Falling Apart

By John Skow

The year it all fell apart, Stewart O'Nan reports in Snow Angels, an unusually skillful first novel (Doubleday; 305 pages; $20), Arthur Parkinson was 14, a not-very-good trombonist in his high school band, "small for his size, generally ignored." He and his friend Warren were trying out pot, trying out irony and scornfulness.

Given what was facing Arthur, these usually reliable teenage defenses weren't quite enough. His parents were splitting up, glumly and fatalistically. And a young neighborhood woman, Arthur's friend and former baby-sitter, was destroyed by the accidental drowning of her baby daughter -- it was Arthur who discovered the dead toddler -- and by the obsessive stalking of her neurotic, estranged husband.

The adult Arthur tells this story years later in flat, cautious language, with neither the melodrama nor the bitter comedy that might be expected. We know little about him except that he has survived and that he is on fairly good terms with an older sister. There is no summing up of what he has become, with what scar tissue.

Among the vectors of that bad year, however, is one hopeful element of adolescence. Awkward Arthur is saved, or at any rate distracted, by his hormones. He falls in lust with Lila, who is unclever and unpretty. She is a twin, and she and her sister dress, according to the unsympathetic Warren, like Mister Rogers. No matter, nature's reward for enduring one's teens grabs both Arthur and his girl by the seat of the pants. He recalls necking with her on his bed while Jimi Hendrix twanged in the background. "Lila's hair smelled of strawberry shampoo; we were trading a wad of watermelon bubble gum, making a game of hiding it from the other's tongue. I thought, if I could just stay here ... "

Simple, intricate storytelling; one notion it leaves is that being 14 can be its own cure.