Coming of Age on the Margins

AMERICAN SON, A Novel, By Brian Ascalon Roley, W.W. Norton: 256 pp., $13 paper

Self-invention has always been an element of the California dream, no less in life than in art. The latest variations on the theme, however, are boiling up from some surprising places. “American Son” and “Chicken” allow us to see how young men on the margins--the son of a Filipino immigrant in the first, a sexually adventurous adolescent in the second, both very much “at risk”--struggle to scrape out places for themselves in the Southern California landscape.

Tomas, the dangerous but compelling young man whom we meet in Brian Ascalon Roley’s “American Son,” is “half white, half Filipino, but dresses like a Mexican.” He makes money buying pit bulls from poor black people in Compton and reselling the dogs to rich white people in Brentwood. As if to convince his clients that he is an authentic gangbanger, he shaves his head and decorates himself with tattoos of various styles, which the author describes as “gang, Spanish, and old-lady Catholic.” His Filipino mother is baffled by the strange torque he has applied to the American dream that brought the family to the United States in the first place.

“She cannot understand why if he wants to be something he is not,” observes his younger brother, Gabe. “He does not at least try to look white.”

Gabe, who narrates the novel, is the shy and compliant son who is always ready to help his mother and brother. Gabe washes the dogs before they are delivered to his brother’s customers, but Tomas orders him to stay in the car when he goes to the door. “One look at you,” says Tomas to Gabe, “and they’ll think these dogs were raised by a bunch of wimps.” But it is Gabe whose voice we hear in “American Son,” and all of the intriguing but unsettling sights we are shown are seen through his discerning eyes.

“American Son,” not unlike Jonathan Franzen’s “The Corrections” and much else in recent American fiction, shows how family members are capable of afflicting and disappointing one another. But it is overlaid with a much more ambitious theme: Roley wants us to see how our authentic selves can be betrayed and corrupted by the thoroughly American phenomenon of self-invention. For Roley, the breeding and training of attack dogs symbolizes how readily we tamper with our own origins.

“Tomas always gives the dogs German names and trains them with foreign words,” Gabe explains. “He tells the celebrities and rich people he sells them to that they have pedigrees that go back to Germany, and that they descend from dogs the Nazis used. All this is a lie, of course. But the clients seem to like the explanation, even this movie producer who has a Jewish name. He paid six thousand dollars for the one dog and it was not even the best in the litter.”

Gabe attempts to flee the family home, stealing his brother’s car and heading toward the northeastern corner of California, where the denizens wear Stetsons and listen to country music and go hunting. “This sort of place,” he observes, “is not supposed to be in California.” No matter how far he runs, however, Gabe cannot escape the crosscurrents of race, class and family that swirl around him, and he is drawn ever deeper into despair and danger when he returns to Los Angeles. At every moment, at every level, Tomas and Gabe and their mother injure one another in intimate ways, even when they try to rescue each other.

“At times she looks mad but at others she seems hurt,” muses Gabe, “and I cannot tell which look is my memory and which is my imagination.”

“American Son” is Roley’s debut as a novelist, but the book bears none of the tool marks of first fiction. Roley writes with assurance, grace and insight, and he plays expertly with our perceptions and expectations: His tale ends in a shocking incident of rough justice that is horrifying and yet somehow satisfying and even exhilarating. And Roley is one young writer with something important to say: He has fused a coming-of-age story with a variant on the American immigrant saga, and the result is both explosive and illuminating.

“Chicken” is a story of self-invention too, but one with a starkly different setting. To hear David Henry Sterry tell it, he arrived in Los Angeles in the early 1970s as a 17-year-old freshman at Immaculate Heart College, accepted the offer of a place to crash from a friendly stranger on Hollywood Boulevard, endured a brutal sexual assault from his host and then tumbled into the life of a “chicken,” a term that is used on the streets to describe an adolescent prostitute.

“It’s a sick twisted Wonderland,” warns Sterry, “and I’m Alice.”

Sterry’s memoir is often overwrought and always overwritten, but he is dealing in a commodity that is sure to command the reader’s attention: the dirty little secrets about what men and women do behind closed doors. Even his clients want to hear exactly what he does with other women: “Spare no detail,” his very first client instructs him, “and use all the naughty words.” Sterry follows the same advice here.

The author’s resume, according to his publisher, includes acting, athletics, marriage counseling and stand-up comedy, all of which are prefigured in his life as a “humpster of the rich and famous.” Mere sexual prowess, as Sterry allows us to see, is not enough to please a demanding client of a male prostitute in Hollywood.

Baby and Sweety, for example, are a pair of women who want him to put on a black see-through apron and polish the silver. Georgia is a frustrated wife who seems to take pleasure only in complaining about her husband. An aging hippie who calls herself Rainbow reads his palm and tutors him in Tantric sex. “The crumpled bills in my pocket are filling me with the life force,” Sterry writes. “Rainbow and I Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhmmmm for about a fortnight.”

Between glimpses of his work life, Sterry summons up memories of childhood. His parents emigrated from England with high hopes for the good life in America but ended up divorced and embittered. He was never sexually abused, Sterry tells us, but neither was he given much of a sexual education. “The good news, son,” his father told him one day after church when he was only 10, “is that if it’s done properly, you can get the whole thing over with in less than a minute!”

Most of Sterry’s experiences are played for laughs or thrills or both, but one encounter is so grotesque, so pathetic and so heartbreaking--a bereaved woman trying desperately to conjure up both a dead husband and a dead son--that it sends Sterry into a downward spiral. “What a couple of funked-up ducks we are,” he cries in despair, “this ex-mom slash ex-wife and I, trying to get some love in the worst way.” By then, Sterry is ready to get out, and so are we.

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Jonathan Kirsch, a contributing writer to the Book Review, is the author of, most recently, “The Woman Who Laughed at God: The Untold History of the Jewish People” (Viking).