The essayist Caitlin Flanagan once sought to explain why American adolescents seemed so attracted to the Hunger Games novels, which pit teenagers in a dystopian land against one another in a series of competitions-to-the-death to allow their families to survive. The series, she wrote, is “macabre and gory, and it describes a world of extreme physical privation, which is always of deep interest to children. But it also suggests that a teenager is capable of making a real contribution to others using only her wits, and sometimes nothing more than the simple, physical fact of her existence.”
Compare that, Flanagan suggested, with the coming-of-age challenge that most American teenagers undergo—college admissions. “They are hobbled and childlike, deeply dependent on the parents who make their participation in the various belt-notching exercises possible,” she explained. “What they are really prepared to do, at the end of all this, is only one thing: to replicate the society that has created them. It’s a closed system of test-takers and French horn players.” If it seems that the 17- and 18-year-old Los Angeles boys profiled in Jeff Hobbs’s Show Them You’re Good are adrift, that’s at least in part because they are looking for a test to see whether they are ready for adulthood—and college admissions do not feel like a “real contribution.”
Whether they are wealthy or poor, Hispanic or white, from stable families or chaotic ones, the boys here seem to be looking for ways to prove themselves but find themselves floundering in the strange expectations of their parents and teachers. At a time of life when earlier generations of young men might have been helping to support a family or even defend their country, these boys are preparing for the SATs or writing personal essays or engaged in mock-trial competitions. And the sense that both this process and the prizes that ostensibly wait for them are trivial strikes them all at some point.
As Hobbs writes: “This was the first major contest in their lives, the first emphatic demonstration of their standing among greater society.…Certain elements were within their control, or at least gave the illusion of being so, such as how well they organized materials and wrote essays. Many other elements were as governable as a faraway star.”
Hobbs offers us the example of Carlos, whose parents came here illegally from Mexico but who manages to get into Yale, following in his brother’s footsteps. Sometimes he is grateful, but other times he wonders about the fates of his classmates and the strangeness of the fact that he is being rewarded with the highest honors in American society while his parents are constantly worried about deportation.
The admissions process is very different for the kids who attend the Amino Pat Brown Charter School in Los Angeles, where Carlos got his secondary education, from those at Beverly Hills High. But Hobbs is careful not to make Show Them You’re Good a simplistic story about two Americas and the boys from different sides of the track who represent them. Among the book’s affluent kids, we read about Owen, the younger child of a mother who is bedridden from what may be Lyme disease. He struggles with whether to leave home for college at all, knowing that he will be abandoning his debilitated parent. Owen, Hobbs writes, “became inured to that aspect of life that many people his age were still sheltered from, or were able to consciously ignore, but was impossible to elude in the end: the terrible randomness of chance…In his case this randomness had manifested itself as the prospect that a mite the size of a pinhead whose weeklong life-span had played out two decades before he’d been born had injected his mother with the bacterium Borrelia burgdorferi, and in its thrall he’d progressed through the confusion that was high school.”
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