[In the following excerpt, Lawson compares and contrasts the adolescent angst suffered by Paul in Ford's Independence Day to that of Chappie in Russell Banks's Rule of the Bone and discusses the literary merits of each work.]

There isn't a name for them yet—those early teen years of 14 and 15 when a boy's voice drops, he grows two shoe sizes every six months and he begins to see and judge the world through his own eyes. "An ass-o-lescent" is how Frank Bascombe, the narrator of Richard Ford's latest novel, Independence Day, describes his 15-year-old son, Paul. Chappie, the plain-speaking and compelling 14 year old narrator of Russell Banks's Rule of the Bone, doesn't have a word for his stage of life, and he doesn't have a witty father to mint one for him. Chappie doesn't have a father at all.

That is just one of the contrasts between these very fine, very different new works of American fiction. The stories of two white man-boys, the kind one might see hanging out at a mall on a school-day afternoon, sharply illustrate the vast and growing divide between rich and poor, haves and have-nots. Independence Day, the sequel to Ford's much-praised The Sportswriter, finds Frank Bascombe, a divorced, 44-year-old former short story writer and sports journalist, selling real estate in a posh New Jersey town. It's the Fourth of July week-end in 1988, and Bascombe is emerging from what he says is his "Existence Period," a kind of mid-life crisis, a time of uncertain desire and lost love and regret, when treading water is the most that can be hoped for.

It is his son, Paul, a troubled, pudgy rich kid living with his mother and stepfather in a mansion in Connecticut, who seems to be drowning. Busted for shoplifting three boxes of extra-large condoms, Paul has his hair cut "in some new, dopey, skint-sided, buzzed-up way" and sports a tattoo that says "insect" on the inside of his right wrist. "In the next century," Paul tells his father, "we're all going to be enslaved by the insects that survived this century's pesticides. With this I acknowledge being in a band of maladapted creatures whose time is coming to a close."

Driving up to spend the Independence Day weekend touring the baseball and basketball halls of fame with his son, Bascombe tells himself that at least Paul does not suffer from what he calls "the big three:" he does not play with fire, wet his bed or torture animals. But Bascombe finds a dead bird at the gate of Paul's stepfather's mansion and knows instantly that it is his son's handiwork. Paul does torture animals.

Paul also reads The New Yorker, barks like a dog from time to time, and asks his father questions such as "Do you think I'm shallow?" When Paul steals one of his stepfather's Mercedes and crashes it, no charges are brought. The incident is hushed up, consequences avoided. Paul has suffered the pain of a brother's death and his parents' subsequent divorce. But despite his strong self-destructive streak, Paul has second chances in life and is loved by his mother and father.

In Russell Banks's Rule of the Bone, 14-year-old Chappie, like Paul, has an attention-grabbing hairdo—a Mohawk cut. He also has a pierced nostril and ears. Chappie shoplifts useless goods, too—in his case, "a silky green nightgown" from a lingerie store. In the course of the novel, Chappie gets a tattoo on the inside of his left forearm. But getting his tattoo—a pirate's crossed bones without the skull—is not an ersatz nihilistic gesture like Paul's. It is a way of remembering the innocence of his childhood, the time when his grandmother read Peter Pan to him, and of constructing his new identity as "the Bone," as he comes to call himself.

Chappie, or Bone, doesn't get second or third chances in life, or much in the way of love. Abandoned as a baby by his father, he lives in a trailer with his mother and stepfather, Ken, "basically a Nazi with a drinking problem plus a few others." He lives there, that is, until he is kicked out of the trailer for stealing his mother's rare coin collection.

Homeless and suffering, he says, from "wicked low self-esteem," Chappie sets out into the world with nothing but his wits….

In one of Banks's earlier works, The Sweet Hereafter, a character says, "In my lifetime something terrible happened that took our children away from us. I don't know if it was the Vietnam War, or the sexual colonization of kids by industry, or drugs, or TV or divorce, or what the hell it was: I don't know which are causes and which are effects; but the children are gone, that I know." In a post-industrial, postmodern, pre-nothing culture, that is the sentiment that underlies Banks's Rule of the Bone and Ford's Independence Day.

Still, despite the superficial similarities, there is an enormous gap between Paul's and Chappie's lives. Middle-class Paul hurts himself to get his divorced parents' attention; rejected by his family, Chappie seriously contemplates, then nearly commits, suicide. When Paul steals a car he is protected; Chappie, who steals a pickup truck, would be sent to one of the boot camps popular with politicians these days to have the spirit beaten out of him if he were caught.

Taken separately, Independence Day—cracking with insights into everything from what to look for when buying a house to the special ring of hell reserved for divorced spouses who still love each other—is one of the year's best novels. Rule of the Bone is a work of great humanity and empathy, and Chappie is a character who will stay vividly lodged in the memory….

Taken together, Independence Day and Rule of the Bone prove that growing up in America is not getting any easier.