Carlene Bauer

I have seen Sleater-Kinney four times, most recently in London last September. Seeing them in England made me, as silly as this sounds, proud to be an American girl. It brought to mind the Jamesian narrative — minus the menacing Europeans and our fatal innocence — of an American girl being a cultural export that astonishes and trumps anything invented in the dusty old convention-bound continent. The Camden concert hall was filled with hipster guys who had come there for the band’s bottom-heavy, wall-shaking sound. This wasn’t just pretty good for a bunch of girls; this was probably one of the better rock shows we would ever see. My boyfriend, raised on Van Halen and Black Sabbath, was moved to acknowledge their greatness and power. Even better: the inexplicable number of Bob Hoskins look-alikes in the back drinking Foster’s tallboys and nodding along approvingly.

Watching these three women play that night I thought: World, we’ve given you the blues, jazz, Hollywood and rock, and now we will show you a female band that is no gimmick, but an artistic force to be reckoned with. Currently, yes, we’re taking the world down with us, but allow us to say that we have given you Sleater-Kinney. Who are not fodder for the wet dreams of pedophiles, like the Runaways and the Donnas. Who are not, like the Bangles or the Go-Gos, making pretty, flashy guitar pop with retro touches. Or Debbie Harry or Chrissie Hynde out front with a wall of nameless, faceless suits behind them. Here are three individual, indispensable parts: Carrie Brownstein and Corin Tucker on vocals and guitars with Janet Weiss on drums.

Here, back home, it has been very hard to shake the feeling that all the gains, political and cultural, of the previous decades are being reversed. Sleater-Kinney — friends and artists whose friendship and art has nothing to do with expensive shoes and self-deprecation — are quitting when they seem most necessary. Combat boots have long since been exchanged for stilettos. It’s still men who write and direct the movies that my demographic flocks to, who write the books that are most read and lauded — and when women write novels now, there’s the ever-present danger that just by virtue of its treating the female, the book will be categorized as chick lit. The New Yorker and the New York Times are giving prime real estate to women — Caitlin Flanagan and Maureen Dowd — who refuse to accept or acknowledge the fact that feminism worked and can still work, who ignore the fact that many women in my generation are being loved and married precisely for their intellect and strength and that we live lives as the equal of our husbands and partners — and in ignoring those facts, in ignoring lives other than their own, they are halting progress. What happens to women, unless you’re Terri Schiavo or Britney Spears, seems to be of no concern to the government or the public.

How to account for this backlash? Did it seem like the ’60s had won all our wars against discrimination and inequality? Was it the record companies’ realization that alternative rock would not make them rich? Can you even believe that Roseanne Barr had a long-running show on network television? And Lilith Fair! Oh, Lord, remember Lilith Fair? Who ever thought that one day there could be nostalgia for Sarah McLachlan and the Massengil-meets-Celestial Seasonings vibe of her tribal gatherings? It may be that third wavers are partly at fault — that we became so comfortable in the world our mothers had made for us that, during the complacent Clinton years, never dreaming that there would be such a thing as George W. Bush, we decided to play around with theory and vibrators, and became so infatuated with the personal that we forgot that maybe we should spend some time tending to the political. And just when we need to wage war against the right wing, we’re also losing a soundtrack to that fight. Which means that the ’90s are officially over, and it might be a while before there’s another comparable surge of challenging, exhilarating female voices. Exit Sleater-Kinney.

Confession: While I find Sleater-Kinney necessary now, I didn’t come to them until 1999′s “The Hot Rock.” I was never a punk fan, and I couldn’t get past the shrill bleat Corin Tucker began with. Also, the riot grrrl movement that they came out of — lowercased radical feminism that gave men, those powder kegs of violence and selfishness and aggression, no benefit of the doubt — sounded like dogma couched in terms of the playground taunt, and a sloppy, bratty presentation didn’t seem the best way to convince your opponents that there needed to be change. I shied away from the scene for some of the same reasons I finally rejected Sassy: The furious jazz of opinion in the magazine made Seventeen read like Vogue, and it felt, finally, like a sorority of name-dropping queen bees lording it over the lit mag. The feminists who spoke to me in college were dead white females: the prose of Mary Wollstonecraft, Simone de Beauvoir and Virginia Woolf was majestic and elegant, and they taught me how to analyze and argue (making Jennifer Weiner’s recent campaign to legitimize chick lit farcical). Among the living there was Courtney Love, because she was fiercely intelligent and you could hear her affinity for Stevie Nicks under the rage, which I admit now might have been sham, and Liz Phair, because I liked my fury tempered by songcraft. Liz Phair admitted to wanting what she called all the stupid old shit, like letters and sodas. Like Mary Wollstonecraft, she hoped for romance between equals. Which I was hoping for, too.

It turns out Phair and Love were false idols. Liz Phair has in recent years infamously and unashamedly reduced herself to singing the praises of younger men and their hot white cum, which, to hear her tell it, has the age-reversing effects of La Mer. Courtney Love — well, the latest indignity is that she has been reduced to hooking up with Linda Perry, the songwriting Svengali employed by Pink and Christina Aguilera, and while those two may be as close to feminist as pop will allow, they never had any alt-rock cred to squander. Phair and Love both had plenty of musical ambition — you can’t write and play a line-by-line response to “Exile on Main Street” or put playing Wembley Stadium, in London, on a to-do list without it — but maybe also toxic levels of self-regard. Love crowned herself the goddess of Mt. Olympia, coming down to earth only to snatch up a husband and talk smack about her contemporaries; Phair always seemed like the girl who preferred to be the lone dame among men. Perhaps they wanted to be famous more than they wanted to be great rock musicians.

Sleater-Kinney, however, have never wasted time running other women down or gunning for chart placement. While Phair and Love have been falling apart, they’ve been pushing themselves as a band, making each record richer and more complex than the last. As they’ve grown up, so has their music. It’s true that some songs, particularly the earlier ones, can resemble poems written for extra credit in your intro to women’s studies class. But they learned how to fuse vulnerability and girl group jubilance with wildness and ferocity; to embody both Jane Eyre and the madwoman in the attic. On their last record, “The Woods”, they anchored songs about love’s terrors and pleasures to riffs as heavy as anything let loose by the Who and Led Zeppelin, and the torrent blasted away all the anemic indie rock being made by sensitive yelping boys and faux naifs helming glockenspiels. You’re no rock ‘n’ roll fun, Jeff Tweedy and Thom Yorke, they might have said to themselves. We are not ashamed of our love of the loud. We don’t think these instruments have been exhausted in their capacity to give us, and other humans, joy.

“The Woods” opens with “The Fox,” a fable about predators and prey. But when I listen to the song the only lyric I hear is Tucker rearing back and announcing, “Land ho!” The female condition may never be extrapolated by audiences into something approximating the human condition. But when Tucker shouts those two words, it’s as if she’s looking hopefully over the horizon, convinced there are ideals out there that can be realized. At least that’s what I like to pretend. I know musicians don’t owe us self-actualization or revolution or truth, and when they do make that their business, it often results in inferior art. All they owe us, as the theorists say, is pleasure. But I was raised a Christian, and grew up imparting a saving power to the act of standing in a crowd before a band. Shows have always been like church services to me, even when I regularly sat in sanctuaries. I no longer go to church, but I still believe in feminism, and I still believe in the saving power of rock music — when politics fail to help us realize a new heaven and a new earth, as politics often do, records, those reminders that there are other dreamers out there, are often all we have.

