Hairstyles of the Damned Joe Meno Akashic Books/Punk Planet Books 270 pp. ISBN: 1-888451-70-X Available from Powell's Books.

Every one of Joe Meno's characters, regardless of his or her role in or importance to the story, is carefully drawn -- burnouts, single moms, asshole jocks and others are rendered with the accuracy of experience. This wouldn't be true if Brian Oswald, the story's narrator, wasn't such a strong creation himself -- which may be an odd thing to say about a character who moves passively through the story, reflecting and being changed by everything that goes on around him. In creating Brian, Meno has held fast against that most insidious of authorial temptations: the urge to make the narrator, who is typically the author's stand-in, as intelligent and perceptive and witty as the author is now. This, of course, kills the story; the narrator knows too much, and can sift through the psychology of language and actions to find motivations few high school students would understand, or even know to look for. This doesn't happen with Brian Oswald. He's not the best or brightest in his group -- if anything, he's a bit dumber than average, with few obvious talents. He's not an idealized scenester, either -- punk for Brian is a means to an end (i.e. getting closer to Gretchen), and although his musical tastes are shaped and changed as the story progresses, the songs he listens to never really broaden his world-view. Like most kids his age, he has a lot of time and a lot of questions about life, and he already has an inkling that he isn't going to like some of the answers to those questions. We're along for the ride as he bumbles along in a sort of adolescent pre-existentialist fog; he learns while we watch, but we're always ahead of him -- we've been there, and we can read between the lines.

As such, we also understand why Brian's earnest but unsteady love for Gretchen is never reciprocated. Gretchen is still living with the inconceivable pain of her mother's death -- a massive, unexpected, awful change that came at a time when Gretchen desperately needed stability. Gretchen's family is in ruins; her father has become a sad, empty husk of a man, wistful and teary-eyed and uncertain of how to reconnect with the world, while her sister has attempted to ignore the pain, burying herself in the routine of a marginal existence. Gretchen, on the other hand, acts out in every way, every direction, desperate for the world to acknowledge her existence, to snap back so she'll finally feel something again. She's angry, unpleasant, often unlikable, frequently closed-minded, but secretly so in need of love, of a connection with another human being, that she'll seek out the occasional affections of racist asshole Tony Degan. This frustrates Brian Oswald to no end; he speaks his mind in typically true-to-life fashion:

"And here was I, with an erection every ten minutes, and all she had to do was ask."

That said, Hairstyles isn't 270 pages of pain. It's certainly grim -- the book's stolid, grey south-side setting assures that -- but there's plenty of adolescent "joy" here. You'll recognize the idiotic pranks (at once point, Brian and Gretchen drive past someone they've decided they dislike and throw a ziplock bag full of Brian's urine at his head; predictably, the bag doesn't burst), the shitty jobs, the fascination with death, the opportunistic friendships, the name-dropping. Meno breaks up his narrative with handwritten segments, presumably written during school -- various mix tape track-listings, ideas for band names, ideas for action movies that always end with the adolescent hero getting a hot girlfriend, and so forth; you'll probably tire of these after a short time, but that's only because you wrote stuff just like them when you were in school. The mixtapes are a great laugh, too -- full of bands like The Misfits, The Clash, Black Flag, Dead Milkmen, The Smiths, Violent Femmes, The Ramones and all of the other bands you first discover when you're young and eager to rebel but not sure what you have to rebel against. Tellingly, Brian's first truly transitional music experience happens at a Seven Seconds show, and Meno nails the sense of broadened awareness -- Brian wonders, "Why haven't I heard of this shit before?" He also aces Brian's sudden, revelatory connection with the object of his affections, late in the book: a few minutes, or maybe just seconds of closeness in which hormones kick in and awkward fumbling becomes artful, bodies connect, desire flares and then, just as suddenly, it's all awkwardness and embarrassment and things never to be spoken of again. Sounds just like high school to me.

I work in the same Chicago suburbs where Hairstyles of the Damned's story plays out. I've driven past many of its name-dropped landmarks, and can match the characters' names with people I remember from my own high school experiences. It's scarily familiar stuff. You may never have been as damaged and disenfranchised as Hairstyles' characters, but if you spent high school trying to fit in by aligning yourself with various outcast groups, Meno's novel will revive a lot of memories. You'll speed through it in a day, then be haunted by it, and by your own equivalent experiences, for weeks.

-- George Zahora

Hairstyles of the Damned is a team-up between New York-based Akashic Books and Chicago-based Punk Planet. Akashic is an indie publisher dedicated to urban literary fiction and political nonfiction by authors who are either ignored by the mainstream, or who have no interest in working within the ever-consolidating ranks of the major corporate publishers. Punk Planet are best known for Punk Planet, the magazine, for which Joe Meno writes a column.