by Chuck Kinder
Male adolescence can be a mess, as writers historically have noticed, and it must have been especially painful in the '50s, what with James Dean as the role model. The Silver Ghost is a racing Porsche like the one Dean was driving when he died. In this novel, the 17-year-old antihero drives one that's also been in an accident; it froze the speedometer at 110 mph. He loves a girl who looks like Sandra Dee, and on a local West Virginia TV bandstand show they slow-dance for the camera. Kinder's prose comes in heavy rushes, as in "Jimbo Stark, old Captain Rebel Without a Cause On the Road, steely eyed, grinning tightly, his soul whoopeeing, roars relentlessly through the rainy southern night as he makes the perfect clean getaway in the stolen Silver Ghost." Oh, for a modern version of J. D. Salinger's cool Holden Caulfield. (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, $8.95)
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