THE SILVER GHOST

It's 1959, a small West Virginia town, and Jimbo Stark is 17. He and girlfriend Judy ""were stars slowdancing on Happy Hop with everyone as their witness: the small red light on the gliding camera glowed like grace upon them and their love was its own program on teevee, its signals pulsing out like light into space, becoming real in some new set forever."" To buy Judy an engagement ring, Jimbo hocks his old man's set of miniature World War II soldiers--for which he gets promptly booted out of the house, sent to live with his grandmother, from which distant exile he watches Judy take up with another, less trouble-prone sort. So Jimbo does a James Dean, a Kerouac, in retaliation; with pal Pace, he hitches toward Florida and gets himself picked up by a hipster/drugger/ex-con who says his name is lake Barnes and enrolls Jimbo and Pace in a course in freeloading, pickpocketing, armed robbery--a mythical, cool, profane adventure that soon gets way out of hand. Kinder (Snakehunter) pours it on thick and dreamy, with Jimbo's fantasy world always undercut by the grubbier reality. But you never believe a bit of it; Jimbo seems out-of-it more for the purposes of Kinder's rapturous and naive prose than anything else. Nostalgia overly gussied-up--and the only A here would be for effort.