Russell Banks narrates his new novel in the colloquial voice of a 14-year-old who has the possibly unique distinction of almost never using a certain four-letter word: “like,” as in “I'm like how am I going to tell my story, and he's like don't ask me.” A staple of adolescent vernacular, “like” is a hiccup of self-conscious diffidence: don't mistake me for sincere or eloquent, I'm cool and non-committal. That Chappie Dorset, a high-school dropout from a small town in the Adirondacks, is free of this tic of teenage dialect is a key to his lineage, and thus to the tradition that The Rule of the Bone aspires to. Banks is aiming higher than an adolescent classic in the mold of Catcher in the Rye, for and about the disaffected young in an age of indulgence. (Holden Caulfield would have run “like” into the ground if he'd had the chance.) He intends an indictment of a decaying and divided era, which is meant to be heard by adults. And he has The American Classic in mind. Chappie Dorset's literary antecedent is Huck Finn, the 14-year-old witness with an utterly original voice.

Huck's voice, though inimitable, is a model in two useful ways. It is self-aware without being self-conscious, and it is persuasive whether delivering clear-eyed testimony or indulging in imaginative embroidery. His form of delivery, in other words, has nothing to do with diffidence. Huck's unapologetic dead-pan style depends instead on qualities often at low ebb in adolescence: self-confidence and independence, resources that abandoned boys are quickly driven to develop. Like Huck and, completely unlike the blasé Holden, Chappie is a social outcast whose whole heart is in his account of the deformed world in which he finds himself; he isn't striking world-weary poses. In fact, Chappie (who soon adopts the more oracular moniker of Bone) sometimes gets away with a declamatory note that Huck never could, for Banks doesn't mind readers who are tempted by what Twain, in his prefatory “Notice,” expressly warned his audience against: the search for motive, moral and plot in the conscience-pricking story told by a haunted young rustic.

Banks has never been reticent about the motive behind his fiction. He laid out his credo most explicitly at the close of Continental Drift (1985), where he announced that “good cheer and mournfulness over lives other than our own, even wholly invented lives—no, especially wholly invented lives—deprive the world as it is of some of the greed it needs to continue to be itself.” Banks doesn't claim that fiction conveys factual truth that can change anything. Though he has made it his mission to portray the gritty particulars of existence on the peripheries (blue-collar towns in the rural Northeast, enclaves of new arrivals and foreign immigrants in Florida, villages on Caribbean islands), he is under no illusion that mere reportage will set anyone free. The liberating force lies instead in the feelings of empathy that inspire a writer to create the “facts” of his fiction, and in the sympathy that fiction in turn inspires in readers. Banks has emphasized an almost primitive notion of storytelling as exorcism, for the teller and for the listener. And he has repeatedly set himself the challenge of letting comparatively untutored characters have their say.

Chappie fits naturally into Banks's succession of storytellers, an heir apparent. For with him and his saga, the moral underlying Banks's work up to now asserts itself with a new force. The child is father of the man: that has been the very unromantic lesson that almost all of his novels and stories, in different bleak ways, have illustrated. From the start Banks has distinguished himself as a family chronicler of an uncozy kind. In cramped and angry domesticity he finds grim auguries of personal and national destiny. Shades of the prison-house close all too soon on growing boys (and more rarely, girls), and entrapped men and women are the result in The Sweet Hereafter (1991), Affliction (1989), Success Stories (1986) and Continental Drift, to mention just the second harvest of Banks's prolific two-decade career. A cycle of paternal rage and abuse is at work, producing generation after generation of fathers who harbor bruised boys within, ready to strike back. In Continental Drift, Bob Dubois faces up to the disheartening drama of arrested development that dominates Banks's fiction:

For years, Bob was one of those people who believed that there are two kinds of people, children and adults, and that they are like two different species. Then, when he himself became an adult and learned that the child in him had not only refused to die or disappear, but in fact seemed to be refusing to let the adult have his way, and when he saw that was true not only of him but of everyone else he knew as well—his wife, his brother, his friends, even his own mother and father—Bob reluctantly, sadly, with increasing loneliness, came to believe that there are no such things as adults after all, only children who try and usually fail to imitate adults. People are more or less adult-like, that's all.

Until now Banks has focused on grown-ups, and proved himself an expert on the myopic innocence that maturity can cling to. His characters are desperate dreamers. His typical plot turns on their refusal to accept what feels like frustratingly little control over their lives, especially when the world beckons with bigger promises. When they succumb to those promises, they discover the world won't make good on them, and they are left feeling even more powerless. Not surprisingly, one thing over which they have a frighteningly frail grasp is their children, as Banks pointedly dramatized by making a school bus accident the crux of his previous novel, The Sweet Hereafter.