But it was only when I started to feel a little bit lost in the biggest of cities — New York, where I had begun a job in the publishing industry — that I submitted myself to the process. And so, at the age of 27, in a city known for sex and sin, I decided to convert.

——

Spring came, and I visited my friend Eric in Baltimore. Eric did not believe, but was sympathetic to those who did, although his sympathy could also take the form of gentle mockery.

“When is it exactly that the pope is infallible?” he asked, feigning confusion. We had been talking a walk around Fells Point. “When he puts on the funny hat or sits on the throne? Or does the throne make him invisible?”

We sat down on a bench by the water, and I told him about a black Labrador that came occasionally to five o’clock Mass — a seeing eye dog that lay down at the feet of its owner with patience in a way that made me think that it was getting something out of Mass, too.

I said, “It’s almost as if the Holy Spirit — “

“Holy Spirit my ass,” he said. “It’s well trained!”

The sun was going down. We’d been talking for hours. He was trying to finish his dissertation; I was trying to live up to my potential. “Do you think it’s intellectually irresponsible of me not to be reading every single thing I can get my hands on about Catholic doctrine?” I asked him.

He looked out at the water and smiled. “You’ve already done something intellectually irresponsible by converting,” he said.

But there was something else other than my mind at work here, whether I liked it or not. I could not find the words to say this to Eric. It was something I had trouble admitting to myself. Remembering Kierkegaard and his knight of faith — someone who believed in spite of the evidence against it, who believed because she had subjectively experienced, not deductively reasoned her way to, the truth of God’s existence — was no comfort. If I told Eric about that day in Florence to try to explain myself, would he tell me that I was just as well-trained as that seeing eye dog?

A few summers before, my sister and I had taken ourselves to Europe, and when in Florence, we visited the baptistry. We stood under the dome, under a bearded, dark-eyed Christ looking down on us from the ceiling, seated in judgment, surrounded by angels, saints, evangelists, and prophets. His face gave me a start. I recognized this face, although it had never been made visible to me by the churches I’d grown up in. This was the Jesus of the lover’s sigh. Of the mother’s sigh. The Jesus I had been praying to all my life, whose open hands offered infinite mercy. There he was suspended above us, arms outstretched, suffering everyone to come unto him, whether indifferent, curious, hostile, or humble. He had been sitting there for centuries, wanting really only a few things from us while people came and went below him. Come unto me, if you want to, everyone down there flipping through guidebooks, taking pictures, arguing about where to have lunch, tugging your children on to the next sight.

That day I saw that I could not be anything other than a Christian. I could not be a Buddhist. That seemed faddish — what you did when you wanted to be spiritual without having to subscribe to a religion that was unpopular for the way most of its adherents practiced it. It was what hippies and vegetarians did, and I wanted no part of it. If the Beats embraced it, with their sloppy rhapsodies, I wanted no part of it. I was too much a lover of Christ and his words to leave him behind for Judaism or the Unitarians. He had come alive to me — for me? — in that baptistry in such a way that I knew it would be impossible to follow anyone else. If you walked into a building and, upon Christ’s looming, you felt that you should drop to your knees, even though you had spent your life arranging things so that you would never be in such a supplicating position, you had to give up: He was yours, and you were his.

On a damp, cloudy morning back in New York City, on the first Sunday of Lent, our church’s group of converts met at St. Patrick’s Cathedral to attend the Rite of Election, a ceremony in which all the catechumens in the city’s diocese declared their intentions before God and Cardinal Egan. Once our names were called and we stood before the altar receiving a blessing, there was apparently no turning back. There were hundreds of people there, faces of many colors. But then the priests before us: corpulent, white, reminding me of all the stories I’d heard about the princely class that lived like kept women in their rectories. Fat white men lording it over the faithful. Here was the other Catholic Church, the church that, in all my excitement, I’d been suppressing my knowledge of. It was the church that came to mind for most people when they thought of the Catholic Church, the one that turned a blind eye to the sexual abuse of its children, that would not let women become priests or let their priests marry, that castigated its liberation theologians. The moneyed, secretive, inflexible machine.

How many people would I have to climb over to run down the aisle and out onto Fifth Avenue? This really was intellectually irresponsible. The pope, Mary, Padre Pio, Pope Pius, Opus Dei, the sexual abuse, the forbidding of birth control, the official stance on homosexuality. I wouldn’t marry someone if I had to ignore this much sin and dysfunction. Or would I? But think: Why had I come all this way? And who had led me here? Dorothy Day had submitted. And if it was the church of Dorothy Day, it was the church of Catherine of Siena, Teresa of Avila, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Thomas Merton, Walker Percy, Graham Greene, and Flannery O’Connor. A church of dissenters and mystics.

In the last few weeks before Easter, at Mass, the readings reminded us that Jesus healed the blind. As Paul wrote to the Ephesians, quoting an early Christian hymn:

But everything exposed by the light becomes visible, for it is light that makes everything visible. This is why it is said:

Wake up, O sleeper,

Rise from the dead,

And Christ will shine on you.

We were also reminded that Jesus called Lazarus forth from the tomb — and perhaps I wasn’t as deadened by fear and anxiety. I was no longer frightened of God; I no longer believed that his plan for my life was to extract grudging submission from me until I died. I had signed up to teach English as a second language through the church. And at rush hour in the morning it was possible to feel what my father used to try to get me and my sister to feel when we sat at the kitchen table putting off driving to school, which was that “Today is another day of wonderful opportunity!” In the morning I had all my limbs and a job in the publishing industry and could walk around the city staring up at the buildings and the sky. I had the train humming with purpose, everyone snapping their papers in half into the straphanger origami needed to read them standing up, squat cups of coffee like whiskeys ordered neat, intently consuming news of the world — what to eat, who to see, what to wear. Tapping their feet to whatever was in their headphones, breakfasting steadfastly, sheep may safely graze, on Gideon New Testaments or the Torah, fortified, ready to go, the train and its riders vibrating with that line from Longfellow: “Let us then be up and doing, with a heart for any fate.” Leaving the train like leaving Mass, bolstered by thinking of the last line in the liturgy: Go in peace to love and serve the Lord. Or mammon, whichever you preferred. I no longer cared.

The night we converted, the Saturday night before Easter Sunday, we waited in the back of the church in the dark, standing behind Father N and the Eucharistic ministers. The only light in the church came from the fire in the bowl of the baptistry. “May the light of Christ’s rising dispel the darkness of hearts and minds,” said Father N as he touched a candle to the bowl, and we exchanged smiles as we hovered. I could see my sister and my friend Genevieve in the crowd. There was a feeling of waiting in the wings and walking out into the glare of expectant faces — a feeling I last had in junior high, before piano recitals and choral concerts, before you took to the stage to do your part, a feeling I had never experienced just by standing in a church. After the candle was lit, the procession traveled up the aisle, the large candle lighting pew by pew the small ones held by the congregants.

For a large part of the service we stood in a line up front, facing the congregation and submitting to a series of questions and proclamations. Some of us would be baptized; all of us would take communion for the first time.

“God does not give up on us,” said Father N. “God always brings us out of the place of death and into the place of life.”

We were asked to renounce our sin and make a profession of faith. “Do you reject the glamour of evil and refuse to be mastered by sin?” he asked.

