PARDON ME, YOU'RE STEPPING ON MY EYEBALL!

The unorthodox mutual healing of two disturbed kids, who are brought together in a Staten Island high school psychologist's encounter therapy group. Pretty but withdrawn Edna's only problem is her mother's pushy obsession with her getting a boyfriend; actually, Edna straightens herself out in the process of helping the boy, Marsh Mellow, who is far crazier. He tells outlandish lies about his and his father's sexual exploits and writes himself rambling letters which he says are from his father, Paranoid Pete, whom the CIA, FBI, etc., have locked up in a Los Angeles loony bin. Marsh presses himself and his letters on Edna; she resists at first; then he does. They get drunk at a nutty key club. . . . She's tossed in the air by the therapy group. . . . She consults a stinking gypsy who's crawling with cockroaches. . . . There's a party in an expensive glass house which burns down as naked hippies run about and Marsh's pet raccoon is trapped in the flames. . . . It's followed by a wilder ride--to rescue Marsh's father from an impending lobotomy--that ends in a crash near Washington D.C. It's then and there, in Arlington cemetery, that Edna gets Marsh to admit that his father is really dead--and the ghost is dispelled. Whew. Compared with Judith Guest's recent Ordinary People, for example, this is a broader, outside view of teenage crazies, splashed with caricature and pointed distortion. But Zindel does involve you--breathlessly--in one bizarre, increasingly frenzied scene after another.