In what now looks like a warm-up for Chappie's epic monologue, Banks had 14-year-old Nichole Burnell, a lucky survivor of the accident, narrate one of the five sections of the book. Her story, and The Sweet Hereafter as a whole, are the ominous calm before the storm of The Rule of the Bone. Nichole is the abused daughter who buries her pain in high performance (she's the junior-high-school salutatorian). And in a novel that is built not on action (the tragedy has already happened when the book opens) but on reactions, her response to the event helps give the shattered Adirondack town at least some peace. Here the wise disillusionment of children—the complement, in Banks's world, to the childish delusions of adults—is clearly on the way to becoming his main subject.

In The Rule of the Bone Banks gives the entire story over to a child, and the result is brutally, often fantastically, picaresque. Twain threatened shooting as the penalty for anyone looking for plot in his novel: Chappie, at nearly every turn in his adventures, is either dodging or firing bullets. He is the antithesis of Nichole—a wounded boy who drops out of his family, his town, his country and finally out of the category of run-of-the-mill delinquent to which he (with help from others) has consigned himself. For Bone, like Huck before him, is by no means unregenerate. His recounting of high drama among a crowd of dead-beats, and a few true companions, gives his good soul and honest imagination a chance to prove themselves.

Here, as before, Banks sees to it that his provincial portrait has a panoramic sweep, a continental drift. The Rule of the Bone is another parable about lost American innocence. And for the most part Banks's confidence again pays off, thanks not least to his gift for psychological portrayal of a notoriously difficult kind: he maps the inner life of characters who are commonly assumed not to be introspective or articulate. He manages to make Chappie a hapless boy and yet also an acute narrator of a series of exploits that themselves seem both accidental and part of a literary pattern. As each chapter of Bone's misadventure unfolds, the new predicament he finds himself in seems nightmarishly contingent—the realistic travails of a down-and-out delinquent. But taken together, the episodes strain credulity as a rough-hewn memoir, as they are meant to. Bone's monologue assumes very symmetrical and symbolic shape, and very consciously strikes echoes of Twain (and of Banks's own previous work) as it proceeds.

Chappie, who recounts his year-long odyssey in retrospect, starts out, like Huck, by emphasizing a smoking habit that gets him into trouble at home. For Chappie, the weed is marijuana. He doesn't think twice about ransacking his house when he finds himself penniless and eager to get high, for life with his stepfather and mother has been edgy for some time. Chappie, with his nose-rings and mohawk haircut, is perfectly willing to take some blame for bad relations in a passage that conveys the matter-of-fact, fair-minded tone of his voice:

It was getting toward the end of summer school and I knew I was going to flunk at least two out of the three courses that I needed to pass just to get out of eighth grade which was going to make my mom crazy and deeply piss off my stepdad who already had his own secret reasons for disliking me but I don't want to talk about that now.

As that typically run-on sentence suggests, with its hint of abuse, Chappie also feels his parents have plenty to answer for. When he pawns his mother's coin collection to buy dope, and then assaults his stepfather when his parents discover the theft, the uneasy truce between generations is over. Banks captures the mix of defiance and confusion, pride and remorse, with which Chappie leaves home to join his friend Russ—a fast-talker of the Tom Sawyer variety—who has been living with a band of bikers.

The first in what is to be a succession of parodic “families,” the motorcycle gang marks one step down the road of criminal marginality (the bikers deal drugs and steal). Chappie evokes life in their company with what comes to be his characteristically dark comic flair: he wryly compares them to dogs, he being “the ultimate little dog and it was all I could do to keep from pissing down my own leg.” Chappie's underground exploits are a distorted mirror of life above ground, and the criticism of callous and irresponsible America they convey is stark. But Banks consistently gives the messages an ironic twist, rescuing them from sanctimony. At one point, moved by sympathy, Chappie rescues a small girl from the clutches of a pervert who evidently bought her—only to talk himself into returning her to the crackhead mother who sold her. Moved by resentment at another point, he trashes the fancy summer house of some rich people—only to confront the flagrant indulgence of his own act. Chappie, in his role as social conscience, is suitably confused.

With a sure sense of pacing, Banks periodically takes a break from the action and sends Chappie to hide out in an abandoned school bus in the woods, which turns out to be the wreck from The Sweet Hereafter—Banks's version of Twain's raft. It serves at first as an image of hopelessness, when Chappie finds it inhabited by two drug addicts (who turn out to be Nichole Burnell's brothers), but it also becomes an emblem of hope. Just before he falls asleep one night, Chappie has a utopian vision of the bus, and the dream shows Banks working at perfect pitch. The passage has the specific pathos of a kid's comforting nighttime fantasy, and yet at the same time it's a more sweeping comment on the search for community, one of the novel's main themes:

It would be wicked cool to have a real bus, one that worked and all and fix it up inside like a home and drive it around the country your whole life, stopping whenever you felt like and making a little money off a job for a while and if you got restless just taking off again. You could have friends and family with you some of the time and be alone some of the time but basically and this would be the best thing, you'd be in complete charge of your life like those old pioneers in their covered wagons.