“I do,” we said. The glamour of evil. This city. I no longer wanted to walk its streets thinking of what I didn’t have and how I’d never have it.

“Give them the spirit of right judgment and courage, of wonder and awe,” said Father N. “Be sealed with the gift of the Holy Spirit,” he told us, anointing our foreheads with oil, confirming us.

We then took places in the aisles of the church with our sponsors, and people began to file out of the pews. I seized up, shoulders tensing, vowing that only a few friends of mine would ever know that I’d stood in a church with my eyes closed, letting strange people lay their hands on me in a gesture of blessing. Because it sounded, out of the context of this Catholic ceremony, disturbingly Pentecostal.

But we were in a house of miserere, I remembered, which meant a house of mercy, which meant a house of mystery. Here are strangers of all sorts, strangers of kind face. They keep coming. They’re singing “Veni Sancte Spiritus.” I hear piano and voices. They’re passing their hands over me, patting my shoulders, grazing my bare arms with their fingers. A little girl, her gold hoops glinting, led by her father, touches my hand, and I’m a stone dropped down into a stream, disappearing from the world as I know it.

The survey was conducted over the phone and in person in 2002 and 2003 by a team of sociologists headed by Christian Smith, a professor at the University of North Carolina. Their findings can be found in the book “Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of Teenagers,” which Smith coauthored with Melinda Lundquist Denton.

Smith and his colleagues discovered that while three-quarters of their subjects professed to be Christians, they’re dazed and confused when it comes to articulating their beliefs. “We go to church, and … God is coming back again and he’ll take us to heaven. And what was the other one?” was a typical attempt. One 14-year-old girl, through barely contained yawns, pointed to her Internet and cable connections as proof of God’s goodness. And she wasn’t the only one who saw God as a big cable guy in the sky. Most kids’ faith, says Smith, takes the form of what he calls moralistic therapeutic deism — God is an undemanding, all-fulfilling entity existing only to help us feel better about ourselves.

Salon talked to Smith, who has also written extensively about evangelical Christianity, about the inner lives of teenagers and the potential costs of their slacker spirituality.

You found that when teens do experiment with religion, they’re not flirting with Buddhist or Wiccan practices — in fact, less than one-third of 1 percent of the kids you spoke to identified themselves as either Buddhist or Wiccan. They’re trying on Christianity instead. Did that surprise you?

Yes, very much. There’s a lot in the media and books about spiritual seeking and people identifying themselves as “spiritual but not religious,” so we expected to see that more. But if you stand back and think about it, mathematically Christianity is the dominant religion, and if you’re any minority religion you’re going to be surrounded by Christianity.

Do you think, mathematics aside, teens are looking into it because they think they might find community or because their Christian peers seem happier?

Well, any of that would go along with the mathematics. Say your parents were immigrants from East India and you have a Hindu background. It’s not necessarily that your Christian friends are happier, but activities are going to be more available — summer camps, friends going on a retreat. And so it’s not like Christians are always smiling, it’s that there are just so many opportunities to get involved with Christianity and those opportunities connect with friendships. Let me put it another way — if you’re a minority religion, especially one that isn’t super well-organized, it’s just harder to construct a whole life that the religion makes sense in.

There are two basic options when you’re a minority religion. One is to construct an isolated subculture or counterculture that you can center your whole life on — so you would have to be like the Amish, or Orthodox Jews in New York. You’d have to be part of an encapsulated community. But most people can’t or don’t do that and so that means that they are constantly exposed to values and practices of cultures different from their religion, and then that presents a challenge that they have to continually evaluate — they have to continually decide how to respond. Do they resist? How? Do they acculturate? It could also be, and I don’t have data on this, but most teens just want to fit in. They want acceptance, and so with teens of minority faiths, who have to deal with the ubiquity of Christianity, and have these cultural markers that are basically like neon signs that say, “I’m different, I’m weird,” many of them don’t want that.

There are so many accessories for Christian kids — Christian rock, T-shirts with cheeky slogans, niche-marketed Bibles. Nearly half of the teens you surveyed said they’d worn jewelry or clothing with a religious message and nearly half listened to religious music. How did these accessories figure into their faith?

The percentages of kids having a favorite rock band or wearing a cross or clothing in meaningful ways were higher than I imagined. But again, these things were just part of the general fabric of their lives. I would connect this to, as I do in the book, living in a mass consumer capitalist society where everything gets commodified. Some of us sociologists think of our country’s religious system as a religious economy. And it’s competitive. There isn’t a state church that you need to go and pay your taxes to. You can choose where you want to go, so congregations and pastors are in a market where they’re trying to get followers. The believer is the consumer, essentially.

Adults, you say, view teens as living in an embattled subculture roiling with alienation. But you found that the majority of American teens were content to follow the faith they inherited and seemed to think that it was self-evident that kids would accept what their parents had taught them — they had no real desire to assert their independence by finding a different religion.

This was another thing that really ,surprised us — how conventional they were. Because teenager and rebellion are virtually synonymous in popular thinking. But they said, “This was how I was raised, what do you expect?” Baby boomers’ main experience was not being like their parents — changing the world, fostering cultural revolutions, breaking boundaries, thinking if you’re over 30 you’re evil. So their children grow up with parents who still imagine adolescence in terms of rebellion. But it’s not the same world as, say, 1964. There are fewer boundaries that need to be broken through. So teens have parents who still have those particular notions of what it’s like to be a teen but the teens themselves, I think, wish for more boundaries and structure than they have. And that’s partly coming from what we heard in interviews and partly from what we know about psychology and human behavior, what we know about what humans need to thrive — they need structure.

You say that teens’ “benign whateverism” is a bigger problem for communities of faith than teen rebellion. Why? And can you define that?

The benign part is that they see religion as generally good for people. It doesn’t hurt you — at the very least, if you enjoy it, it can produce positive results and help you to be moral. And so they’re pretty positive about religion on that score — as long as nobody’s forced to do it. And then the whateverism is that religion’s not that important. It’s not worth getting all that worked up about. If someone wants to do it, good. Their parents go to church now and then, most of their friends say, “Sure, God, that’s fine, whatever,” and it’s not this kind of active, foregrounded, important belief. It’s just sort of part of the furniture. You wouldn’t have an argument about it in the same way you’re not going to have arguments about the wallpaper in your dining room — it’s just there.

Another thing that surprised us was how inarticulate they were when it came to talking about these matters. So many Christian teens of all denominations couldn’t talk about the most elementary Christian beliefs. Most of the highly devoted teens were certainly more articulate. But I would say maybe a majority of the regular or even sporadic church attenders certainly would just not be able to answer elementary questions. For example, they’d answer “Who is Jesus?” with “I don’t know.”

You say that teens were more articulate when discussing their views on drugs or pregnancy or AIDS. Why do you think that is?

There are two factors behind their increased articulacy when discussing their views on drugs and other problems, and they’re both related. One is that these are things that could wreck their lives, things that could ruin their futures — you die in a car crash because you were drinking. Well, they think about that. And it’s also because the adult world has communicated to them, effectively and over time, that you need to pay attention to this, this is important. We don’t want you getting herpes and AIDS, we don’t want you killing yourself and other people driving drunk, we don’t want you getting pregnant. The adult world has taken an interest and said we have got to educate them about this. And they are educated about this. So the larger point is teens are educable, they can be taught. But adults have got to decide, “Religion matters, and we’re going to teach them why this matters.”

