The Death of Mr. Angel

Middle-class American values get a scorching confutation in this diary-as-novel. Dick Shaw, who wants to be a ``cultured human being,'' faces bigotry, hypocrisy, double standards and finally murder before he runs away from his conventional small-town home. Dick's affluent background and his earnest examination of the spiritual paucity of modern society will garner inevitable comparisons to Holden Caufield. Dick, however, is angrier and more alienated than his literary predecessor, and where Salinger's character finds salvation in his loving family, Dick never resolves his ethical differences with the world around him. Haugaard ( The Boy and the Samurai ) stacks the deck against his narrator, giving him a family as weak-witted and contemptible as the rest of the mammon-loving community in which they live. Nevertheless, the moral issues he addresses will doubtless strike a chord with his intended audience. Ages 13-17. (Nov.)