Like others in the growing company of writers who have been reviving the American tradition of backwoods yarn-spinning, Banks clearly finds it a liberating return to naturalistic story-telling. It offers a respite from minimalism that needn't mean staid narrative conformism. In fact (as Carolyn Chute, Jayne Anne Phillips and others have shown) it invites Gothic character exaggeration, surreal scene-making, violent drama and often a dose of primitive spiritualism. Banks stands out as knowing how to overdo to just the right degree, and throughout the first half of the novel he leavens thematic sobriety with lively theatrics. It's when he introduces his brand of exotic spiritualism in the middle of the book that his remarkably agile touch threatens to get heavy.

Bone meets up with a ganja-growing illegal immigrant from Jamaica, I-Man, a Rastafarian dedicated to liberating the slave within. Chappie's transformation from underdog outlaw to idealized outlaw, under the tutelage of this Jim figure for the '90s, is the drama of the rest of the book. It's a quest that begins with disillusioned hopelessness in America, when Bone's stepfather stands in the way of an attempted reconciliation with the family. The journey ends with unillusioned hope in Jamaica, where Bone finds his real father, a decadent cocaine addict. Taking stock of him and of himself, Bone gathers strength to embark on his own independent future.

Such an odyssey of vindication marks a departure for Banks, whose specialty has been men who can't reverse, but can only accelerate, their downward course. Here he is at his characteristic best as he explores the combustible mix of fear, frustration and passionate feeling that makes life at home and in Jamaica dangerous, sometimes in surprisingly similar ways. In Banks's America, divisions have never been deeper. And the postcolonial menace of Jamaica, filtered through Bone's eyes, is as ominous as it has ever been in Banks's fiction. Racial troubles and family strains, which he labored hard to link in Continental Drift, here overlap more easily; homelessness in The Rule of the Bone has a long history.

But it looks as though Hollywood has edged out Huck as the inspiration at several key moments in Bone's saga. Well before a redemptive ending comes into view, the novel has beckoned as prime film material: an action-packed adventure, full of visual potential, with a huge target market. But with the formulaic scripting of its turning point and its concluding scene, The Rule of the Bone risks begging for the screen a little too obviously. Banks can't resist an Oprah-style trauma to send Bone off to Jamaica, and a Disney scene of transcendence to prepare him for his return to America.

Bone, as we have been alerted at the start and are informed in graphic detail in the middle of the book, has been sexually abused by his stepfather—who threatens him again, a last straw that helps propel Bone to Jamaica. Banks can't be accused of jumping on the child-abuse bandwagon; after all, the theme has been, more and less subtly, at the heart of his work for a long time. But given the focus on paternal molestation here, and given the recent surge in its popularity as a plot device (it threatens to become the contemporary equivalent of the classic fatal illness ploy), Banks faces higher hurdles in pulling it off. Child abuse, once it has been overused as a sensational revelation, does more than lose its shock value; it becomes a sentimental formula.

For to presume that the abuse of children is a widespread reality rather than a fantasy, as Freud ultimately concluded it was, has the paradoxical effect of restoring a very romantic idea: the utter dependence and purity of children. When abuse is given literary center stage as a motivation or explanation for events, or even alluded to in the background, it has a way of shifting the light in the coming-of-age novel: young characters are flattened into passive victims, and maturation begins to look more like a melodrama about corruption than like an awakening to a complicated world. It's exactly this kind of reduction that Banks capably skirts before the scarring secret is out. After, though he works hard to keep roguish Chappie from becoming merely a wronged innocent, the revelation has inevitably introduced a shallower therapeutic perspective.

The end of The Rule of the Bone brings another brush with bathos. The novel closes with Bone on his way back from Jamaica, lying at night on the deck of The Belinda Blue, the boat that meant death for illegal Haitian refugees in Continental Drift but that will mean a new life for Bone in his own country. After the visions he has had during the Rastafarian rites of self-discovery I-Man has led him through, the closing revelation Bone describes is almost bound to be an anticlimax. Still, his resort to clichéd inspirationalism comes as a jolt. Bone gazes up at the stars, and finds in them constellations of the figures who have meant most to him: the biker who once tried to save him, “the sign of the bad boy with the brave heart”; the girl whom he tried to save, “the sign of the rejected child”; and I-Man, “the shape of a lion's head with a crown, the constellation Lion-I, the sign of the open mind.”

It's disorienting to hear in this the cloying strains of The Lion King, the blockbuster paeon to family values in a time of absent fathers and cultural blight. (“The great kings of the past look down on us from these stars. They will always be there to guide you. …”) Banks's recurrent subject—the struggle to take one's fruitful place “in the circle of life” rather than continue a generational cycle of destruction—is not any less rich for being hugely, and often banally, popular. It is, though, that much harder to sustain at a vigorous and subtle imaginative level. What is striking is how successfully daring Banks has managed to be with his vernacular hero. The triteness at the end, while Chappie lets the credits roll, shouldn't drown out the story that has come before, which has followed the energetic and idiosyncratic rules of Bone.