REUNION

A Utah boy who survives horrific child sexual abuse fails to put it behind him as he matures into a brilliant, caustic, verbose teenager in this debut coming-of-age novel.

Growing up in Salt Lake City in the 1960s and ’70s, Owen Langley’s life is a Dickensian nightmare. The offspring of his mother’s rape by a stranger, the 5-year-old Owen is beaten and starved by his mom and her husband. After they commit suicide, Owen falls into the clutches of a ghoulish foster couple and is kept in the basement and regularly raped by the husband. An intervention and another suicide later, he’s adopted by the kindly James and Jean Crowley. But when James drops dead and Jean enters a mental institution, Owen winds up in the custody of the couple’s housekeeper, Mrs. Windom, who locks him in the basement for two weeks on a shredded wheat–and-water diet. First grade is a further ordeal of bullying and ostracism that’s worsened by Owen’s bookishness and Victorian rhetoric. (How a 6-year-old Utah kid learned to say “I won’t let you soil my parents’ good name” isn’t explored.) The sprawling tale then skips ahead to ninth grade, when Owen’s toffish grandiloquence effloresces. At one point, he tells a school bully: “You have not changed any over the summer, Wayne….Rather like a tedious ostinato, aren’t you? Or a birth defect—tiresome, monotonous, ineradicable.” The high school girls love that talk, and Owen is soon going steady with queen bee Roxanne Solleveld, whose family has its own backstory of molestation, murder, and suicide. Owen’s implausible maturity and thoughtfulness make him a big man on campus whom students and teachers alike turn to for counseling. Alas, his humane acceptance of gay students runs afoul of homophobic bullies, leading to yet more sexual assault and suicide. Walters’ melodrama and his prose style are dominated by Owen’s voice, which energizes the ambitious novel. He’s a complex, magnetic character, and the author skillfully dissects Owen’s inner turmoil as he deploys his arrogant intellect to cover up his insecurities and ward off the emotional connections he fears and craves. Unfortunately, 654 pages of the protagonist’s bombast, know-it-all-ism, and speechifying start to suck the air out of the story—one funeral oration drones on for four pages—especially because his incessant Wilde-an snark lacks Wilde’s wit. The result is a hero whom readers may not care about.

A psychologically acute but long-winded tale of trauma and redemption.