FICTION

PIZZA FACE Or, The Hero of Suburbia by Ken Siman (Grove Weidenfeld: $17.95; 179 pp.) . For a teen-ager named Andy, growing up alienated in Charlotte, N.C., pimples are a bigger problem than the discovery that he’s gay. This could be a sign that we’ve made progress against homophobia and shame. On the other hand, “Pizza Face” is a novel remarkable for its headlong pace and lack of introspection. And Andy has serious acne. Hence his nickname.

Though he’s bright and willing to please, Andy is treated dismissively or cruelly at home, at school, at the fast-food joints where he works, by adults, girls and prettier boys. Forced to the fringes of nerdiness, he collects campaign buttons and other political memorabilia, and maintains a wistful, one-sided correspondence with the governor’s wife and Jimmy Carter. Even in college, “all Andy usually thought about was politicians, Ryan (the pretty boy he loves unrequitedly) and trying to clear up his face.”

Actually, in the long run, Andy is going to do just fine. He shows energy and ingenuity, avoids bitterness, learns how to use makeup, and gets a promising summer job on the staff of a Washington, D.C., political newsletter run by a kindly, if drug-addicted, gay man. But Andy doesn’t seem to realize that his is a success story, and it’s not clear that author Ken Siman does either. “Pizza Face” has some humor, but it’s primarily a chronicle of pain. One humiliating episode piles breathlessly on another. The pain is genuine but adolescent: It turns Andy’s parents and love objects into caricatures, and would rather deny itself than allow Andy (or the reader) to question it. Siman is capable of stoicism but not of irony; his only way of dealing with self-pity is to try to outrun it.