You go to a dance where a new pop song is playing, and for the rest of your life hearing that song triggers the same emotion. It comes on the radio, and you think, That’s when things were truly fine. You want to hear it again and again. You have become addicted.Youth culture acquires its poignancy through time, and so thoroughly that you can barely see what it is in itself. It’s just, permanently, “your song,” your story. When people who grew up in the nineteen-fifties give “The Catcher in the Rye” to their kids, it’s like showing them an old photo album: That’s me.

It isn’t, of course. Maybe, in fact, the nostalgia of youth culture is completely spurious. Maybe it invites you to indulge in bittersweet memories of a childhood you never had, an idyll of Beach Boys songs and cheeseburgers and convertibles and teen-age crushes which has been constructed by pop songs and television shows and movies, and bears very little relation to any experience of your own. But, whether or not the emotion is spurious, people have it. It is the romantic certainty, which all these books seduce you with, that somehow, somewhere, something was taken away from you, and you cannot get it back. Once, you did ride a carrousel. It seemed as though it would last forever.