Boys Just Want to Have Fun

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The mind of a prepubescent boy can be a confused and chaotic place. Caught between childhood and adolescence, he's flooded by new impulses, teased by an itch he can't quite scratch. So wordless lust is confined in wordless thoughts that resound in his tormented head. The 12-year-old narrator of Ed Lin's edgy debut novel Waylaid is the only child of Chinese immigrants. He spends all his spare time working at his family's ramshackle hotel on the New Jersey shore. The summer guests are "Bennys"—crude young Italians from New York City who vomit in the hallways and copulate in the pool. In the lean winter months, the family rents rooms to hookers and their clients. Lin's unnamed narrator mans the front desk at night and cleans the mattresses, giving him plenty of impetus to do what 12-year-old boys do: wonder, fantasize and wait impatiently for his own turn.

"How good is it?" he asks one john.

"How good is it? It's great. It's like following through on a good clean punch."

Sex consumes Waylaid. Lin's narrator gets his notions of it from cast-off porn, his coarse friend Vincent and the flesh trade that surrounds him. His attitude is, not surprisingly, neither romantic nor realistic; he divides the women he meets into "hardcore" or "centerfolds." When he loses his virginity, however, the experience is brutal in a way that shreds his cheap porn fantasies.

Lin's writing is terse, stinging and barely leavened by well-observed humor. In tight strokes he sketches a grimly vivid picture of the depressed Jersey of the early 1980s, a Springsteen vision of darkness at the edge of town. The narrator dreams idly of escaping by becoming an astronaut, but he knows the hotel is his prison, and the service bell is his warden: "BING! BING! BING! That little bell going off put your life on hold. You heard it and you hopped to it."

As the Atari-playing American-born son of Chinese immigrants, the narrator is stuck between two cultures. His repressed, hard-working parents live up to their roles as model minorities, but he doesn't want to play the part of the meek Asian kid. We see a teacher congratulating the narrator for receiving the highest marks in class, but we know the boy has just beaten up a racist classmate with a ruler. Ultimately, though, that hotel bell is inescapable, and when a health catastrophe strikes his father and destroys their finances, his family is left with nothing but the ashes of the American dream. Though Lin ends his searing book on a hopeful note, Waylaid is like a nihilistic—but enjoyable—detour on a journey from nothing to nowhere.