Probabilities

Stein brings a fierce literary intelligence to bear in his first novel. This coming-of-age story isn't cast from the standard mold: from the outset, 16-year-old narrator Will Sterling has his coping mechanisms intact, with a level of insightfulness that asks for no improvement. Will's father has been dead three years, and his 55-year-old mother has abandoned ``family obligations she had once imposed to establish normalcy.'' Will does her chores and her accounting, but their lives rarely intersect as the mother dates men who are ``just a belt and a head.'' The only white boy on the Bergenville, N.J., high-school basketball team and a math genius who sees all of life's conundrums in terms of probability, Will looks for answers from Terri Kean, a 40-ish surrogate mother he visits in Connecticut, and grapples with his need to keep private his love for schoolmate Sara Glasser. The boy has a need to know about his father's past and a hunger for someone to see him into the future; once he understands this, he can begin to temper probabilities with expectations. In Will, Stein has created a funny, roll-with-it adolescent of enormous appeal, and a story that boasts both the elegance and the complexity of a geometric proof. (Aug.)