The Bone wasn't always the Bone. Once he was Chapman “Chappie” Dorset, a small-town kid frequenting Plattsburgh shopping mall. After his Mom and his abusive step-dad kick him out for stealing the family's heirloom coin collection to buy weed, Chappie moves in with a biker gang above a video rental store, tolerated by the older guys because he keeps them in drugs. Presumed dead in a fire (at which he wasn't actually present, although one of the bikers dies trying to save him), he begins a new life. He steals a car with his friend Russ and they take off to stay with a pair of spindly, smack-head brothers who don't smell too good and live in a crashed school bus. Russ has a biker tattoo to get rid of, so they go to the Art-O-Rama tattoo studio to get it covered with a black panther. And when Chappie keeps him company with some crossed bones on his own arm, the Bone is born, his adventures have only just started.

Russell Banks's very moral and somewhat sentimental novel [Rule of the Bone] is an exercise in “doing” a voice, revamping the picaresque narrator to make an MTV-generation Huckleberry Finn. Bone may be a mall-rat with a studded nose who uses expressions like “way” and “wuss”, but his concerns are perennial within the American canon. His retrospection into the state of his soul is squarely in the tradition of Protestant self-testimony (“Unbeknownst to me however I was developing a criminal mentality”), as is his concern with the difference between crime and sin:

Stealing is like only a crime but betrayal of a friend is a sin. It's like a crime is an act that when you've committed one the act is over and you haven't changed inside. But when you commit a sin it's like you create a condition that you have to live in.

Bone shows his innate decency when he encounters a doped seven-year-old named “Froggy” in company with Buster Brown, “the psycho porn king of Plattsburgh who kept little kids on junk”. With his English accent and his fruitily Dickensian spiel, Buster is a memorable character. Despite his big soft nose and pocky skin and “thin black strands of hair combed sideways over his head like a bar code”, he is a convincingly charismatic manipulator:

When he talked he looked right at me and made me feel like there was this spotlight on me and I was standing in the middle of a stage and anything I said would be listened to with total respect … I felt like I was baking in the sun with all the attention.

More than that, “he was so smart he made you feel smart too instead of stupid like smart people usually make you feel”. Bone intends to save Froggy by substituting himself as “protégé”, but when he sees dismantled mannequins in a shop window (evidently looking like Cindy Sherman's sex-doll artworks: “it was the grossest thing I'd ever seen”), he suddenly feels the ugliness of Buster's game and escapes, taking Froggy with him.

With Froggy, whose real name is Rose, Bone returns to the crashed bus, now occupied by a Rasta named I-Man. They share a spliff; “and before the night was gone I knew that I had met the man who would become by best friend.” Unlike the bullies, rule-makers and manipulators Bone has met so far, I-Man's advice is “Up to you, Bone”. The three of them live happily surrounded by plants: “It was like the Garden of Eden.” They eat healthily too, with food like in the “olden pioneer days” that Bone has already yearned for: “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.” In many respects, this is familiar stuff, like I-Man's creed that every honest man is an outlaw, and his larger role in the book, offering salvation through rapprochement with blackness. Bone becomes apprenticed to I-Man's Rastafarian wisdom and goes to live in Jamaica, becoming a kind of make-believe black.

Bone's adventures are still far from over: while in Jamaica, he recognizes his real father (whom he once saw in a photograph) doing a drug deal with I-Man. By the end of the book—having just turned fifteen—he has unwittingly brought disaster on everyone he has loved. But he has achieved the Rule of the Bone, which is total freedom and autonomy guided by the spirit of I-Man. He has even made his own mythic universe, with star constellations named in memory of dead friends: the biker, Rose and I-Man himself.

Throughout the book, Bone's sharp and funny comments bring an unfooled, Holden Caulfield-ish distaste to white self-loathing, and Banks offers wry, lacerating descriptions of blue-collar white America, whether in the mall, at Christmas, or on package tours. He is more convincing on the problem than the solution, combining superb details with a wilful naivety of vision. None the less, he gives an impressive new vitality to any number of old formulas in this unfailingly readable novel. Rule of the Bone is probably more commercial than his previous work and it seems set to have backpack currency with people of Bone's age and above.