Lamarche, Phil

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Lamarche, Phil

PERSONAL:

Education: Attended Syracuse University as a writing fellow. Hobbies and other interests: Whitewater kayaking.

ADDRESSES:

Home—NY. Agent—Peter Straus, Rogers Coleridge and White Ltd., 20 Powis Mews, London W11 1JN, England; The Melanie Jackson Agency, 41 W. 72nd St., Ste. 3F, New York, New York 10023. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

Writer.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Ivan Klíma Fellowship in fiction, Prague, Czechoslovakia; Summer Literary Seminars fellowship, St. Petersburg, Russia.

WRITINGS:

American Youth: A Novel, Random House (New York, NY), 2007.

ADAPTATIONS:

Author's short story "In the Tradition of My Family" was adapted as a film of the same name, for Later Productions.

SIDELIGHTS:

Phil LaMarche's first book, titled American Youth: A Novel, was called "honest and perceptive" by Susanne Bardelson in the School Library Journal. The novel features Ted LeClare, a ninth grader living in New England whose friend Kevin accidentally kills his own younger brother while Ted is showing him his rifle. Ted lies about having loaded the gun himself, but the formerly unpopular youth soon finds himself lured into an antisocial archconservative gang calling themselves the American Youth. In an interview with Magdalena Ball on the Compulsive Reader Web site, LaMarche commented on his depiction of the youth gang, noting: "I think that the way I wanted to portray them was as representative of a conservative element in the culture that I live in. I wanted them to reflect the inadequacies/fallibility of that approach to the world—to show where that mentality and where that outlook falls short." LaMarche's debut was well received by the critics. "Lamarche paints an austere vision of a society where the gun culture is not just endemic but also holds an alarming generational influence," wrote Michael Leonard on the Curled Up with a Good Book Web site. A Publishers Weekly contributor noted: "LaMarche deftly allows his debut to be at once a parable and a dead-on rendering of its time and place."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Booklist, February 15, 2007, Keir Graff, review of American Youth: A Novel, p. 35.

Entertainment Weekly, April 13, 2007, Thom Geier, review of American Youth, p. 77.

Financial Times, April 14, 2007, Stanley Pignal, "In Brief—American Youth," p. 33.

Library Journal, January 1, 2007, Lawrence Rungren, review of American Youth, p. 96.

New Statesman, March 26, 2007, Sophie Pearce, "Angry Young Men," p. 68.

Publishers Weekly, December 4, 2006, review of American Youth, p. 31; January 22, 2007, Lauren Joyce, "American Youth (Spring '07 Fiction Debuts)," p. 63.

School Library Journal, May, 2007, Susanne Bardelson, review of American Youth, p. 173.

Spectator, June 16, 2007, Tom Fleming, "A Choice of First Novels."