The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys.

One autumn afternoon many years ago, I joyfully risked death, taking a running leap across a lethal, rocky ledge and plunging what seemed like four thousand feet into the green water of a flooded New England stone quarry to make myself worthy of a pretty girl named Rosemary Sheehan, or perhaps just to get her attention. I was fifteen at the time, unchaperoned, hormonederanged, and in love. Every adult parent carries at least one such memory and uncomfortably rediscovers its piercing beauty and folly and danger whenever an overripened child ventures beyond protective domestic reach. We all know that if our pubescent babies manage to survive and become mature men and women, they will do so by means of tragedy alone. No wonder we sometimes recoil from them.

The presumably grown-up narrator of Chris Fuhrman's first and last novel is a veteran of tragedy whose account of being rudderless in adolescent whitewater begins like this: "By eighth grade, Jesus Christ had been bone meal and rumors for most of 1,974 years, but we were only thirteen. We were daredevils, gangsters. I had a girl's name, Francis, and a hernia."

Francis Doyle, an eighth grader at Blessed Heart School in Savannah, Georgia, is chafing under its fatuous religiosity and bourgeois rectitude ("The nuns thought 'Bridge over Troubled Water' was brainwashing us to shoot heroin. Things like that.") The universe as glimpsed through his eyes is a crowded, turbulent, and unpredictable place. The latch-key kid of well-meaning, but distracted and abusive parents, Francis has recently spent a day in the juvenile detention center for shoplifting, having been apprehended in the local K-Mart because, as Tim Sullivan, his best friend and the leader of their gang tells him, "You did the genteel Robert E. Lee thing instead of hauling ass like the rest of us." Francis is an endearingly, even heartbreakingly screwed-up suburban teen-ager who sneaks drinks, carries a machete, orders sea monkeys by mail from the back pages of comic books, smokes dope, and weeps for the whole world. He is terrified of mortality, tormented by bullies, distrustful of adults, alarmed by his emergent sexuality, and helplessly in love with a seventh grader named Majorie Flynn, who has a few problems of her own. A ghost in her house, for instance, is the least of them.

Francis and the gang are talented Magic Marker artists, grudgingly entrusted by school authorities with such commissions as a hallway bulletin board mural on the theme "Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again." They are altar boys, after all. They are also scumbags, and the collaborative authors of Sodom and Gomorrah 74, a samizdat satire of life at Blessed Heart whose "last page showed the priests defiling fat, nude Sisters of Mercy on the church altar while our comic book selves watched in horror from the choir loft." Sodom and Gomorrah has been discovered by their pastor, the chain-smoking Father Kavanagh, who is deciding whether or not to issue a sort of parochial fatwah. The desperate altar boys persuade themselves that their best defense--against Kavanagh, Blessed Heart, the nuns, their parents, the complicated encroachments of the adult world, the enormousness and strangeness of the universe, and the uncertainty and fragility of life--is to capture a mountain lion and surreptitiously release it in the school.

Fairness to potential readers--and this book deserves many, many readers--precludes a summary of the adventure which ensues. What can be said is that--even if not exactly on a par with such classics as Huckleberry Finn, Catcher in the Rye, and A Separate Peace--The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys is nevertheless a memorable, funny, and poignant depiction of a glorious boyhood chased down and brutally terminated. Fuhrman powerfully evokes adolescence through a masterly use of sensory detail from the misery of fetid dishwashing chores and the horror of playground combat to the agony of dis-appointed love and the exhilaration of anticipated coupling. It quickly becomes apparent that the ingenuous Francis Doyle's boorish posturing, binge drinking, and native wariness are the survival equipment of a tender sensibility in the roughest of moral terrain. As he and his friends flee through the vanishing landscape of childhood, the story takes a startling turn from irony to tragedy, and a reader begins to experience the pity of Sophocles' Odysseus for the insane Ajax, "for the terrible yoke of blindness that is on him. I think of him, yet also of myself." Not many novels can command that sort of pity amidst obscene graffiti and fart jokes.

By the novel's end, an adult Francis Doyle has created an eponymous underground comic book based on subversive memories of his life at Blessed Heart. The success of his efforts gives rise to a contract offer from DC Comics, which Francis is eager to accept because "I want people to see and hear the things I can see and hear. And I want them to remember how it was when they were children. I don't want them to grow up entirely." Whether or not the grown-up comic book artist succeeds, the novelist who imagined him has admirably achieved those ends, producing a story as odd, vivid, painful, splendid, and sad as adolescence itself. It is impossible to read The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys without confronting again and again the memory of some tragic longing, or lethal folly, or audacious gesture, or ancient sin which has long since become peculiarly one's own.

Chris Fuhrman was thirty-one years old when he died, and The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys is his first and last novel. As with John Kennedy Toole, another Southern Catholic who died at thirty-two and left behind A Confederacy of Dunces, Fuhrman's posthumous debut invites wistful speculation about the sort of career which might have followed it. I believe it would have been superb.