Troublemakers

Midwestern pot smokers, petty thieves and bullies-in-training populate this debut collection, but that doesn't prevent McNally from transforming chronicles of their everyday troubles into 11 meaningful, sharply etched stories. Many of the characters are adolescent boys on the edge of discovery of the excitement of sex, the disappointments of adulthood. In ""The Vomitorium,"" the young narrator and his friend Ralph, old enough to be aware of girls but still interested in dressing up for Halloween, grab a ride with an older cousin. The cousin has been stealing from his jobDhis truck is full of purloined Tootsie RollsDbut behind that goofy crime he hides a more serious misdeed. In ""Grand Illusion,"" the narrator and Ralph are back again, still pruriently interested in their female classmates and now determined to commit some minor crimes of their own. The year is 1979, the bands are Cheap Trick and Styx, but their adolescent cluelessness feels timeless. In ""The New Year,"" drugs and sex appear on the scene (with significant consequences), but for Gary, the main character, the grimmest lesson learned concerns the distance between father and son. In ""The First of Your Last Chances,"" a grown-up version of these misdirected boys is trying to work himself out of trouble with his girlfriend. He learns a surprisingly useful lesson in relating to women from his friend's experience with a personals-ad dominatrix. Of the stories collected here, only ""The Politics of Correctness,"" with its shopworn critique of liberal academia, falls flat. The protagonists of the rest of the tales are vivid though hapless, the adolescents the most heartbreaking in their attempts to not only make trouble, but to make men of themselves. (Oct.) FYI: Troublemakers is this year's winner of the University of Iowa's John Simmons Short Fiction Award.