Kite

Ed Minus (Viking: $15.95; 278 pp.)

Kite is a boy/man of 14 spending his first summer outside the orphanage that has been his only home. As one of his female admirers describes him, he is the “cutest and sweetest boy” anyone has ever known. He also is delightfully oversexed, a veritable virtuoso of masturbation.

A scrap of old newspaper is on the floor, Kite spots an advertisement for an adults-only movie, and for days he cannot get the image of the tawny heroine out of his mind. If he goes to a store, he cannot resist stealing a men’s magazine, hiding it inside a Saturday Evening Post that he buys, like Woody Allen in “Bananas” hiding raunchy magazines under the high-brow magazines he buys to impress a woman.

The novel follows Kite through a summer in rural South Carolina, a world of “big noonday meals” and “suppertime,” of swimming holes and front porches with gliders, of boys swimming in their cut-offs, constantly worried whether their erections show, of thick slices of cake and a glass of milk at bedtime. Ed Minus captures the language of this rural world and the feel of the countryside beautifully. We can taste an ice-cold watermelon on a steamy day, watch shadowy sunlight play through the lush foliage, see the unexpected colors of distant mountains.

Only occasionally does the prose stray too far. A boy feels the sun “smiting” his back. When Kite is working at a conveyor belt in a packing shed, stamping peach crates, he feels “like Charlie Chaplin in a scene from a silent movie he had seen once on television.” “Modern Times” on television in the ‘50s?

The lapses are minor blemishes. It is the character of Kite, not the plot, that draws us into this world; and not until a third of the way into the book does Minus introduce the imagery of the fall from innocence that becomes his theme. When the hints of Adam and Eve and Milton come, they are a flood: page after page of snakes; Kite and one of his girlfriends lying amid flowers and trees, tempted; a cataclysmic earthquake; fat, juicy, tempting watermelons. Fortunately, the imagery is not heavy handed. Minus resists the temptation of first novelists who fear that a reader will not make the connection and feel compelled to toss in a superfluous “Like Adam and Eve. . . .”

If there is any criticism to be made of this lovely little book, it is that Minus, like so many authors, has been ill-served by the designer of the book jacket, who has painted a character that looks not at all like the attractive Kite, and who evokes weird psychological imagery that has little to do with Minus’ subtle portrait of lost adolescent innocence.