Uh-oh. Salinger wannabe on the scanner, Captain. “You'll probably think I'm making a lot of this up just to make me sound better than I really am or smarter or even luckier but I'm not.” That's no J D Salinger, Sulu … that's Mark Twain!

Russell Banks' prose, like Don DeLillo's, has an insistent, buttonholing quality even at its most neutral. But when it inhabits the coolly wised-up consciousness of Chappie, aka “Bone”, it's harder to get away from than a Big Issue ambush. Even allowing for the wonderful Continental Drift, this [Rule of the Bone] is the book that promotes Banks to the premier division of US novelists. In it, Banks seems aware that he is inscribing himself into a long tradition.

With his nose-rings, Mohican and promising weed habit, Chappie makes Holden Caulfield sound like John-Boy Walton, and Huck Finn a virtual Pollyanna. Chappie—Chapman—lives with a deflated mom and an abusive step-dad in trailer-park America. Lives, that is, until steadily mounting tensions push him to light out for the New Frontier—the Banks territory of the dispossessed. Chappie forages like a true mall-rat, hacks a living pushing dope to local kids, then to a bunch of bikers called the Adirondack Irons, whose chapter-house is shared by his sidekick Russ.

At this point, Chappie probably still plays Tom Sawyer to Russ' Huck, but the roles are quickly reversed. Tired of being the Irons' gofer, Russ decides to liberate his tithe of the gang's stolen VCRs. They get away with their lives only by virtue of having seemed to perish in the blaze that kills the bikers' leader. Trial by fire, as subsequently by the other elements, cuts Chappie free of most of his remaining ties. A last, semi-sentimental return home is one of the few false notes Banks strikes—an awkward bit of structure that interrupts the book's impeccable logic.

The only other one is an unnecessary and ambiguous reprise of the book's most chilling episode, an encounter with the pornographer Buster Brown and his child victim, semi-catatonic Froggy the Gremlin. Chappie stalks them, and flirts with Brown, even agreeing to a “screen test”. His escape should have been the last word, but Banks has Chappie meet up with the pair again, rescue Froggy and send her home.

By this stage, Russ has wimped out and returned to his mother and Chappie has fallen in with an elderly Rasta called I-Man, who becomes his Chingachgook and almost father. I-Man has the home-itch for Jamaica and so Chappie sinks the remains of Buster's tainted cash in a hypnotic excursion to the Caribbean, to the ganja fields, and the source of his own alienation. This is where Banks eases in to the bone, and to the rule of the bone.

Early in their flight, Chappie had joined Russ in a tattoo parlour and acquired the tattoo that was to give him a road name. Attracted to a pirate symbol, he is put off by the skull, and has the tattooist Art badge him with just a pair of crossed bones. Chappie becomes Bone.

This is a complex symbol, as deliberately wrought as Chappie's slow abandonment of his punked, ironic Red Indian haircut. Denying the skull is both a recognition of his fear of death, and a beginning to his capacity to live fully. I-Man becomes his teacher, but also tutors him in a kind of suspension of consciousness (and not just in the obvious way) which the missing skull also symbolised. Like Holden, like Huck to a different degree, Chappie is trapped by his own partial awareness of things, his own misgivings and denials (the revelation of his stepfather's sexual abuse is all the more shocking for being delayed).

Where the “rescue” of Rose does function positively is that it shows him teeter between awarenesses of himself and his relationship with others; formerly, only the family cat engaged him wholly. The rule of the bone teaches him to live by a set of instincts older than any of them, except perhaps I-Man. As Bone, he becomes for the first time a native American.