Your study found that teens often subscribe to the philosophy of moralistic therapeutic deism — the belief that God exists to help us out, that God largely exists to boost our self-esteem — and this is how God is often imagined in the evangelical community. I’m wondering, since you’ve studied and written on evangelical beliefs, how much of this philosophy is coming from those churches?

There are things in the evangelical subculture that feed directly into moralistic therapeutic deism. One is the personal relationship with Jesus, and that’s a big theme. And originally evangelicals intended that to mean you make a personal commitment to Christianity. But that can turn into thinking that Jesus is your buddy, Jesus is a pal, Jesus helps you out. Another thing is evangelicalism’s insistence that your faith should have to do with all parts of your life and I think that makes for a strong religious tradition in some ways, but it also can easily slide into thinking like, “I prayed for a parking spot and God gave it to me.” Basically, instead of thinking, “I’m living my life with God,” it can easily turn into something self-centered: “I want God to fix all my problems and meet all my needs.”

Another piece of evangelicalism is the whole seeker church or church growth movement, which is very much about finding out what the customer wants and delivering it. This redefines faith not as a truthful tradition that people need to get onboard with and respond to, but as a consumer commodity that is out there to meet individual needs and wants. The seat of authority then is the unchurched Joe in whatever suburb who may have an itch in his life for something different, and some church will come along and say, “Come here, there’s no demands, you can dress however you want, we’ll entertain you.” All these things feed into moralistic therapeutic deism. And I would say — and this is getting more theological here — but I would say that they’re all distortions of practices and precepts that are intended to be good.

Did moralistic therapeutic deism color the way they viewed politics?

We didn’t ask specifically about their views on issues of the day, but from interviews I can tell you they’re fairly apolitical. We did ask them what they were excited about or interested in so there would have been opportunities to discuss things like this at length if they wanted to, and the more extreme liberal or conservative teens did have more thought-out positions on things like abortion. There’s a minority who are interested in politics, but a majority think it doesn’t have anything to do with their life. If life is about being happy, and as long as politics isn’t impinging directly on your happiness, they’re not going to think about it. If they did have, for example, patriotic views, it would be because they were from a generally patriotic family. What’s really pressing, we found, are things like who are they going to sit with in cafeteria, did they get good grades, did they make the play? They hear about Iraq in news, and they may feel bad about the people dying, but these are not the immediate pressing concerns.

According to your results, 11 percent of highly devoted teens have engaged in oral sex and 9 percent have had intercourse — and they’ve had an average of about three sexual partners. How did they reconcile sex with prescribed chastity?

Well, if you expect the numbers to be zero then that’s a high number. But if you compare it to the national norm for teens [according to the most recent figures from the CDC about 30 percent of teens aged 15-17 have had intercourse] then it’s somewhat lower. With some of them we don’t know when they became devoted — they may have been involved in a relationship when they were 14 but when they were 15 they got serious about religious faith. Some amount of kids are sincere and committed about faith and it’s just that stuff happens, which they may regret or they may not. Then there are some kids who are highly compartmentalized — they may be highly religious and go to youth group but in some other area in their life there’s contradictory stuff going on. The culture sends signals that say you have a human right to sexual fulfillment as long as you’re ready and comfortable, and this is natural, there’s no reason why it should be repressed. So for a lot of teens sex is not a moral issue, it’s about A) are you being safe and B) do you really like the person. We asked everyone, “Does your faith have anything to teach about sexual behavior?” I interviewed some Catholic teens that told me the church has no teaching on sexuality. They weren’t aware that this was an issue. Sex was one thing you do under certain conditions and religion was something else.

One 16-year-old boy in the book said his faith became stronger when he saw his prayers for his drug-addicted father answered. “I was like, if God can do that, than he can do other things too,” he says. It’s as if he sees God as an appliance — or, as you say, a “divine butler.” Of those 16 percent of kids who considered themselves non-religious, did you find that they ever gave up when God didn’t function as an appliance?

The vast majority just see that God comes through. There were a few kids who said, “Where the heck is God? He’s not doing what he’s supposed to do.” But most non-religious kids didn’t put it that way. They just said, “Oh, I’m just not interested.” They didn’t say, “You know, I asked God for my brother to be healed and he wasn’t, so I’m pissed off.” They didn’t say that. The whateverism is also on the not religious side — their attitude is, “I’ve got nothing against it, I’m just not interested.”

Were you heartened at all in talking to these kids? It seemed like even if they were encountering trouble in their lives they really did want to be good.

Unless we were deceived by these interviews, and I don’t think we were, teenagers really do have this sense that you should be good, you should be nice, you should be trying to do well. They link being good and doing well. You’re probably not going to do well in life if you’re a complete screw-up and immoral. They’re oriented toward being a good person and that God is out there — which, compared to being neo-Nazis or Nietzschean nihilists, is great. It’s just that it doesn’t have much rootedness — you ask them why and they don’t know.

What consequences do you think this lack of rootedness will eventually produce?

Without roots, people become vulnerable to ideologues and demagoguery. Like the one kid we mention in the book who started off our in-person interview saying you should treat everyone lovingly. But then later in the conversation said, “Well, evolutionarily, if you had to kill a bunch of people, that’s fine too.” That’s scary. He hasn’t been trained in moral reasoning. Teens can’t give a good argument so they’re left with asserting. And assertions only go so far.

Why is it important for teens to be able to reason in a religious context?

Articulacy matters if you’re interested in having teens and people who are serious and committed and know what they’re doing with their faith. This claim of mine that it is important is somewhat Christian oriented, Christianity being in general more focused on cognitive belief, as compared to Buddhism, or Judaism, which has evolved in such a way that it can be more focused on family and community and identity. And I’m coming from a certain philosophical position, which is that if we can’t articulate our beliefs, belief can only be so real. So if these teenagers grow up, and they have kids, and when their kids want to know why are certain things right and wrong or say, “Why should I believe anything you’re telling me?” what substance will they have to explain why? And what will our churches look like 10 generations from now? The congregation of We Don’t Really Know.

Levy’s novel, set primarily in 1948 London with interludes in Jamaica, illuminates the moment at which one small, cold island began to turn into a melting pot. Gilbert Joseph, a cocksure but slightly hapless former Royal Air Force airman, has come to England hoping to make more of himself than he might have in Jamaica. His brand-new wife, Hortense, follows him, imagining that all the propriety she acquired in her British-run teachers college will be put to good use in the country she idealizes. But they’ve settled in one dank room in the house of no-nonsense Queenie Bligh, whose banker husband, Bernard, has unexpectedly returned home from the war. (Queenie had presumed him dead.) While Queenie and Bernard weather a soured marriage, Hortense and Gilbert try to maintain hope as they realize that their dreams may be dashed. Though they love the Mother Country, it’s clear that she couldn’t care less about them. “How come England did not know me?” Gilbert asks. Levy’s novel attempts to answer that pained protest.

Though Levy may believe in the power of good old-fashioned storytelling, she’s no romantic. “Have you lived here at all?” she asked, when this interviewer confessed to some Anglophila. “Come — it will put you off completely.” Salon talked to Levy, just before her American book tour, about her exceptional writer’s life.

The novel is based in part on your parents’ experience. To what extent is their story the story of Hortense and Gilbert?

All my books have been an exploration of my past, really. They’re all about family and trying to understand it. It’s me filling in my own gaps. And I have filled them in with fiction. I do get a bit confused sometimes. I know in “Fruit of the Lemon” [her 1999 novel] there’s a family tree that I have gotten completely confused over what was real and what was fictitious about it, so I’ve just decided to have the one that’s in the book!

