Nearing's Grace by Scott Sommer is a … mature book: in fact, it is partly about what constitutes genuine maturity. Narrated in the first person by a college drop-out with a nice line in irony, it inevitably calls to mind The Catcher in the Rye—especially as Henry Nearing also shares Holden Caulfield's preoccupation with death: he rides a motor-bike called Thanatos and writes imaginary letters to his dead mother. The world he sardonically surveys, however, is very different from Holden Caulfield's. College sex is no longer a matter of heavy petting but strenuous all-night sessions fuelled by coke and Quaaludes.

For all their sexy rompings, the book's characters finally emerge as forlorn. Their hectic hedonism increasingly seems a panic-flight from the pressures of reality….

Nearing himself is a virtuoso of irony—it is his real grace. Thanks to it, the book's sad facts are given very funny formulations.