Waiting for Ricky Tantrum, by Jules Lewis, Dundurn, 175 pages, $17.99
Jules Lewis's novel of fractured adolescence in Toronto opens with a sampling of pith from Henrik Ibsen's The Wild Duck: "All the world is sick, pretty nearly." The suggested cure: "make-believe. That is the stimulating principle of life." Lewis is a Toronto lad himself, so his tale is conceivably not all make-believe, but it's certainly stimulating.
It's the year 2000 on Bloor West, and Jim is just starting junior high school. First day, he comes out the main doors and a kid he has barely glanced at growls, "Hell you looking at buddy?" It's a fateful meeting. Charlie is a talker, scary enough to keep Jim sweating yet eccentric enough to stir a wary fascination. His story of a tarty girl who allows glimpses of her orange pubic hair is enough to commit Jim to meeting Charlie the next day after school.
Jim lives with a father who "was 16 at the end of World War Two." Dad wears dentures and has trouble getting up the stairs. Jim is the point man left with elder care each time his big sister, Amanda, heads back to university. Lewis introduces Amanda in a delightful, Portnoy-esque kitchen scene in which the image of sisterly bottom in baby-blue panties triggers … well, let's call it an incriminating dampness. Then we're off to the schoolyard appointment with Charlie, and his lesson in how to befriend a hooker.
Lewis is a wide-open window on the cheesy mortifications of boyish lust. Jim, Charlie, Oleg and a few hanger-on Korean boys frequent a video arcade where their fave game is virtual strip poker. After weeks of wasted pocket change, players just may get to watch a busty animated "model" remove that final layer. Jim and his fractious pals are voiced with a discerning ear for the motor-mouth swagger of teenage rivalry. These kids live to yank each other's chains. Equally diverting, but cutting deeper, are the darkly comic exchanges with adults, ranging from the arcade manager to the long-suffering moms of friends, through to Jim's melancholic dad who ritually listens to Schubert's Unfinished Symphony each weekend because "there's no closure in this world."
Fast forward to high school. The "Pepto Bismol-coloured" corridors of Dufferin Collegiate are chilled by buzzing fluorescent lights. The science teacher, an ill-tempered Barbie doll, inspires smarmy whispers from Jim's desk-mate: "Bet you she just lets guys do her. Bet you if I asked she'd let me." Everything gets meaner in high school, with teachers the supreme targets. Charlie, a master manipulator with the conscience of a stone, reduces history teacher Mr. Glickman to weak-kneed, sputtering rage. At Oleg's house, we enter a different sort of jungle; Jim watches his friend suffer a shocking, unprovoked beating from his older brother. The scene leaps from the page, visceral proof of what lies beneath the verbal jousting.
In all of this, Jim is our keen-eyed observer, Lewis's non-judgmental conduit for scenes and relationships that often jangle with verisimilitude. Much of the initial pleasure is in the long yet brisk stretches of dialogue - convincing precisely because the litany of insult and vain posturing seems unedited. It's effective until it's not; in later scenes, the smart-ass circularities begin to feel simply recycled.
Mostly, the prose rattles along with scattershot energy, staving off the vague but gathering sense that something is missing. Twenty pages from the end there's still no evident story arc. Lewis makes up for it with a clever closing twist. But really, it's his fully formed world of aimless, hormone-buzzed kids that does the trick.
Jim Bartley is The Globe and Mail's first-fiction reviewer.