Fear, Loathing and Adolescent Wisdom in Palos Verdes

“How old are you?” asks a boy 14-year-old Medina Mason actually likes. “Fifteen,” she tells him. He looks down. “You seem a lot older.” “Like 6 million years old,” she says.

This is the wise, funny, adolescent voice of a female Holden Caulfield, noble and honest. We watch her rise from a background of self-absorbed parents and a twin brother who is being slowly buried under the wreckage of their disintegrating family. We are astonished by her strength of character, her instinct for survival and her anger.

Medina, narrator of “The Tribes of Palos Verdes,” has two voices: one raw, angry and blunt; the other poetic, tender, observant. When the family moves to wealthy Palos Verdes, she notices: “There are laws against loud stereos and rap music. There are laws against pit bulls and loud parents.”

“A chaos of stars,” she thinks, “is spattered across the skies of Palos Verdes. Everything else is regulated.” This may not be true for other readers, but I trust Medina entirely, and these observations are all I need to understand just how disoriented and generally upset she is to find herself living in Palos Verdes.

Medina is not the only angry member of the family. Her mother, once beautiful, eats junk food and weighs 250 pounds. This is her revenge on her rubber-necking husband, who barely contains his enthusiasm for the community’s tennis ladies. But the real tragedy of the story is the slow suffocation of Medina’s twin, Jim, whom she loves more than anyone.

“Jim is beautiful. He has been my best friend for years, my only true friend. . . . For years we’ve known what the other’s thinking. We think about water.”

At first she is the adoring sister who wants to learn to surf, mainly to be like her brother, to be with her brother. But gradually she becomes stronger, more powerful, a better surfer than he.

Jim becomes a human crutch for his mother as her marriage disintegrates. He is taught to hate his father and he allows his mother to split him into a dozen different fragments.

Medina watches in disgust. Because her mother assumes that she is in collusion with her father, Medina is left to surf morning, noon and night to her heart’s content.

At school, identified as mentally gifted, she is ostracized by the popular girls. At home, she feels close to her father but betrayed when he leaves for a tennis lady, and disgusted by her parents’ lack of character. Jim sinks deeper into the drugs he buys from the “bottom feeder.” He stops surfing and spends more and more time in his room.

But Medina gets better and better: “The wave begins to fold in on itself with a careen to the side, ducking down, wind whistling in my ear. Then I’m inside a long blue cavern. It’s eerily soundless except for the noise of my board cutting through a thick wall of rushing liquid. The waves get softer as I unfold, looser, slower, more forgiving. . . . I look at the people on the shores . . . . I do a little dance, shaking my butt, moving my arms up and down like a disco scene.”

The novel combines two fine, perhaps overlooked figures in American literature: The child / adolescent and the surfer.

Surfing books may not be bestsellers in Manhattan and Berlin, but I would not hesitate to prescribe them, or this one, for anyone renting a 10-by-12 studio for $2,000 a month during a New York winter. “The Tribes of Palos Verdes” is a vibrant book, brave and true to a young girl’s voice.