King Dork: B+

Minor Spoiler Alert: King Dork ends with the line, "Saying nothing." It's in reference to one of the more fascinating (and by fascinating, in author Frank Portman's world, it is of course meant odd, clever, mildly sinister, stoned, and suburban) of the book's characters: the hero's, Tom Henderson, best - and only - friend, Sam Hellerman. The final line is mentioned for the sake of irony; because for the majority of Dork, pretty much everything is said - everything, for the sake of Portman's debut novel, subbing in for complex conspiracy theories, pointed satirical versions of modern high school social hierarchies, day-to-day accounts of survival at the bottom of said hierarchies, and endless riffs on pop culture. (Or more specifically: rock and roll, young adult fiction dating back to the 60s, and counter-culture movies - Rosemary's Baby, Caririe - from around those years as well.) Basically, in the world of our eponymous hero, a lot happens, is discovered, is learned, isn't learned, is egregiously assumed, or flees town. Or some combination thereof.

But all that stuff happens later on. In the beginning, really there isn't much to the world Tom Henderson (aka King Dork, Chi-Mo, Henderson-fag, or, most oddly, Sheepie) inhabits. It's just him, Sam Hellerman, Hillmont High School, and their pretty-much-imaginary band (which, in one of the novel's most intelligent gags, changes names every few chapters or so - from "Tennis with Guitars" to "Ray Bradbury's Love Camel" to "Easter Monday" and so on). In retrospect, what comes to be the fluffiest layer to a pretty engaging treat is captured with the usual tropes; and Henderson himself is a sharply cynical, witty young-ancient protagonist. But after more than 100 pages, it all gets tiresome. Scratch that, after about eighteen pages, it begins to wear thin. There is no particular, solitary, fault. Really it's just that, lacking the angsty heft of something like Special Topics in Calamity Physics, all the verbal wunderkid-tricks and clever satire comes to seem a little aimless, angry.

And then Tom finds his dad's old copy of Catcher in the Rye, and everything starts to change. It should be mentioned that Tom despises (at least for the majority of the novel) Rye. He hate hate hate hate hates it. And the idea that such a flagrant object of his contempt can come to hold so many secrets and fodder for, as he would call it, "a pretty flimsy," if not wholly unimportant, "character arc," is a running theme throughout the book: that things aren't always what they seem, but what they truly are isn't all that different from the illusion you originally held. King Dork holds to this notion pretty steadfastly as well. The reader starts out with the idea this is another overpraised, angrily articulate and intermittently entertaining high school melodrama-athon. But then the reader reads about some cryptic scribbled notes in the margins of the Rye Tom discovered - notes written by his dad, who died mysteriously eight years ago, when he was a child - and their perceptions start to shift. Not entirely, granted, but what once seemed to be aimlessly aggressive, even wearying, becomes a mostly rich endeavor about the life of an entirely too smart, entirely too stunted, hero-mensch.

Portman, for his part, is a marvel: he charts the tortures and travails of his too-insane-to-be-real high schol with consistency, unvailing the darker flairs of his murkier conspiracy with near-perfect timing, Plus his character voices, the majority of which are almost always filtered through Tom's bitter sentimentality, are spot-on. What Dork lacks in early motivation (reader-directed, anyway) it makes up for in the end with sharp humor and a jagged compassion that is at once hard-won and winningly gooey. What happened, or didn't, to Tom's dad may be ultimately of little importance. But the journey he starts on because of it means the world, both for what it sincerely reveals about a teenager's life (e.g., that step-parents can be annoying and likable in the same moment; that assistant principles are usually in league with Satan; that twelve-year old little sisters usually only show physical affection when they cry) and for what cliches it overlooks.