SOURCE: "Teenage Wasteland," in Maclean's, July 10, 1995, pp. 42-3.

[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...