Youth in Revolt

February 27, 1995
Told as the diary of an oversexed 14-year-old, this three-part comic-novel deals with the usual adolescent bugbears: divorced parents, rebellion, virginity. Set in the cultural wasteland of trailer-park northern California, the episodic plot involves arson, car theft, police brutality and more. Nick tries to win an even more precocious girl his age, Sheeni Saunders, by means of allusive letters and screwball schemes which eventually backfire. Payne gives his narrator an overblown literary voice that contrasts with the attendant embarrassments of his age (e.g., the problems of finding a place to masturbate privately in an R.V.), but the narrative strains for comedic effect. With its Woody Allen-like punch lines, double entendres and overall high-school atmosphere, the novel reads like YA fiction: a nihilist Daniel Pinkwater. And for all Nick's intellectual pretension and artificial speech (qualities echoed, oddly, by nearly all the teenaged characters), he seems devoid of imagination or any redeeming qualities; nor does he care about anything other than satisfying his pubescent desires. And, though in the book's final third the boy comes alive in his drag persona of Carlotta (and Payne admirably brings home his convoluted plot), it is too late to revitalize an ultimately unsympathetic hero.

November 29, 1993
Debuting with this rambling, logorrheic, self-indulgent trilogy of comic novels collected in one volume, Payne covers six hectic months in the life of 14-year-old Oakland native Nick Twisp. Youth in Revolt , the first installment, chronicles Nick's transformation from a computer-hacking, book-reading teen into a rebel with a libidinous cause: the winning of Sheeni Saunders, a girl he meets while on vacation. Youth in Bondage finds Nick stuck in Sheeni's hometown of Ukiah, Calif. She has gone away to school in Santa Cruz (with her boyfriend), and Nick must live with his penny-pinching father, who treats him like an indentured servant. Nick relies increasingly on his tough alter ego, Francois Dillinger, creating a fantasy life that is the trilogy's main strength, far less tiresome than the forced humor that mars most of Nick's bizarre adventures. When the FBI turns up in Ukiah--they are on Nick's trail for a fire he accidentally set in downtown Berkeley--he flees to L.A. Youth in Exile eventually takes him back to Ukiah, disguised as a girl and re-enrolled at the local high school, where he fends off passes from undiscerning boys while plotting to get Sheeni back. The long-delayed resolution to this tedious effort fulfills every teen fantasy from great sex to independent wealth. Author tour.