[In the following review, Mesic lauds Banks's vivid and believable characterizations in Rule of the Bone.]

You see the young drifting in shoals through malls, clustering together and then slipping away, hair lank or shaved to nothing or twisted into dreadlocks, tender ears tagged with multiple silver rings as if repeatedly captured and released. Their clothes are ripped and nondescript, protective coloring in a drab and dangerous world. From this inscrutable throng of no-longer-children, not-yet-adults, Russell Banks has chosen a resourceful, undersized, 14-year-old boy to serve as narrator and hero of his latest novel, a brilliantly funny and heartfelt work called Rule of the Bone. Named Chapman, nicknamed “Chappie,” later “Bone,” the boy is good-natured, shrewd and more than a little screwed up, but—and this is Banks' great accomplishment—believably young, with all the raw freshness, resiliency and sense of adventure that implies.

He also has a deadpan naivete reminiscent of Huck Finn's, which allows him to deliver devastating judgments while apparently unaware that he has done so. His mother, who drinks too much, is affectionate but nothing like as sharp as Chappie, although his love for her prevents him from saying so. She has “a cheesy job as a bookkeeper at the hospital.” His stepfather, sarcastic with a mean streak, “thinks I'm a total loser because his idea of a real man is Arnold Schwarzenegger or General Schwarzkopf or anybody with a name with Schwarz in it because he's basically a Nazi with a drinking problem plus a few others.” Here Chappie explains why he thinks his grandmother is self-centered: “On my thirteenth birthday my mom had a special family dinner and Grandma when she sat down at the table took my hand in hers and mother who'll be 75 in September?”

It is evident that Chappie's bond with his family is frayed to the breaking point, and what he gets from them in time, attention and love is not enough for a child to prosper. As the book begins, he is ditching school, staying with a friend and a bunch of bikers over a store called the Video Den. Like “lots of kids” he deals dope on a small scale. He also smokes dope, because “always high was better than low and those were my only two alternatives.”

Banks paints a devastating—and devastatingly funny—picture of Chappie's daily routine; that Chappie soon accepts the life as normal is what shocks us. Our dull adult sense of his danger is constant. His more accurate sense is that, around the bikers, who alternately play dumb sadistic jokes, use the kids as errand boys and treat them like mascots, he has to be “pretty alert.” But he recognizes the play-acting going on—that while they are tough, there's also a make-believe quality to their talk about guns, drugs, Harleys, tattoos and the “famous murderer” who was one biker's uncle. Privately Chappie comes to the same assessment the reader does, that the bikers are losers “who couldn't get real jobs.”

There's a wonderful sketch of a formidable biker called “Roundhouse,” who is “humongously fat and hasn't had a haircut since third grade.” He's so shaggy that “when he stood up you expected to see a tail,” Chappie tells us, adding that he used stolen credit cards for phone sex, but “whenever there were any real females around he plugged his headphones into Russ's box and nodded out.” The whimsicality of the description and the reference to third grade help us accept Chappie's conclusion: “Basically he was harmless.”

Other men he encounters, superficially less menacing, are more dangerous. At the mall there is a pockmarked individual with a droll style of speech who leads around a female child of 6 or 7 who appears to be drugged. Chappie senses evil, but his idea of what might be going on is authentically kidlike and cloudy. Any writer might bone up, so to speak, on the language and customs of the young, but here Banks does the far more difficult work of structuring the gaps in Chappie's knowledge that make the boy, despite himself, innocent.

Chappie has a foolish, generous impulse to somehow substitute himself for the younger child, and chatting with the man, lets himself be led toward the man's car. On the way they pass a window display being set up. “The mannequins are all in pieces with their arms and hands lying on the floor and some of them don't have any heads and the ones that do are bald. They have breasts and all but no nipples or pubic hair. It's like they're adults but they're really little kids … it looked like a dissecting room in a morgue or something. Definitely it was the grossest thing I'd ever seen, which is strange because I'd seen a lot of really gross things by then. … That's when I turned and started running.”

The boy's apparently stray words—nipples, pubic hair—build up an awareness of sex, the confusion of adult and child in this context sets off warning bells, and the theme of dismemberment is appalling. The way this association of ideas is created, resulting in a terror that Chappie scarcely understands, is masterly.

Throughout this work, we want for our hero what he wants for himself: someone to look out for him. What he encounters is a series of bad fathers—exploitative, violent, false. When help finally comes, it is in the guise, again reminiscent of Huckleberry Finn, of a black Rastafarian called “I-Man” who is cultivating vegetables and ganja in the weedy lot around an abandoned school bus.

No one who has read the The Sweet Hereafter, the Banks novel that preceded this one, can hear the words “school bus” unmoved—and yes, this bus is the rusting hulk of one that figured in a terrible crash. But in its present state, the wreck is a haven of sanity and health. Chappie, having survived adventures of increasing risk, including one that in another Mark Twain-like touch left him reading his own obituary, is now safe. He has someone whose mellow principles he can adopt.

We scarcely notice when our longing that the boy return home disappears. But we are very conscious of the moment when he realizes that neglect and displacement have somehow ripened into freedom. He is traveling with I-Man, crossing Lake Champlain on the first leg of what will become a voyage to Jamaica. “I remember thinking you live from moment to moment and the moments all flow into each other forwards and backwards and you almost never catch one like this that's separate from the rest. It felt like a precious diamond and I was holding it up to the sunlight between my thumb and forefinger.” That could be a metaphor for what Banks has done: pulled one adolescent from the drably dressed, drifting throng and found in his candor and freshness something like a diamond.