Heads by Harry

This frank and poetic tragicomic novel completes Yamanaka's trilogy (Wild Meat and the Bully Burgers; Blu's Hanging) about growing up in Hawaii. As in the previous books, the narrator's distinctive voice conveys a cultural climate as well as a story of adolescent angst and survival. Toni Yagyuu's Japanese-American, lower-middle-class family generates and harbors conflict and disenchantment. Toni is the middle child, sandwiched between popular, successful siblings: Sheldon, her homosexual older brother, and Bunny, her conventionally pretty younger sister. Sheldon and Bunny have their selfishness in common and, with cruel nonchalance, invariably take each other's sides against lonely Toni. She is closest to her father, Harry O., who runs Heads by Harry, a taxidermy shop in Hilo. Although Toni aspires to take over the business, Harry O. would rather apprentice neighborhood youths Maverick and Wyatt Santos. Toni and her siblings yearn for handsome Maverick, but Toni always seems to be thrown together with crude, uneducated Wyatt, whose federal job hunting pigs seems to suit his personality. Harry O. has bigger plans for his children--college, preferably business degrees. Sheldon and Bunny manage to bluff and party their ways through college, but Toni is overwhelmed; she flunks out and returns home a failure. She despairingly explores a sexual relationship with Wyatt Santos and then falls humiliatingly in love with a ""haole"" six years her junior. Yet stouthearted Toni finds a hardy strain of unconditional love amid her family's painful disavowals and her diminished expectations. Her integrity and individuality are affirmed in a touching denouement. Yamanaka infuses her characters' pidgin English, their often coarse dialogue and their sometimes brutal behavior with gut-level poetry and fresh vernacular. With this stirring novel, the potency and honesty of Yamanaka's view of Hawaiian life achieves the haunting force of myth. First serial to A. magazine and Poets & Writers; author tour. (Feb.)