Young girl learns life lessons the hard way

LULI McMULLEN is one of those kids who are always alone even when they’re not. The 13-year-old, who might be described as a happy-go-lucky fatalist, has erected the defense mechanisms, figured out all of the stratagems she needs to see her through another day, another week.

Luli lives in Lancaster, Neb., one of those parched and barren Midwestern locales that stands in for everything that’s godforsaken and passed by in “Hick” by Andrea Portes. Luli’s parents are rip-roaring drunks who have made of the local bar a second home. Luli is always present whenever the eighth or ninth drink rolls around. “You can almost see the surliness rising up through the smoke, coming off the pool table.”

These early scenes in the bar are among the best in this uneven but promising debut novel, which is narrated by the knowing and cynical Luli. Portes’ protagonist sees things the way smart youngsters do. Of Ray, the burly, freckled bartender, for example, she says, it’s as if “Strawberry Shortcake had a big brother that looked like he wanted to kick your ass.” She reads her parents’ ashtray like a weather vane. “Empty ashtray means partly sunny.... Full ashtray ain’t bad either.... Full ashtray with a lit cigarette?.... That lit cigarette means the storm’s rolling in. Brace yourself.”

Luli, in other words, has seen far too much, and she would prefer not to see any more. Her mother, Tammy, was once a great beauty, but now she needs affirmation from men other than her violent husband, Nick. They both take off separately, leaving Luli to her own devices. And she lights out for the wide open spaces because there’s “something just waiting to throw me into the sun.”

From this point on, “Hick” becomes a demented road trip: Luli is picked up in turn by Eddie Kreezer, a surly and darkly sensual cowboy, and Glenda, a manic cocaine user with a con man’s cunning. Eddie and Glenda, as it turns out, are bound together, although Luli doesn’t get wind of it until much later. In the meantime, she’s jostled by these two -- by their pathetic dependency on her -- until she begins to feel reassured by their clinginess, even if it is David Lynch-creepy at times. “You can’t see it now,” says Luli of Eddie, her potential paramour, “but let me put him in hair and make-up and dust him off and shine the light.... [H]e’ll dip his Stetson and call me sweetheart and darlin’ and sugar-pie and you may not see it yet, but believe me, just wait, it’ll hit you like a ton of bricks.”

They appear at first to be saviors, but they wind up behaving like her parents, coming and going without a thought for Luli. It’s ugly stuff, but Portes, to her credit, allows Luli to derive some mordant humor out of the situation; without it, the book would just be another catalog of white-trash oppression and deprivation. Her parents are awful, granted, but Luli realizes that a life with Eddie and Glenda would be far worse. “I am just a two-bit hick from the heartland but I do know one thing, my mama did not raise me to be skankin it in skanksville with the skanks.”

Luli is self-aware but not entirely sure of herself; she weighs the benefits of her new life against the disadvantages, of which there are many. Her hunger for a normal life -- of any kind of experience other than neglect, really -- is satisfied in a twisted fashion that is clearly untenable in the long term. But some peace of mind is won, and Luli finds her way. By herself.

The narrative tropes in this coming-of-age novel are familiar, but Portes pulls back from preciousness just when things get sticky. The book would have benefited from fewer little-girl reveries -- digressions about dancing on wedding cakes and the like. Still, “Hick” is a bracing drama, a study in tenacity against the gnarled teeth of domestic storms.

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Marc Weingarten is the author of “The Gang That Wouldn’t Write Straight: Wolfe, Thompson, Didion, Capote & the New Journalism Revolution.”