Books

Jeff Garigliano's engaging debut novel, Dogface, is hard to categorize. With its 14-year-old protagonist and young supporting characters, it could be a Young Adult novel if it were not so uninhibited. With its bizarre characters, frank dialogue and violence, it belongs somewhere between Louis Sachar's Holes and a Carl Hiaasen comic thriller.

At the center of Dogface is Loren, a likable teenager obsessed with military paraphernalia and groups such as the Army Special Forces and the Navy SEALs. The son of a strikingly beautiful single mother, Loren wages guerrilla warfare against her boyfriends.

Tom, a golf pro, is the latest in a long parade, and the one who pushes the teenager to go too far. Loren tries to burn a Navy SEAL symbol into the grass of the course one night and accidentally sets fire to it, causing huge damage.

Under pressure, his mother agrees to send him to Camp Ascend!, a wilderness camp for mixed-up teens.

Mr. Garigliano creates three wonderfully sleazy characters to run this so-called camp, which he locates in a polluted area on the site of an abandoned music camp. Even the trees look ragged, and the horse trails and waterfall celebrated in the camp brochure do not exist.

The commandant of Camp Ascend! is the Colonel, a con man whose maxim is "that it's always easier to convince people to give you their money than to steal it."

The Colonel's self-obsessed wife, Kitty, shows up to greet the girl campers but otherwise mostly tans by the pool. Her loser brother, Donovan, stupid and mean, has day-to-day responsibility for the nine campers and shows no mercy.

The author has a gift for humorous description. In depicting Riap, the camp's Indonesian cook, who lives in spare quarters behind the kitchen, he writes: "It's like the Colonel ordered him out of the back of a magazine."

By the fourth day at Camp Ascend!, Loren figures out that something's wrong. Everything about the camp was "half-fake and half-stupid, equal parts bullying and inept." His goal becomes to retaliate and prevail, with the help of as many of the other campers as possible.

The author gives the other eight campers characteristics that make them easy to see as individuals, though they also are types. There's a despicable tattletale, two rich boys, a slutty fat girl, a good-looking vegetarian girl, a kid with tons of allergies, and more.

The plot pits these pitiful troops against the camp's venal operators.

Despite the clichés, the novel never loses its freshness. It has dark humor, outsize pyrotechnics, a love story and a coming-of-age theme.

Entertaining throughout, it would make a fine movie.

Anne Morris, a member of the National Book Critics Circle, lives in Austin.

Jeff Garigliano

(MacAdam/Cage, $23)

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