E-Mail This Article to a Friend Dazed and confused (continued)

Happy Baby, by Stephen Elliott (MacAdam/Cage, 2004; $21). If you’re anything like me, your reading tastes have changed over the years. Salinger invigorated me from my junior-high-school daze; Dickens and John Irving gave me carefully plotted novels about orphaned/incestuous/abused youth; and in the muggy summer before college, I was addicted to anti-establishment maven Ayn Rand before graduating to the renegade delinquents of Augusten Burroughs and Jean Genet. All languid tales of disaffected youth. But if you’ve entered your 20s and are still as rebellious as ever, where do you find solace?

Stephen Elliott’s novel Happy Baby is one fucked-up adult’s attempt to make sense of a tough Chicago childhood. Elliott’s fans include J.T. Leroy (a hard-hitting young writer himself) and the popular Anthony Swofford, whose book Jarhead describes the rigors of military life; Elliott is one of the hip McSweeney’s crowd of writers. Happy Baby, however, earns its hipster praise in spades. This is a book that refuses to flinch — whether describing the narrator’s sexual abuse as a teenage ward of the state of Illinois, or relating a submissive relationship with a woman who requires him to wear women’s underwear and leather pants on the San Francisco subway. Elliott’s sadomasochistic lovers blur the lines of brutality and love as powerfully as do Genet’s combatants in Miracle of the Rose.

But Elliott captures the tender awkwardness of life, too. He describes a young couple who "lean into one another even though the couch is long, cutting off their own space." An image of a sleeping child: "Kyle has his back turned to me, resting, sleeping I think, in Maria’s collar. He could be rising from her skin ..."

The locales in Elliott’s world are places of wonder and decay: "There’s trash in the plants, cups sitting on branches. The mailbox hangs upside down, its lid gaping open. In place of a buzzer two wires protrude from a hole in the door. I look a little harder and see a face behind a curtain. The house isn’t abandoned at all."

This is a gritty, evocative novel that portrays the seaminess and splendor of the human condition. The dust-jacket-less cover of Happy Baby says it all: a pencil-thin sketch of a man with his hand covering his face.

Animal Crackers, by Hannah Tinti (Dial Press, 2004; $22.95). In Hannah Tinti’s strange, surreal collection Animal Crackers, restlessness pervades everything from droopy tom turkeys to giraffes’ zany manifestoes to zookeepers. As in the title story — whose narrator must deal with a belligerent elephant (not to mention his ex-wife) — animals figure prominently in these masterful tales.

"Slim’s Last Ride" offers a single mom’s point of view toward her troubled, shirt-yanked-over-head son ("He does this when he knows he’s done something wrong. He doesn’t have to get caught, either"). What’s the most unusual way a child might express suffering and pain? Crying, throwing wild tantrums? Or tossing a pet rabbit out the window? This very kooky mother and son find themselves torn between nursing an ailing animal or letting it go free, an allegory for parenting. How do parents balance discipline with nurture? For kids with emotional problems, is the best treatment tough love or a swift hand?

The moral core of Tinti’s work may lie in the title story, in which the narrator tells us, "You hear animal stories every day. How a bee stung little Johnny and he went into cardiac arrest. How a snake bit Cousin Tom and it shriveled up his toe.... These stories are supposed to give warning."

The Sleeping Father, by Matthew Sharpe (Soft Skull Press, 2003; $14). Published by the estimable Soft Skull Press and buoyed by the Today Show Book Club’s mega-endorsement, Matthew Sharpe’s The Sleeping Father is a dark, tragicomic look at the dysfunction of a typical, post-millennial family that is physically, emotionally, and socially comatose. The novel indicts almost everyone in familial life: kids, fathers, deadbeat moms, grandfathers, social workers, and even the doctors we trust to save lives.

Sharpe’s sardonic tale places adolescent angst squarely on the shoulders of its narrators: ever-grumpy Chris and his truth-seeking sister, Cathy. These two characters cope with their hormones in diametrically opposed ways: one chooses apathy, the other faith. Cathy is particularly insecure and angst-ridden: "The tremor in her hands wasn’t the outward sign of some kind of saintly passion, it was the outward sign of the fear of a 16-year-old girl whose father was falling apart." To steal a title from filmmaker Gregg Araki (himself a rebellious youth), these two characters are "The Doom Generation."

How does Chris choose to express his discontent with the crappy hand he’s been dealt? More often than not, by lashing out at caretakers and wallowing in self-loathing. "Chris made a stop at the mirror to study that miniature version of humanity, his own face, on which adolescent discomfort expressed itself through the medium of acne."

Sharpe’s voice is as wry and witty as the stories of George Saunders and Julia Slavin (have you read Pastoralia or The Woman Who Cut Off Her Leg at the Maidstone Club yet?); his tragicomic outlook may well be as dead-on as Howard Zinn’s. Read this book whether you’re 15 or 51, because The Sleeping Father captures the restlessness, wit, and heartbreak of teenagers and the people who love them.

Ricco Villanueva Siasoco can be reached at mail@riccosiasoco.com.