ANYONE'S GHOST

A young man has an emotional and sexual awakening through a fellow troubled teen.

Thompson’s debut is narrated by Theron, who at 15 is forced to shuttle between the East and West coasts after his parents’ divorce. Spending a summer with his tough-as-nails dad in New Hampshire, he brings along a bag of pot brownies to cope; when dad finds it, Theron is made to work at a hardware store. But his ostensible boss is 17-year-old Jake, a fellow stoner and aspiring musician who recognizes that the store is a tax write-off and runs things lazily when he’s not robbing the till. So ensues “a kind of permanent hang,” with the two bonding over heavy metal, weed, and hard-to-articulate sexual feelings. Thompson writes beautifully and with a sense of tension about having nothing to do—no simple trick. And he’s graceful when considering young male insecurity and self-loathing. (“He was beautiful. I was a brace-­faced gremlin with boy tits and stalagmites of cystic acne ridging my cheeks.”) Over time, this dirtbag Call Me by Your Name turns more perilous and gloomy. Jake is prone to vehicular calamities, and though Theron gets older, attending college and pursuing a relationship with a woman, he’s not much wiser. A reconnection with Jake becomes a boozy, druggy push-and-pull as he sorts out his feelings, and poor choices and insecure selfishness abound. (“I wanted to control both of them. I wanted them both to give me their focus.”) Yet Theron remains a sympathetic character, and Thompson recognizes that though sexual identity doesn’t always arrive like a thunderbolt, or settle into simple definitions, the process can be all-consuming. The arc of the story’s plot is largely tragic, but the mood is bighearted, revealing the power of the first flush of romantic and erotic connection.

A brash and well-turned coming-of-age tale.