Gas Station

The comic Steven Wright once said that the first time he read a dictionary, he thought it was ""a poem with everything."" The same could be said of Torra's first novel, which in rhythmic, lyrical prose tells of a young man's adolescence spent working in his father's gas station. Torra, who is the author of Keep Watching the Sky, a book of poems, has created the ultimate reliable narrator: he can't keep his mind on anything, and so he tells it all. Grown-ups display habits and quirks that slowly come to make sense to him as he pieces together the rules of politics, sex, business, marriage, the church, pornography, ethnicity--everything that matters in this mid-'60s town north of Boston. In Torra's innovative style, the trivialities of everyday work often meet new realizations in the same sentence, with no punctuation separating them. Although the style is unusual, its suitability to the novel and its close mimicry of thought make it a seamless vehicle for this stream of conscious recollections. The end result is almost generic: this is how we all grow up, and while we may not have reached adulthood by listening to the sex tales of mechanics, adjusting crankcase bearings, towing cars dangling off the Route 28 overpass above I-93, Gas Station grants the whole process a grace that is beautiful without being precious and universal through its specificity. (Sept.)