Teen Angel By Sonia Pilcer Coward, McCann, 262 pp., $8.95 We owe the mid-twentieth century a whole lot: nuclear power, penicillin, silicone women, Water Piks. And adolescence. I mean: adolescence as myth, basic human right, growth industry, nation almost. My OED does not contain the word “teen-ager” or “teen-aged.” Tom Jones grew up, but he was never noticeably teen-aged: he went from child to young man, no sociological parenthesis in between. You can’t imagine Dante or Swift saying, “I had a grim adolescence.” This is due, in part, to new longevity: our lives, like an over-successful sit-com, have been padded out: sequels at the center. Also due, in part, to co-education. The Country of Teen is very much a sexual place. Mating dances are first choreographed there.
In prospect, Teen Angel, with its Grease-Fonz nostalgia, didn’t much enchant me, even though I was brought up just one or two IND stops from Sonia Pilcer. The West Side above 160th Street had a varied tone, chiefly lower-middle-class on down. Sonny Palovsky, her heroine, is Jewish: but Sonny’s Teen Angel girl-gang people are Italian, Puerto Rican, and Irish. Sonia Pilcer clearly knows the turf: I give my imprimatur. There were apartments that took your breath away; others that made you hold it. Harlem, we felt, might get on the A-train and move uptown any day: but it didn’t happen. A rough place, dangerous: yet not fatal. You always felt you could talk your way out of trouble. Washington Heights was in an adolescence: trying to create some functional persona.
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