Boice's overlong second novel (after MVP
) opens with a startling meditation on the dead body of a 17-year-old suicide, Grayson Donald, hanging from a basketball hoop in Centreville, Va. From there, the story branches out to portray Grayson's troubles and those of his community, focusing on the mostly affluent residents of the subdivision where he lived. Beginning with Grayson's alcoholic, porn-addicted father and ambitious, devoutly Catholic mother, the narrative plumbs the lives and minds of a variety of characters, including housewife Ellen Eubank, neurotically dependent on her daily bath; schoolteacher and Home Owners' Association member Mitzy Hurkle, obsessed with her neighbor's regulations-violating curbside basketball hoop; and party boy Trent Batchelor, unemployed and living with and leaching off his pushover parents. Despite the variety of their needs, the characters are uniformly self-absorbed, incapable of connecting with others and endowed with desperate, rapacious appetites; the sameness of their situations becomes tiresome. While Boice's commentary on suburban banality is nothing short of savage, it's also too predictable and thin, as if he can't get over his own contempt for his characters. By the end, Grayson's suicide seems nonsensical, but not for the reasons intended. (Jan.)
