That beast, self-discovery

HENRY Elinsky, the protagonist in Ben Dolnick’s first novel, “Zoology,” is a would-be saxophonist casting about for purpose in life in a syrupy morass of freshman Cs and Ds at American University in Washington, D.C. He drops out, moves home for a bit and then decamps to New York City to find himself while sponging off his dermatologist brother David, who lives with his minimalist-artist girlfriend Lucy. Henry’s family life is peppered by acidly simmering parental disappointment and a clumsy pageant of dream girls. Little honesties about his direction in life never quite make it past the tongue.

He takes a job at the Tisch Children’s Zoo in Central Park, where stark and rote shoveling duties are the order of the day. His closest friends are the animals and the immigrant staff of David’s apartment building. One day, he meets an enigmatic Midwestern sylph named Margaret at the building’s swimming pool, and his attraction to her spawns a fantasy world that is the province of young men, daydreams materializing like an avalanche of online pop-up windows. After a protracted, one-sided courtship, he learns the awful truth about Margaret; she has a boyfriend, conveniently and conspicuously absent. He remains friends with her, jockeying for position out of sheer force of will and maturity that battles the “fizzing pill of hate” he feels at the situation.

The uncertain rhythm of this new life is upended when his father has a heart attack after a heated argument. For a time it seems as if the family will cleave more closely together when, in fact, they cleave more distantly apart. There is a growing sense that David and Lucy don’t want Henry living with them anymore. Henry’s uncle predicts that the young man’s parents will divorce. And then the blackout of 2003 hits and an animal goes missing from the zoo, Margaret’s boyfriend reappears and Henry’s family splinters even further.

An exceptionally sensory author, Dolnick is one for whom the smells and the shapes of the world take center stage, a diarist collecting moments to be pored over. Henry hears voices in the hydraulics of buses, charts the rise and fall of birdsong and approaches synesthesia when remembering the color of a sneeze or the texture of flatulence borne of nerves which he describes as “razor blades of gas.” As Henry realizes, when first working in the grueling, rewarding confines of the zoo, “You don’t really know how lonely you are, I don’t think, until you get some relief from it.” Margaret is that relief, and he takes her to his work, where they bond over the goats and the potbellied pigs and nurse their respective talents at writing -- hers lifelong and his, as everything else in his life seems, almost there.

In an era of devolved literature that concerns itself with young people whose parents have failed, “Zoology” presents a portrait of a young man yearning to journey into adulthood through fields of thorny and fragile emotions the size of Jovian gas giants. His turns of phrase -- blood in the water from a swimming accident is described as “an instant, terrifying cloud,” and love is “so strong that it was almost terror” -- fall like brilliant autumn colors, layering upon one another.

Along with the passing of the seasons come those scents that resurrect little thrills, sensations that Dolnick writes about with great skill: of the first time a girl writes a boy a note, of the fantasies of perfect scenarios that blossom in its wake and of the resulting embarrassment, all eloquently evocative of the grandiose naivete that’s a hallmark of young love. It’s the kind of youthful nerve that reads the most fearful things into the most innocuous of gestures and the inscrutable ways of impossible girls. As he writes in the very first passage of his journal involving Margaret, “I don’t understand why I feel so much about so little and so little about so much.” And yet when Henry faces setbacks and the thwarting of his love for her, he doesn’t dissolve into a puddle of histrionics or a hail of bullets. Yes, there are tears. But it’s how he deals with setbacks that distinguishes him from those who give in, give out and give up. It’s how he starts over and grows from the experience that defines him and shows how, in so doing, he becomes a man.