Coming of Age Among the Bottom Feeders : MOSQUITO GAMES <i> by Dana Andrew Jennings (Ticknor & Fields: $17.95; 206 pp.) </i>

The coming-of-age novel seems to have become an especially American genre. Every novelist either writes one or once planned to write one and somehow didn’t. First novels, of course, quite often fit into this classification, since young novelists live--and write--with the fires of their own adolescence barely subsiding. This propinquity of the past gives the best of these novels the shimmer of actuality, as in this particularly fine first novel by Dana Andrew Jennings.

Although the novel may well have nothing to do with the life that Jennings has lived, “Mosquito Games” seems close to autobiography. Jennings obviously wants that to be the case, since he writes in a first-person voice that affects the intimacy of autobiographical writing, as in the opening paragraph:

“I sat with my hands flat on the kitchen table. Sweat seeped from my forehead, rolled down my face, and dripped off my chin, making a wet spot at the neck of my T-shirt. Eyes shut, I cocked my head to one side like the table was whispering to me--Earl Duston.”

The voice of the novel--and this is pre-eminently a novel of voice--uncoils from this dense, imagistic beginning.

The novel is set in an archetypical working-class town in rural New England. Granite, N.H., is dominated by its mills, which generate the almost inexplicable sadness of late Victorian industry and bury the town in their long shadows. Jennings obviously knows these towns well: their perverse immobility, the sticky web of familial ties that holds the locals in its netting until their time has come to be devoured.

Earl Duston’s life in Granite (one wishes Jennings had picked a somewhat less glaringly symbolic name) has few pleasures. He has been forced by the poverty of his family situation to drop out of high school early and take a job in a factory that makes steel drums. He lives with his mother and step-father, Frank, in a situation of almost continuous torment. Indeed, Jennings has drawn an image of working-class life that shows the extent to which poverty and family brutalization go hand in hand.

This brutalization is particularly well captured in Earl’s highly colloquial speech. “The first time I ever saw Frank smack Ma I’d just come home from school,” he says. “I walks in and see him crack her one in the face, knocking her into the kitchen table. I drop my books, take a run at him, fists up. But he picks me up and whungs me through the screen door. Way I crashed through that door and tumbled down those steps I thought he broke my neck. I was stiff for two weeks, and plucking slivers out my ass for another three.”

Though Earl flashes back to points from his earlier life, the main narrative is intensely focused on the summer of 1975. It is a hot, sticky summer, so uncomfortable that Earl can hardly think about anything else. The mosquitoes (of the title) are out, too, in force. Jennings dwells on these insects with poetic intensity, describing them in the course of the novel in endlessly different ways as they pursue Earl Duston, with their “ragged buzz,” like Furies.

This is especially true of his escapes into Cedar Swamp, where he goes with his friend, Denny Gamble. Denny plays Huck Finn to Earl’s Tom Sawyer, though both lack the optimism of Twain’s famous characters. There is little to be optimistic about in Granite. At least in the swamp, surrounded by snakes, bears, and wildcats, eaten alive by mosquitoes, there is some sense of escape, of male togetherness, of communion with the natural order of things--all themes familiar to readers of American fiction from Cooper to Hemingway.

In a world where life has little meaning and death is often preferable to what passes for life, the friendship between Earl and Denny has a fierceness to it that seems utterly original--a fierceness underscored by the novel’s bizarre, violent, memorable conclusion in the “black heart” of Cedar Swamp.

This portrait of a community feeding on the dregs of American capitalism is one of the most vivid first novels I have read in years. The sense of animal frustration that gathers in the heads of Earl Duston and Denny Gamble is palpably invoked. Though “Mosquito Game” contains many of the stock elements of coming-of-age fiction, it bears the unmistakable mark of a writer with a vision all his own and the writerly skills to support it.