Youth in Revolt

February 27, 1995
Told as the diary of an oversexed 14-year-old, this three-part comic-novel deals with the usual adolescent bugbears: divorced parents, rebellion, virginity. Set in the cultural wasteland of trailer-park northern California, the episodic plot involves arson, car theft, police brutality and more. Nick tries to win an even more precocious girl his age, Sheeni Saunders, by means of allusive letters and screwball schemes which eventually backfire. Payne gives his narrator an overblown literary voice that contrasts with the attendant embarrassments of his age (e.g., the problems of finding a place to masturbate privately in an R.V.), but the narrative strains for comedic effect. With its Woody Allen-like punch lines, double entendres and overall high-school atmosphere, the novel reads like YA fiction: a nihilist Daniel Pinkwater. And for all Nick's intellectual pretension and artificial speech (qualities echoed, oddly, by nearly all the teenaged characters), he seems devoid of imagination or any redeeming qualities; nor does he care about anything other than satisfying his pubescent desires. And, though in the book's final third the boy comes alive in his drag persona of Carlotta (and Payne admirably brings home his convoluted plot), it is too late to revitalize an ultimately unsympathetic hero.