All American Boy

William J. Mann, author of "The Men From the Boys" and "Where the Boys Are," charts new dramatic terrain in the lush, multi-leveled new novel "All American Boy," investing surprises and tender heart-aches in the folds and tucks of a cleverly convoluted and gripping story.

Wally Day is the name of the title character, and the sobriquet all-American boy fits him exactly. Son of a Naval officer and the prettiest woman in town, Wally's boyhood is marked by stellar grades in school and his promise to his mother always to be a good kid. Kyle, Wally's cousin, is -- as Wally puts it -- his "evil twin," his "Bizarro double." Wally's aunt wonders fretfully (and, as time goes on, drunkenly) why Kyle can't be more like Wally, so reliable and well behaved. Wally's father looks to his only son to carry on the family tradition of military service, telling the lad, "People need heroes, Wally. And the Days have a long history of providing them." But when adolescence hits, the fragile certainties of childhood come crashing in; Wally's father leaves the Navy under a dark cloud, his playmates become viciously tribal and exclusionary, and Wally's sexuality emerges with an overwhelming forcefulness that blindsides and panics him. Suddenly the all-American boy finds that there's a darker edge to his identity, one that will lead to a scandal and change how the small town of Brown's Mill sees him and responds to him. The only escape is to the city -- an avenue out that Wally takes as soon as he possibly can to escape his angry, disappointed father, his frightened, passive mother, and the knowledge that young Wally has destroyed the life of an older man: the man who taught him about love.

More than twenty years later, Wally's widowed mother calls him back to Brown's Mill. Now in her seventies and struggling against dementia and forgetfulness, Regina Day fears that she is losing her mind. The local police and officials from the Navy are hounding her about the whereabouts of Kyle, who was last known to be living with her. What Regina doesn't tell them is that she murdered Kyle in a spasm of indignation at his callous treatment of her; what Regina cannot recall is what, exactly, she did with his body. When asked Kyle's whereabouts by a bullying cop, multitudes of possibilities flash through her mind, each seeming as probable as the others: "The yard? The crate in the basement? The shed? The attic? 'I don't know where he is,' she sobs." Kyle's suspicious absence fills Regina's house with a thousand grim possibilities, tormenting the old woman until she wonders to herself, "Why must I always be so fearful of phantoms hiding somewhere in my house?" Mann provides plenty of phantoms and demons for Regina, and he takes the time to tell us her story, too. The grand-daughter of immigrants, Regina has always been the quiet one, the passive one, uncertain of herself and unsure even of reality. Mann makes plain, without having to delve into details, that Regina is the victim of hideous abuses in her early life; when she and her sister Rocky are still children of fourteen and fifteen, Rocky leads the way and the two run off to the city with a singing career in mind (even shy Regina has the expectation that she'll become "as famous as Dinah Shore!"). Sassy, smart, and strong, Rocky plows unstoppably through life, clearing the way for herself and her sister -- until tragedy sends both girls back to Brown's Mill and the waiting clutches of their disapproving family.

Wally has more than his dotty mother to sort out now that he's come back to Brown's Mill. He reconnects with Miss Aletha, a transsexual who rescued him after his father disowned him in scandal's wake; he discovers an echo of his own youth in the defiantly queer Dee (short for Donald), Miss Aletha's new ward, who has been kicked out of his fundamentalist Christian family; he relives his boyhood turmoil just walking along the streets and seeing the churches and schoolbuildings from his youth. Most compelling, he edges, cautiously, toward absolution from Zandy, the man he sent to jail as a "pervert" under pressure from the police and from his father all those years ago.

Mann plays with memory and perception in a way that feels freeing; ghosts waft through these pages, and there's even a brush with a vampire -- or maybe not; but distinctions between dream and reality become less important than the truths of knowledge and forgiveness that slowly swell in his bruised and hurting characters. In one way this is a coming of age novel for those whose lives were delayed along the way -- or perhaps, better put, it's a coming to terms novel. In a larger way, though, this book about the all-American boy is more about the all-American family, with its nasty rifts and dirty secrets and scandalized polarities -- and, finally, its discovery of kindness. "When does the cycle finally stop?" Miss Aletha asks Wally, and Wally learns that the answer might be, Now.