It’s a funny thing when you’re writing fiction. Everything gets all mushed up, as they say in Jamaica. You can’t unpick the threads. Because I would say to you that Hortense and Gilbert are not my parents. They don’t have the same characters. However, my mum was once a teacher in Jamaica and came to Britain and couldn’t teach, like Hortense. And my father did work for the post office. They did come to one room in Earls Court [where Gilbert and Hortense settle]. In 1948 my dad was on the Empire Windrush. So I suppose what you would say is I used her story — or as my mother would say, I “thieved” it from her. And then the rest is fiction.

You didn’t start writing until your early 30s. What got you going?

I was working in the wardrobe department at the BBC and the Royal Opera in my early 20s. By my early 30s, I was working as a graphic designer with my partner, now my husband, with our own company. And I got this urge to do something creative. I thought, I’ll try writing and see if I’m any good at that. So I just sort of bought a pen and a pad and had a go. Fully intending to give up. Fully intending that this was just a silly thing and maybe I should try basket weaving or something next. I actually found I loved it. And I’m so glad I stuck at it. I really feel that I’m learning my craft. I’m not one of those people who wanted to be a writer from the age of 4. I didn’t read a book until I was 23. So I’m really having to catch up on that.

So when you say you didn’t read a book until you were 23, do you mean you didn’t read for yourself in any serious way outside of school?

No, I meant from cover to cover. Shall I explain? [Laughs.] Well, I was sort of a working-class girl. I grew up on council estates. Books weren’t big where I came from. We never really had that many books at home. We had the Encyclopedia Britannica, but not fiction. Nobody thought it was worth wasting time reading a book. Why read a story in a book when you could watch the television? So I grew up watching the television … I had to read books for school and all those books I was made to read were by George Eliot, Jane Austen, Dickens. And so if you can just imagine for a moment a young, working-class girl without any books at home picking up “Bleak House” for pleasure — it just wasn’t going to happen. I did actually do A-level English but I used these sort of crib sheets, and that’s how I got my A-level in English –and just barely. It wasn’t until I was 23 a friend bought me “The Women’s Room” by Marilyn French. That was the first book I read that made me think, Wow, this can be pleasurable. I honestly thought it was like taking in vitamins.

So you needed stories, but you got them from the small screen

Absolutely. I could almost, I believe, tell the 20th century writers who have learned their storytelling through books from those who’ve learned it on the telly. That’s where I learned storytelling … It is embarrassing, but I’m not ashamed.

So did your parents keep their stories to themselves?

Yes. They didn’t have time. They were working. They were working hard. It wasn’t that sort of environment.

Was there a point when you started to ask about them and your parents didn’t understand why you would be interested?

My mum’s still not sure why I’m interested. For my last novel I started asking about her childhood and her time in Jamaica — she grew up and left at 26 and never went back. And so she started to tell these things because I had an interest in it. But I think she sort of regrets it now, because then I write it down in books and tell everybody our business. And she’s fed up with it! But it’s fine. And I think my mother’s always tried to protect me from disappointment. Deciding to be a writer in my family is a bit like deciding to become a Hollywood film star — it’s way above your station. And I think she was nervous about that — that I was starting something and nobody would be interested.

In one of your previous novels, a character talks of how proud she was of her hardworking parents. “My parents helped this country,” she says, but then adds that even as a kid “I knew that English people hated us.” To what extent is that a reflection of a split between your parents’ hopes for life in England and what you experienced while growing up?

Well, I was getting along quite fine. Until I was shortlisted for the Orange Prize and in two newspapers the implication was that there was only one British person on the shortlist and that was Rose Tremain. I felt gutted! Absolutely gutted. So shocked. I didn’t know how — or what was going on that that happened. The journalists have subsequently apologized — and said, “Oh, they just forgot,” and blah blah blah. But it happened. And that hurt. So I’m never off my guard. I don’t think that as a minority in this country that you’re ever off your guard.

In “Small Island” you write about a little-known episode in British-American relations. You have black American GIs enduring the segregation of home while they’re stationed in England and marveling at the relative harmony enjoyed by West Indians in the RAF. You did almost five years of research for this book — how did you come upon this story?

It was almost by chance I found this going on. What happened was, I was researching the West Indians who’d been in the RAF here, and time and time again in all these sort of things it would come up that they were fighting literally on the streets or getting aggression from white GIs. It just kept coming up and I kept thinking — these West Indians are fighting another war. Then I found a book called “When Jim Crow Met John Bull.” This is a book precisely about that period when the American Army came to Britain as greatly needed allies, bringing with them Jim Crow, and the black people in the RAF were just going about their business and got caught up in it. And Britain didn’t quite know how to deal with it. Because on the one hand they wanted to be friendly and they didn’t want to upset anyone. But on the other they didn’t have the facilities to cope with it. And hence you got strange things happening — like towns designated as black towns for black soldiers on their days off and white towns for white soldiers on their days off. In newspapers there are lots of reports of it.

Since I’ve written the book people have come up to me and said that they remember at the time there being problems with this, saying that there was lots of animosity here as well with the ways black GIs were treated. We didn’t quite understand it … It’s different here. But I never like to talk about degrees of racism. If it appears in any way it’s far too much. But I think that during the war there were a lot of people in Britain from all over the place — Britain was taking in strangers, if you like, in order to help with the war effort. There was always this sense that anybody you saw on the street who was unfamiliar was here for the war — so there was a real [feeling of] “Thank God they’ve come to help us.” And [the idea was that] they would go once the war was over. Of course the Jamaicans decided they didn’t want to go. And then things changed. I think that probably a lot of British people thought of the men coming from the Caribbean — or even from India– they thought of them in the same way as Americans. Nobody thought the Yanks were going to stay forever.

You’ve said that when you began to write you turned to Toni Morrison and Alice Walker. What were you finding necessary in these American authors’ work?

I sort of grew up — was it ashamed to be black? Well, not ashamed to be — is there a place between not ashamed and ashamed? Because if there is that was it. My parents had brought me up to keep my head down. Don’t make any noise and people won’t know we sneaked into the country. Don’t ever tell anybody where your parents came from — don’t ever mention it. And I went along with it for years — you know, get your hair straightened and don’t sit in the sun. Crikey.

Even now in my family when I say, “But we’re black,” it doesn’t really go down that well. When I say that, I mean that there’s this resistance to thinking that. When I was growing up you wouldn’t use any term. You just tried to forget about it. There’s a line in my second novel where the mother says to the two sisters who are the protagonists, “You’re not black, you’re not white, you’re just you.” And that’s what I was brought up with. Then there was a point in my early 20s at which I broke away from this and thought, hang on, wait, it’s great to be black. Feeling, oh, what have I done all those years? And then I was desperate and hungry to try and understand what it meant to be proud of being a black person and that’s where those African-American writers came in. They were inspirational writers in that they were writing about being black. And they were saying, “It is worth listening to this story.” And so that visibility and popularity of their work can’t be underestimated. It was incredibly influential in making black Britons here think, Oh, do we have a story too?

So do you bristle a bit when you see the success of Monica Ali and Zadie Smith, women who’ve recently gotten a lot of acclaim for their writing on the British immigrant experience, when you’ve been writing on the same for more than 10 years?

