Word: waylaid
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...chaotic place. Caught between childhood and adolescence, he's flooded by new impulses, teased by an itch he can't quite scratch. So wordless lust is confined in wordless thoughts that resound in his tormented head. The 12-year-old narrator of Ed Lin's edgy debut novel Waylaid is the only child of Chinese immigrants. He spends all his spare time working at his family's ramshackle hotel on the New Jersey shore. The summer guests are "Bennys"?crude young Italians from New York City who vomit in the hallways and copulate in the pool. In the lean winter...
...consumes Waylaid. Lin's narrator gets his notions of it from cast-off porn, his coarse friend Vincent and the flesh trade that surrounds him. His attitude is, not surprisingly, neither romantic nor realistic; he divides the women he meets into "hardcore" or "centerfolds." When he loses his virginity, however, the experience is brutal in a way that shreds his cheap porn fantasies...
...racist classmate with a ruler. Ultimately, though, that hotel bell is inescapable, and when a health catastrophe strikes his father and destroys their finances, his family is left with nothing but the ashes of the American dream. Though Lin ends his searing book on a hopeful note, Waylaid is like a nihilistic?but enjoyable?detour on a journey from nothing to nowhere...
...Behind the Scenes: Kill Bill Movies: So Close Books: Theroux on Naipaul Books: Mysterious Massacre Books: Waylaid in New Jersey...
...Behind the Scenes: Kill Bill Movies: So Close Books: Theroux on Naipaul Books: Mysterious Massacre Books: Waylaid in New Jersey...