The main setting of this debut novel is Manhattan's Lower East Side in the late '80s--that pivotal time just before gentrification, when derelict buildings were occupied by drug dealers, immigrants and runaways. Every character in this tale is somehow flawed, but we keep pulling for them, hoping that they will sort themselves out, instead of endlessly chasing whatever a drug or cult experience has promised.
Jude Keffy-Horn is the unlikely hero/protagonist who, despite a possible diagnosis of Fetal Alcohol Syndrome and indifferent parenting, might just emerge a whole person. Jude and his best friend, Teddy, are druggie adolescents in the rural metropolis of Lintonburg, Vt. The boys come by their taste for drugs honestly: Jude's father, Les, is a drug dealer in New York, and his mother makes her living as a glass blower--and most of her inventory consists of bongs. Teddy's splintered home (his mother, "Queen Bea," leaves as the novel begins) presages Bad Choices Ahead. Jude and Teddy smoke pot, huff and do whatever it takes to maintain a constant high. On Jude's 16th birthday, they hook up with visiting Eliza; before she boards the train back to New York a mere six hours later, Teddy is dead from a cocaine overdose and she is pregnant by him. Jude is sent to New York to live with his father.
Enter Johnny, Teddy's 18-year-old half-brother--he marries Eliza so that he can raise Teddy's child. One problem: Johnny is in the closet, except to his boyfriend, Rooster, but they, and very soon Jude and Eliza, become members of "straight-edge," a cult movement that eschews meat, sex and drugs--but not punk rock.
In Ten Thousand Saints, Henderson has captured the dynamic of a generation of kids trying to overcome the legacy of whacked-out parents, terminal permissiveness and no rudder. --Valerie Ryan, Cannon Beach Book Company, Ore.