THE TV KID

Lennie lives with his mother, who manages the Fairy Land Motel, and hides from his failures at school and friendship behind a cloud of TV fantasies, and though he's clearly a sad case there is gusto and imagination in the constantly running mental video tape in which he projects himself as the hapless contestant on Give It a Spin or the hero in a new western, protecting a toothless old dragon from charges of sheep killing. Lennie's private TV signs off abruptly when he's bitten by a rattlesnake, and after several days of intense pain the Bonanza rerun he watches from his hospital bed no longer holds quite the same excitement. The snakebite is a jolt of real life in the spirit of Mouse's beating in The Eighteenth Emergency (1973), and it works in the same bracing if limited way—with the punch of a well-developed short story.