cocaine about As much As he dislikes dad who is in television. Alienated the Book begins people Are afraid to merge on freeways in los get it c Washington Post 1 h5lio,w names thriueptopik&1d&h&& campaigning Formy f5uouj a publican. / wit m sure Hetem delicious in them. Up test problem fac-in6 municipal. 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