Ernest Hebert delivers cautionary tale in `Mad Boys’

MAD BOYS, by Ernest Hebert, University Press of New England, 216 pages, $22.

“The inspiration for `Mad Boys’ came from a photograph I saw of a boy who had been raped and murdered. I thought: this is the Huck Finn of our time; what if he got away?”

— Author’s Note, “Mad Boys”

Echoes of “Huck Finn” abound throughout Ernest Hebert’s latest novel; like Twain, he laces his picaresque story with biting social commentary. His protagonist, 13-year-old “Web” Webster, is not only our guide through a flawed America, he is the embodiment of the human damage those flaws engender.

The book’s brief prologue, a series of journal entries by one Henri Scratch, quickly sets up the situation. Scratch, a mad essayist who lives in a van, is writing a treatise to support his theory of Virtual Realism. The world, he argues, is one of style rather than of substance, “not of fairness but of Vanity Fair; not of speech, but of spin; not of the chicken, but of the McNugget.”

Through these entries, we learn that Scratch abducted a boy (Web) four years earlier and has held him captive in the van for purposes hinted at but never stated. The boy’s sole source of entertainment is television, the icon of Virtual Realism. With the onset of puberty, however, the boy has become restless and in the final entry Scratch has drowned him in the mud of a New Hampshire swamp.

Chapter One begins as Web emerges naked from the mud, stripped of his memory and his sanity. He has visions of weird alter egos — “Xiphi,” “the Alien,” “Langdon,” “The Director,” as well as jumbled memories of a “mother ship” (his nickname for Scratch’s van). Rescued and hospitalized, he becomes more confused as a mysterious half brother and long-lost father re-enter his life, bringing vague hints of a past as strange as his own confused hallucinations. Royal, the brother, comes and goes with such suddenness that the reader begins to suspect that he is another figment of Web’s imagination. Conversely, the hallucinatory characters are portrayed in such detail that it is difficult not to wonder if they are real.

Released into the care of his father, a ’60s radical still wanted by the FBI, Web achieves a momentary, fragile equilibrium. From his father he learns that his mother is a member of the Children of the Cacti, a New Mexican cult devoted to the philosophy of Virtual Realism. When Web’s father dies the boy sets off in search of her.

Web’s quest takes the reader through a satirically exaggerated America that is at once familiar and surreal. In New York a colony of feminists has retreated to underground catacombs. Fast-food restaurants offer computer menus complete with lists of available prayers: “Catholic (Hold the Sermon), Protestant With the Works (Judgment Day and Damnation), Specials: Ecumenism, Sweet ‘n Sour (Hedonism and Hair Shirts).” In New Mexico Web becomes embroiled with warring foreign political factions who have been imported and subsidized to carry on their bloody civil war in front of TV cameras.

Hebert’s jumps from the real to the surreal are seamless. It is often impossible to retrace our steps and discern at what point the boundaries of logic were crossed.

Sadly, there is nothing unrealistic about the scores of other “mad boys” (and girls), Web encounters along the way; children abused and abandoned by an older generation whose insatiable need for instant gratification numbs them like a drug.

Darkly comic as Swift’s “Gulliver’s Travels,” as chillingly logical as Atwood’s “Handmaid’s Tale,” “Mad Boys” is, like these, a cautionary tale: If we don’t wake up and pay attention to the direction society is going, we may not like where we end up.

Lynn Flewelling lives in Bangor.