That '70s show.

In the Cherry Tree

Dan Pope

Picador, $14, 272 pp.

You have to admire a writer who gets mileage from the word "the." That's one of the sly coups that up-and-coming author Dan Pope pulls in In the Cherry Tree, his witty and affecting novel about coming of age in 1970s suburbia. Twelve-year-old Timmy, the book's narrator, is just another unruly boy sharing a Connecticut summer with his unruly pals, masturbating, flipping baseball cards, listening to Elton John, playing Stratego, making flatulence jokes--did I say masturbating?--and climbing the eponymous cherry tree, which grows on his front lawn.

But Timmy has developed a linguistic strategy that allows him to distance himself from his bickering parents, and it involves slapping the definite article in front of their names. In his version of reality, Mom becomes The Mom. Dad becomes The Dad. And Timmy himself becomes a more intriguing character, because as readers we can see him struggling, via this tiny trick of wording, to define the parameters of relationships and acquire an ironic perspective on life. It's the same impulse as the one behind the nickname game he and his best friend Stev invent: as Timmy explains it, "We had a rule against having an e at the end of your first name. E's were not allowed. Therefore we called Steve Stev." With these little rhetorical eccentricities, Timmy seems to lash out at the sensations of powerlessness that are the mortification of childhood and adult life. As soon as that e gets lopped off, or that parental the crops up, Timmy's story becomes at once more distinctive and more universal.

Such shrewd, idiosyncratic uses of language lend piquancy to In the Cherry Tree, which recounts Timmy's good-humored solidarity with his older brother Albert, his sexual awakening, and his eagle-eyed monitoring of considerable adult naughtiness. Arching through the short chapters is the story of the separation and grudging reconciliation of The Dad, an easygoing, philandering construction engineer who loves to golf, and The Mom, a snobbish perfectionist whose ability to sense her children's misdoings leads Timmy to compare her to "Mr. Spock doing a Vulcan mind meld."

If you get right down to it, nothing much happens in In the Cherry Tree that has not happened in myriad coming-of-age novels and myriad lives--it's the narrative voice that makes the book compelling. As Timmy relates the revelations and peccadilloes that fill this little stretch of the 1970s, his deadpan tone manages to capture both the wonder and frustration of the moment and a certain amused nostalgia. In one of many anecdotes that trace the falling-out between his parents, for example, he describes a watershed evening:

    Dinner came and went and The Dad didn't come home.
    The Mom said, "Your father is a liar."
    I said, "Do you think he's playing golf?"
    ... The Mom was strangely calm. She was the calm before the storm.
  She was like the SS Poseidon floating happily along on New Year's Eve
  before the tidal wave struck and capsized the ship and all hell broke
  loose and the enormous fake Christmas tree fell over, crushing
  numerous passengers, and the purser screamed, "Stay where you are, for
  God's sake," and some panic-stricken weasel screamed back, "We're
  going to die ..."

As this excerpt indicates via that marvelously ingenuous run-on sentence, Pope has a knack for meting out his grammatical units so that they amplify the book's overall mood of bemusement. Cleverly breaking a cardinal law of good writing (and proving yet again that rules exist only to be broken), he sticks the same subject-verb structure at the start of nearly every sentence, building up an almost hypnotic rhythm. The intentionally monotonous cadences almost seem to echo the stoicism of Timmy, whose summer brings him a host of ordeals, including his alienation from Stev, the death of the family dog, a marathon clothes-shopping session ("more exhausting than playing a game of badminton to 500"), and a fight between The Mom and The Dad as to whether the kids will be brought up Catholic (like The Dad) or Protestant (like The Mom). The kids opt for "Neither."

Not all of these episodes will be to everyone's taste--the fastidious, for example, may find the chapter devoted to flatulence jokes somewhat long. Readers are more likely to see In the Cherry Tree as an endearing tribute to family love and to the resilience of youth. Pope discovers a wry metaphor for the latter in the figure of Evel Knievel, whom Timmy and Albert attempt to imitate on their bikes. Timmy recalls:

  I hopped on the World's Greatest Bicycle otherwise known as the
  Chopper otherwise known as the Green Machine ... went up the takeoff
  ramp and flew in dead silence over the garbage can for approximately
  one second that seemed a lot longer and touched down in a perfect
  two-wheel landing and skidded to a stop in a skid shaped like a
  fishhook.

The casual virtuosity of this daredevil leap seems on a par with the subtle deftness of In the Cherry Tree itself, so, in conclusion, it feels appropriate to award Pope's book the succinct praise that Albert gives his brother after those bike wheels have stopped spinning: "Cool."

Celia Wren, Commonweal's drama and media critic, is the managing editor of American Theatre magazine.