The Bewildered
A Novel
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
In Portland, Orgeon, three high school friends—Leon, Chris and Kayla—spend their time skateboarding studying foreign languages and classical music, and plotting a shared future that will avoid the superficiality they witness in the adult world around them. There is only one adult they admire, whom they suspect might hold secrets worth knowing.
Natalie lives alone in a decrepit trailer, yet seems happy, and to have few concerns. As they befriend her she persuades them to harvest copper wire from the high tension electrical lines in the countryside around the city, until one day when there is an accident in which Leon is electrocuted. He appears to shake it off, yet soon—despite his denials of anything being wrong—his behavior comes to resemble Natalie's in many ways.
The mystery of what has happened to Leon (and to Natalie) leads Kayla and Chris on an adventure that takes them into the world of a remarkable group of people. These people live among us and are almost impossible to recognize, yet they possess different needs, and different powers. What they do not possess is insight into their condition, or any awareness that they are different. Others are left to wonder at—and attempt to profit from—the possibilities these people contain. Chris and Kayla are not alone in attempting to study, to use, and perhaps even to join their ranks.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Oddball teens and even odder adults people Rock's quietly mysterious latest novel (after 2001's The Ambidextrist). Bonded by their disdain of their superficial peers, 15-year-olds Kayla, Chris and Leon spend their free time skateboarding along the gray Portland, Ore., streets and stripping copper wire from telephone poles. The latter activity they perform on behalf of a very peculiar woman named Natalie, who lives in a beat-up trailer and who sells the wire to a creepy guy named Chesterton. When Leon is badly shocked on one wire-hunting trip, the adolescent trio figure they ought to get to the bottom of the project; the book's first half follows them on their pursuit of Natalie as she reconnects with Steven, a colleague from her corporate past, and indulges her pastime of dressing up like a 1976 Playboy playmate. What they can't figure out is her obsession with electricity and copper wire. Leon begins to act strangely, and the plot takes a turn for the weird when Chesterton's experiments with the wire are revealed. Rock never quite establishes the lure of the experiments to the various secondary characters, and the novel as a whole lacks tightness. But Rock does a fine job fostering a sense of foreboding in his strange world of outsider's Portland, and each member of his ensemble cast has his or her own eccentric appeal.