Not at all. I know when Zadie’s book came out it was such a big hit here and people were saying, “Oh, you must feel terrible because you’ve been doing it for so long.” I thought, You’re crazy! We are different writers. Entirely different writers, but it just so happens that we have something in common — that we are black Britons. And that’s it, really. So it doesn’t worry me at all. The more the merrier.

I just want these stories told. I don’t feel like there’s some kind of competition between us — any more than I feel there’s competition between me and Margaret Atwood. It doesn’t work like that in my head … I’m kind of on my groove, if you like. I’m just going to write, and if nobody wants to read it, that would be terribly sad. I do want to write books that people want to read. For me, “Small Island” was fantastic because it was absolutely the book I wanted to write and it has caught something here that’s made it a bestseller … I’ve had some fantastic feedback. White people have been saying things like, “I didn’t know it was like that,” saying, “I remember in the ’50s seeing women who were like Hortense at the bus stop and now I feel I know them.” That’s very, very heartening. And black people are saying, “I think I can understand my parents and grandparents better.” It doesn’t get better than that. And I’m going to go to the next thing. It’s almost like a mission. And we’ll just see whether it catches again. Maybe it won’t, but maybe it will.

Exuberance, Jamison writes, “denotes a mood or temperament of joyfulness, ebullience, and high spirits, a state of overflowing energy and delight. It is more energetic than joy and enthusiasm but less intense, although of longer duration, than ecstasy.” It’s got the dynamism that marks the manic half of manic depression — but without the danger of falling into psychosis or debilitating lows. If you’ve got it — and it’s probably hereditary — you’re most likely one of those people who rolls out of bed in the morning trilling that line from Longfellow “Let us then be up and doing, with a heart for any fate.” Even though it might be tiresome for the Eeyores among us, Jamison demonstrates that such positive thinking and doing is necessary for creativity and discovery. It’s exuberance, Jamison says, that buoyed James Watson to discover the double helix, that drove John Muir to preserve the wilderness, and that fueled Americans’ pioneer spirit.

Salon spoke with Jamison, a professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Medicine, about why psychologists haven’t generally been interested in joy, the secret lives of scientists, and who is more exuberant — Bush or Kerry.

Given your backlist, have you ever felt that you’ve had to shy away from exploring positive emotion in your work?

I’ve never felt that I had to shy away from it, as I felt basically as an academic and clinician, like all my colleagues, that the illnesses we treat are really lethal terrible illnesses, and they don’t get written about enough. And so I think there was more of a sense of feeling a professional obligation to write about suicide and bipolar illness. But I’ve always been a lot more interested in mania and a lot more interested in exuberance. Exuberance speaks to a more universal human quality. This is the book I really wanted to write, as opposed to having a strong professional commitment to write it.

In the book you talk about nature usually being the thing that triggers transcendent ecstasies. It seems to me that we don’t really come upon an overabundance of joyful feeling in our daily lives now, or make room for it — and so we really don’t have words in our vocabulary to discuss how we feel when we’re taken out of ourselves.

I couldn’t agree with you more. One of the things that’s striking in academic literature in psychology is how many words we have for depression and anxiety and fear and how relatively few words we have for joy. If you really looked at where the words for joy come from they come from theology and literature. But we don’t really talk about joy a lot. We look for it, but I don’t think we talk about it. Probably because it’s such a physical state, it’s so nonverbal in many respects, and it’s pretty obvious when you’re around somebody who’s really loving life and really enjoying life. By definition, however, when people get depressed they’re unable to express themselves, so it could be that society tries harder to come up with words to communicate such an internal state.

Why do you think your field has been so concerned with the darker side of human nature?

Modern psychology became, for a lot of reasons, much more interested in psychopathology — partly because of the real issues of World War I and World War II where you had a huge population of people with severe psychiatric and psychotic problems, and so you needed psychologists and psychiatrists to start dealing with the pathology, and so a lot of psychologists became interested in that. It goes back to ancient doctoring — you want to help people. So in grad school, when you start off, there’s an attraction to sitting down with a patient and trying to help them. I think that’s human nature.

When you look at the people in your exuberance hall of fame, you notice that they have a great capacity for making noise, for bounding from one idea or project to the next, but this energy seems to go hand in hand with a great capacity for contemplation and reflection, for processing what they discovered in their exuberance.

That’s certainly true for people who have the capacity to feel deeply. We have this tendency to pigeonhole people emotionally as much as we do by any other characteristic. We tend to say, OK, this person is dreary and depressed and crabby, and this person is ebullient — and very often it’s the same person. Which is one of the reasons why I wrote about Virginia Woolf in the book. One of the things I find annoying about how she was written about is that she’s often portrayed as this kind of doomed, gloomy character, when by every account she was unbelievably vivacious and lively, and full of wit. She was both. The capacity to feel great joy and great despair is not unrelated at all.

Can you talk a bit about that relationship?

We do know that people who have wildly exuberant temperaments are inclined toward melancholy. That’s been known for a couple thousand years — the great philosophers and the ancient doctors studied that in detail. So just as depression is sorted along a continuum, from very mild states of wistfulness to something incapacitating or psychotic, so is exuberance. People feel anything from mild happiness to just complete and utter mania, which, like psychotic depression, is a very psychotic state indeed.

What do we know, in terms of neurochemistry, about exuberance?

The neurochemistry of exuberance is not that well worked out. One of the limitations is that there’s been more research done on depression than mania — mania and elated states are still very much being investigated. A lot of neuro-imaging studies have been done on depression, as there have been on mild mania, but obviously it’s harder to do a brain scan of somebody who’s manic because most people who are manic have a lot better things to do with their lives! But what has been studied pretty closely with exuberant temperaments and etxroversion and the tendency to be bold and out there are studies of infants that show this temperament tends to carry on into adulthood. And there’s certainly a genetic tendency toward extroversion as a temperament.

What distinguishes exuberance from mania?

Quite a few things. A lot of people who are highly exuberant have manic depressive illness and many more have milder forms of it — everything from cyclothymia, which is a mild version [of manic depressive illness], to just kind of being moody, intense people who aren’t clinically ill at all. Certainly in mania everything is more extreme. The dopamine system is very much involved in both mania and exuberance, but it’s not revved up to a really pathological level, and it doesn’t stay that way. In mania you really have your foot to the accelerator and it’s going 175 miles an hour and there’s not much break. But with exuberance it’s a much more lulling speed. There’s not that tremendous overdrive.

“Touched With Fire” was dedicated to the artistic temperament, but this book is peopled largely with scientists. Would you say that scientists are a disproportionately exuberant lot?

Why do some people look at the stars? What is it about that? Why is that some people will work all night? This has always fascinated me. There is much more, and for good cause, much more interest in artists and writers — they tend to live interesting lives, and the kind of things they bring to people is remarkable, but I consciously wanted to focus on scientists here. I do think scientists don’t get written about enough, though they do very important work and a lot of them are really wonderful people, and do fascinating things. If you read the things that are in the paper you’d never know that scientists are such interesting people; they’re portrayed either as evil and wicked or they’re portrayed as drones.

You have James Watson confessing to being arrogant and unbearable, and then naturalist Hope Ryden saying of her scholarly exuberance that mostly she tries to tamp it down. It seemed that the male scientists you discussed were more slapdash and forceful in their articulation of this state, while the women were more circumspect. But is there a real gender difference in the way men and women express or experience exuberance?

