King Dork (review)

Fourteen-year-old Tom Henderson is unaffectionately known at school as "Chi-Mo," short for "child molester" (a joke based on a careers test that indicated he would be a good candidate for the clergy), and that's pretty much the least objectionable aspect of his days. Otherwise, he hangs out with his alphabetical-order friend, Sam Hellerman, dreams about their band in its various incarnations, and endures abuse from popular classmates and bizarreness from teachers, whether it be Mr. Schtuppe and his single-minded focus on the vocabulary (which he mispronounces) in Catcher in the Rye or gym teacher Mr. Teone, who seems to take a particular delight in taunting Tom. After a revelatory makeout session with a strange girl at a party and the discovery of his late father's high-school reading material, complete with cryptic and tantalizing notes, Tom goes in search of the solution to at least two mysteries, the whereabouts of the girl and the secret Tom's father was keeping, but he's really hoping to uncover the full story of his father's possibly suicidal, possibly accidental death. Tom's narration is piercingly satirical and acidly witty without being mature beyond his years, but the astringency is sweetened by a certain embarrassed warmheartedness, especially evident in his awkward tenderness toward his eccentric mother and reluctant sympathy for his eager, aging-hippie stepfather. The book takes great pleasure in an elaborate dance with Salinger's Catcher in the Rye, simultaneously lambasting it (and its aficionados, members of the "Catcher Cult"), echoing it, and employing it as a site for clues in the mystery about Tom's father, but readers won't need to be familiar with Salinger's classic to appreciate Portman's savaging of its generation and declaration of the struggle of the subsequent one. The mystery's resolution isn't as satisfying as its pursuit, but the real mystery here is the secret of surviving high school; Tom may not have cracked it completely, but he's got a few more clues than he used to, and that's all that anybody could ask. Readers who relished the rawness and comedy of Going's Fat Kid Rules the World (BCCB 6/03) will take the rich eccentricity of Tom's story to their hearts. Appended is a spoof glossary, complete with mispronunciations, of various vaguely relevant terms, and a "bandography" chronicling Tom and Sam's various hypothetical albums.