Anders' second year away On Stockholm) at high school goes much better than his first, which is recalled here as a long bout with the giant tapeworm of loneliness. Now he is renting a room from Ingeborg -- an older woman with whom he ""gets on darn well,"" he has a friend whose intellectual family is expanding his mind and his confidence, and by the end he has acquired a girl who shares his interests. But mostly for now Anders is concerned with Monica, an unhappy teenage neighbor estranged from her family, who drops in and out of Ingeborg's apartment between stays with her delinquent friends, causing Anders to observe uncomfortably that even in Sweden ""society can't produce love to order."" Anders' conversations (mostly about American problems -- race and Vietnam) and his frequently evoked memories -- of his grandfather, of an old retired teacher who talked with him about truth and facts -- are only very loosely integrated with the Monica business either structurally or thematically, and his trips between his parents' home and Stockholm further the impression of uncohesiveness. Still Anders is nothing if not sincere, and others like him may well respond to a writer who takes their growing pains so seriously.