Oppenheimer: 'Honey, We Are Straight-Edge'

After we had both finished "Ten Thousand Saints," the simply awesome debut novel by Eleanor Henderson, I said to my wife, "Would you ever consider going straight-edge?" Without skipping a beat, she said to me, "Honey, we ARE straight edge." I thought for a second, and I realized she was right: we're vegetarians, we don't do drugs, she never drinks, I rarely do. We're not into tattoos, but otherwise the only part of the straight-edge lifestyle we don't subscribe to is the renunciation of sex. We have three daughters under the age of six, so we must have had conjugal relations at some point, although we're too tired to remember when.

"Ten Thousand Saints" is the story of Jude, a teenager from Vermont who moves to New York City after his best friend, Teddy, dies of a drug overdose. In New York, he is supposed to be living with his dad, a chilled-out pot dealer with a rent-controlled flat in the Village. Instead, he ends up a disciple of Johnny, his late friend's older brother, a tattoo artist and popular musician in the straight-edge hardcore music scene. And the two of them befriend Eliza, an Upper East Side cokehead who, on a fateful trip to Vermont, got knocked up by Teddy the night that he OD'd. Soon they head back to Vermont, where they convince some of Jude and Teddy's old pals to go straight-edge too. They form a band, and with Eliza, the pregnant girl, as their unwilling roadie, they embark on a summer tour of skeevy basement clubs and American Legion halls.

Most writers, especially most first-time novelists, would never have the courage to make up something like this, because it seems too crazy to be true. Therefore, in a book this well written, it all seems ineluctably true, as if it must have happened. There is an urgency here, and a fierceness, that I've been finding lately in a lot of great punk-rock, downtown NYC memoirs, like Patti Smith's, or the critic James Wolcott's. There is no narrative arc, just one pointless, thrilling event after the next. That's real life, not fiction.

But my reaction to "Ten Thousand Saints" was more than just a case of writerly admiration. The more I thought about it, the more this book actually seemed to be talking to me. Sure, it was about tattooed, straight-edged teenagers in the 1980s. But as my wife noted, we're kind of straight-edge ourselves. In the novel, some of the characters are from small-town New England, the rest are from New York City; in real life, I was born in New York City, but grew up in small-town New England. They love music, I love music, just quieter music. Before going straight-edge, they huff Freon — when I was a teenager, I loved the smell of Magic Markers. Actually, I still do.

Alright, maybe I am stretching here. Maybe I don't have much in common with Eleanor Henderson's characters. But it's pretty meaningful that the author has made me feel as if I do, that she has me hunting for all these homologies. Growing up in Western Mass., I never would have joined a straight-edge band. But reading "Ten Thousand Saints," I kind of wish that I had. The intense friendship, the commitment to art, the self-sufficiency: there's something deeply noble about Jude, Johnny, Eliza and their gang. They have the kind of naive passion that adolescents specialize in, and that grown-ups have trouble retaining. "Ten Thousand Saints" made me want to go dance with these kids — if only they could turn the volume down, just a little.