(When a politician visits Last Chance for a photo op, wiping his fingers after every handshake with the students, Shy asks the M.P. Like Holden Caulfield, Shy mixes sweet enthusiasm with wounded cynicism-he’s appalled by the death of the rain forests-and with a weapons-grade intolerance for adult hypocrisy. It is also a crushing verdict ( the kid’s a few marbles shy of a full set). “Shy” is the reassuring alternative to “aggressive” or “disturbed” ( oh, he’s just shy). The question animating the novel is simple: Will Shy’s inner chaos manifest as childish mischief or something worse? Even his name, with its connotations of harmless timidity on one hand and deficiency on the other, forks in multiple directions. Porter is enticed by undetermined forms, like adolescents and white blobs in a field, because they have so much unruly potential. When Shy sneaks out of his room at night, he sees white shapes in a field that “must be stones” but “could also be small white animals staying deadly still.” The book inhabits the moment before the brain’s sense-making tires roll over and flatten the brain’s wildlife. In this subjective zone, it’s hard to tell what’s real and what’s not.

Porter culls from the cramped space of his head about six hours’ worth of mental flotsam: half thoughts, partially verbalized impressions, snatches of voices and lyrics, fantasies, jumbled memories. Shy attends the Last Chance boarding school, where dangerous kids are granted a Hail Mary shot at transforming themselves into respectable citizens. Unlike the rest of adolescence, music “promises, and it delivers” it “welcomes him in” and loves him back.

The three of them live in England, in 1995, and, along with his mother’s “snotty repetitive questions” and Iain’s heavy sighs, hardcore rave mixtapes form the soundtrack to Shy’s life.

Stepdad Iain doesn’t understand why Shy can’t straighten out, join the real world of golf and cars and home improvement. Shy, the teen-aged namesake of Max Porter’s new novel, is a character out of the op-ed sections of newspapers-a troubled young man who has “sprayed, snorted, smoked, sworn, stolen, cut, punched, run, jumped, crashed an Escort, smashed up a shop, trashed a house, broken a nose,” and worse.

Green darkness novel