If you look at people who are hyperthymic — it’s a term that’s used to describe those who are cheerful, talkative, extroverted — the literature’s been pretty consistent and clear, and it’s true with exuberant children as well, that there are more males than females. Cross-species it’s a pretty consistent pattern, but it’s more mixed — for example, in dogs, females and males tend to be equally bold and adventurous. I think it will be interesting to see how this pans out when the measures are better and when women have had a chance to really express themselves more. It’s not that I think it’s all cultural, because I don’t, but I do think that young girls are taught that to be sophisticated and cool, they really have to tone down wild enthusiasms and being tomboyish and out there and having obvious fun. I don’t think anyone’s sorted out the role of testosterone, though. What’s been looked at more is the neurochemistry — dopamine and so forth. Up to a certain point in life, though, all kids are scientists. They all look at the sky, and they all look at the world, and they all look at animals, at the world, and say, Why? Why is this? And why is that? At some point society really shuts this down and they lose that sense of awe. Some of that’s inevitable. People just do lose that awe and exuberance that was probably built in for a certain time in our species and most people move on emotionally in a way.

It’s hard to figure out how to make room for play and experimentation in your life, whether you’re a kid or an adult. But, as you point out in the book, there’s an evolutionary necessity of play — it encourages flexibility and communication, and makes for a fitter species.

Right. And how you build it into your own life is terribly important. There are those people who maintain that childlike capacity to fall in love with the world all over again, who are able to bring a new view to whatever problem they’re looking at. Built into exuberance is an ability to, no matter what comes along, find something else to be interested in, to care about, to write about, to fall in love with. Like Watson says, it’s the pursuit. If you’re totally content you don’t have any desire to pursue anything intellectually or geographically. Exuberance has a restlessness in it. It’s not discontent — it’s a forward-moving, active restlessness.

That restlessness, you say, is what helped settle America. What led you to write the chapter on exuberance as a hallmark of the American temperament?

My family can be traced to the Mayflower and I’ve always thought, sort of like scientists, that the Pilgrims got a bad rap. On the one hand these guys sound like such prigs and so judgmental, but on the other hand anyone who got in a ship and faced that uncertainty — I always felt that it had to be a lot more interesting. So I wanted to think about what kind of temperament gets you over the mountain, gets you settling the plains. There’s the group that came to the Eastern seaboard, and a smaller group from that who got restless and took off for the American West. And the people who stayed in Boston are very different from those who are a bit restless, who had this dream. Some people see desolation when they look out at the prairie, but some people say, Wow, these are going to be orchards. The people who left were more willing to take risks. They really had to be able to imagine the future and act on their optimism.

From my own field, it’s well known that there’s a higher rate of bipolar illness in immigrants, and because bipolar is related to these temperaments it may be that there was some sort of genuine selection for that. Studies also show that Americans value enthusiasm so much more than other people; we tend to believe that we have a lot more control over our own fate than Europeans do. They see exuberance as superficial and not reflecting the seriousness of life, its tragic nature. But we’re really based on going to the moon and settling the land, on the idea of improvement and doing better things. As soon as you say those words it sounds like stereotyping, but I really think it’s true. If you look at the winners of Nobel prizes, it’s not that we’re a bigger country or spend money on sciences, it’s that we really have valued that entrepreneurial spirit in science.

You write of George Patton’s enthusiasm for war and annihilation as an example of the underside of exuberance and passion. Not to force you into political punditry, but do you think our characteristic optimism has become dangerously unreflective?

I’ll try to take this outside the world of politics, but it’s hard when you live in Washington. I think I would get back to my basic argument that it’s great to have all different kinds of temperament and you want to have people who are very bold and who will act boldly. But there’s nothing that keeps you from being both reflective and bold. And I think that’s what you want in a great leader.

In terms of the coming election, who’s your money on, exuberance-wise?

Senator Kerry — because when he really starts talking about something he’s quite passionate about it. He’s not a wildly exuberant man, but he strikes me as someone who has very strong feelings. And has probably spent a certain amount of his life reining them in. The night of the first debate you could see that he was really engaged in what he was doing, unlike the president. He was someone I remember when I was part of the antiwar movement as an incredible leader because he was so passionate. He was unbelievably emotional and articulate — he had this incredible combination of verbal discipline with raw feeling. But I think 20 years in the Senate does something to raw feeling. It hasn’t seemed to have that effect on Ted Kennedy, but to most people, it does!

In 1999, Congress, baffled by the wave of late ’90s shootings, decided to investigate why they were happening in quiet, close-knit communities rather than cities. Newman was asked to contribute two case studies to the effort, and her new book, “Rampage: The Social Roots of School Shootings,” grew out of that research. Newman and a team of four Harvard graduate students conducted more than a hundred interviews with kids, parents, teachers and mental health workers in Heath, Ky., where in 1997, 14-year-old Michael Carneal opened fire on an early morning prayer group at his high school, killing three students and wounding five others, and in Westside, Ark., where in 1998 Andrew Golden, 11, and Mitchell Johnson, 13, fired 30 rounds of ammunition at teachers and students on a school playground, killing four and injuring 10.

Newman and her colleagues concluded that we can’t blame guns or Marilyn Manson for these unthinkable acts of violence. In fact, some of our all-American values may be the poison in the well. The closeness of small towns, she writes, often socializes its residents into silence because they don’t want to risk offending their friends and neighbors by bringing up unsettling information. And, she argues, we need to be more understanding of kids that can’t or won’t be shiny, happy conformists. She reminds us that for teenagers, hell definitely is other people — especially if you’re a boy who isn’t a jock.

The school shootings you studied took place in rural communities. How does the structure of these communities make for trouble?

In a small town the kinds of connections people make are highly overlapping — your teacher may be your Scout leader, who may also be your neighbor. These multiplex ties are really important, and they create a density not just of social relationships but also of information. We argue in the book that this density has many positive features, but also negative ones. It will lead people to worry a lot about the consequences of losing a friendship if they come forward with information that’s regarded as damaging or poorly motivated.

There’s data in the book showing that out of the 25 school shootings that have occurred in the U.S. since 1974, three-quarters of them have taken place since the early ’90s. Why has there been this increase?

I don’t think we have a good handle on why these shootings began to increase. But we do know that there’s a copycat phenomenon in later shootings. We can see that a kind of script was born for this sort of violence and it began to be taken up by young boys. And by “script” I mean media representation of shootings as a way of establishing manhood — of becoming a man, of showing that you’re physically dominant and powerful. This image of a glorified or notorious shooter is something we see in popular media. But we can see that in action films from the ’70s like “Superfly” and “Shaft,” so it’s not as though [this image] has suddenly increased.

In the Kentucky high school, the kids you talked to said the worst thing they can think of is to be called gay. But with hunting and sports so entrenched, is it possible in these small communities to give boys an alternative definition of masculinity?

Sports culture has many positive virtues — I don’t want to sound like I think every football player’s a horrible person. And in fact sports often do unite the community and provide a way for the generations to speak to each other about the things they care about in common. However, it’s more difficult in small communities to have alternative pathways to manhood. But it doesn’t seem to me that it’s impossible. These boys in these towns actually have many different models in front of them — they’ve got fathers who become plumbers or doctors and lawyers and technicians. It’s not as though they look at every male that’s in their social orbit and think “Oh, he’s respected because he’s sporting a gun.” They aren’t. But in the fantastic culture of the media, you don’t see the father who becomes a plumber as an image of masculinity. You see these sawed-off shotguns. And these schools have debate teams; they have science programs. There are other activities that young men can participate in. But they are not usually as publicly valued. Kids [in non-sports activities] we interviewed would say, “You didn’t see a pep rally for us.” Even when the school tries to combat this, by holding a pep rally for the band, everybody knows that it’s a conscious effort. But I do think that’s something we could change if people recognize just how much potential damage it does to have just a single way of defining success and manliness.

