This is like the unwritten postscript to a book I just read by Ron Powers,
called "Tom and Huck don't live here anymore."  Powers, who wrote the
evenhanded memoir "White town drowsing" revisited his hometown as a result
of friends telling him that the place had "changed," and more specifically
in response to two senseless murders by teenagers in the late 1990's. In the
first, a jogger is the vicim of a "joke" as a pair of teenaged boys drive
past him and open the car door - leaving the victim with mortal head wounds.
In the second, weeks later, a teenaged boy kills the relative of his
girlfriend with a shotgun. The detail given to the two murders makes the
book read more like Hannibal Lecter than Mark Twain's earthly paradise.

Powers makes a sullen tour of the town, searching down ineffectual and
distant parents who think they can solve all of their kids' problems by
moving into multi-acre estates west of town, a day care center fighting a
losing battle with overcrowding and underfunding, and the parents of the
killers. Powers finds a Pap Finn everywhere he looks - in a case of painful
honesty, he also describes punishments given him by his own abusive father.
Is Powers describing Hannibal or all of America in the late 1990's?  He
keeps that question open. This book is as dark as some of Twain's later
writing, but I couldn't put it down.

Terry

Terry Ballard
Quinnipiac University