Would you say that this is a particularly American problem, then, our beloved jockocracies?

This is a problem that doesn’t derive so much from the size of these communities as from a general American disdain for intellectual [excellence], a sort of populism that’s common in the culture. In Japan, for instance, if you are a failing academic high school student, you are in deep trouble. But you’re really not in deep trouble in the United States. It’s a curious thing, because we all know that this is damaging to society as a whole, to not value [academic] achievement. Unless you are a glitteringly successful sports star or movie star, most of the rest of us are going to come to the good life through higher education and professions which heavily favor people who are gifted in the mind. But in adolescence we load our status system up with the absolute opposite values. Quite a few kids expressed resentment at this. One Westside girl, complaining about how the football players got out of class on game days to watch “Remember the Titans,” said, “We don’t get any privileges like that … We bust our tails and we don’t get anything for it.” A boy at Heath said even though their football team was terrible, they still got all the attention. “Our choir was really good. We sent the most people to all-state and higher-state. Nobody said a word about it. Smart kids — they didn’t care about the smart kids.”

When people get older, of course, they can look more critically on their high school days and come to grips with what they meant or didn’t mean. But when you’re in the middle of it, it’s your whole world. It’s everything. And if you’re in a small rural community, it might feel like it’s your whole world forever, because you don’t see many examples of people getting up and leaving. The two schools we studied both sent a majority of their students to college — but where do they go? They went to the local community college or state colleges. They often don’t leave at all — they live at home if they go to college, and even if they do go away, they come back. In the graduating class at Heath the year of the shooting, only three or four kids actually went away to college.

While many people wring their hands over the nihilistic music and violent video games that the kids who contemplated and carried out these attacks consumed — for example, Michael Carneal was a fan of “Mortal Kombat” — you say that the sort of media consumed is really only one part of the equation.

Usually shooters are marginal kids who are looking for a way to impress their friends. They’re not in love with the idea of violence — they’re in love with the idea of respect from their peers. Usually these kids are damaged goods: They have reputations as being nerdy, or they’re too young to join status groups that develop in junior year. They’re freshman, they’re dweebs, they haven’t grown yet. Michael Carneal, in his freshman year of high school, was this skinny little kid with glasses, he was socially very awkward, he was developing some serious delusions that no one knew about — he was afraid to sleep alone because he imagined monsters were coming to get him, he put towels over the bathroom vents because he thought snakes would come through them. But what people could see was that he was a jerk. He would do stupid things, like putting gum in a girl’s hair, things he thought people would think were funny, but they didn’t. In one photograph in the book, you can see that now he’s over 6 feet tall and 200 pounds. If he had looked like that at 15, he wouldn’t have been as socially marginal. It’s not surprising in some ways that these shooters are often in the early years of adolescence — there’s so much variation in what boys look like at 14 or 15. Some look like the men they’re going to be. Some look like little boys.

And yet Mitchell Johnson, from the picture in the book, looked pretty husky and seemed to have more power and status than other shooters. And he seemed to be a really compassionate kid — he even made his little brother’s bed every day for him.

Mitchell is something of a mystery. He was a bigger boy, he was successful at sports, he was a pretty good student, most of his teachers thought he was a sweetheart, he sang for the church choir, he visited old people’s homes. There are many, many reasons why people would have never thought of Mitchell as a potential shooter. But they didn’t know the other parts of his life. They didn’t know that he had been sexually abused as a little boy, or about the verbally violent breakup of his parents’ marriage. So there were really two Mitchells. So for all of his success socially, he didn’t think of himself as a success. He thought of himself as a failure. And then he got cut from some sports teams. He got dumped by a girlfriend. And in his very sensitive state, expecting the worst, and in a very turbulent relationship with his dad, he was cycling downwards, and nobody around him recognized it.

Even though the kids who perpetrate these acts do, as you point out in the book, often boast to other kids about what they’re planning, or give other clues that they are troubled, what’s really frightening is that these acts are springing from a narrative that’s unfolding mostly internally, unbeknownst to adults.

Researching the book was scary for that reason. You think the world is an orderly place and that we would be able to pick these kids out, and once we do we’ll either give them treatment and lock them away, or somehow prevent them from doing these horrible things. Then you realize you can’t pick them out. They come from good families and dysfunctional families. They’re good students and terrible students. Some of them look like Mitchell — they seem to be socially successful on the surface but underneath they’re in terrible shape. Others are clearly very troubled, like Kip Kinkel, in Oregon, who was expelled from school. We’re not going to be able to cope with this problem by identifying these kids in advance. We can’t. Kip Kinkel is the scariest case of all — this was someone who was identified. The school expelled him, his parents tried to get him help — they were one day away from voluntary commitment — and they couldn’t stop him. I’m not saying that we’re going to get to a point where we can stop every one of these. But we might see more intercepted plots.

One thing that seems to be very helpful are school resource officers — law enforcement officials in the schools who wear what’s called “soft uniform,” meaning they don’t wear full police regalia and don’t carry weapons — and their great value is that they’re disconnected from the school hierarchy. In the schools we looked at, kids do come forward to talk about drug problems or threats they heard, and they seem to see the school resource officer as a safe haven, as someone who’s there to catch problems before they spin out of control. And they remove a sort of hall-monitor burden from the teachers, who really don’t like having to do all this disciplinary work.

Do you think the government is doing enough to prevent school violence?

After Sept. 11, there appeared to be quite a lull in the shootings themselves. It may be that people who considered shooting were knocked off course just like everybody else was. The phenomenon may have been interrupted, but not forever. We’ve had a couple of these incidents in the last month or so, which leads me to think that the pressure that inclines kids toward these acts hasn’t disappeared, and the incidents may be poised to make something of a comeback. I’m not sure that this is a problem that government can address, other than to provide resources that make it possible for schools and local communities to address the issue. It’s not like a big heavy law enforcement intervention is needed. It certainly is the case that support for things like school resource officers and more mental health counseling in the schools would make a difference. But the problem is so many schools are facing budget crises right now.

When you started the research for the book, did you think that by the end you’d be able to come up with a profile of a school shooter?

Yes and no. As a total outsider to the topic I thought some would emerge, but the Secret Service, whose data we studied, was convinced you would never be able to pick these kids out, and I found their reasoning quite compelling. You looked at the data and you could just see there’s too much variation in who these shooters were. But the one thing that we can do is to understand what we’re hearing when we hear these threats, because these kids are looking to reverse a status deficit, and they always send out warning signals. Michael Carneal turned in some very troubled essays to teachers. He kept telling classmates that something big was going to happen the week before the shooting. Mitchell and Andrew made announcements to their classmates too, who brushed it off. And so we’re not going to be able to tell who they are in advance, but when we hear these warning signals, we need to take these things seriously. Of course there’s a downside to that. Of course there will be false positives. There will be kids who say stupid things and won’t mean it. And we will overreact — but I say better to overreact than to underreact.