The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys

Set in Savannah, Georgia, in the early 1970s, this is a novel of the anarchic joy of youth and encounters with the concerns of early adulthood. Francis Doyle, Tim Sullivan, and their three closest friends are altar boys at Blessed Heart Catholic Church and eighth-grade classmates at the parish school. They are also inveterate pranksters, artistic, and unimpressed by adult authority. When Sodom vs. Gomorrah '74, their collaborative comic book depicting Blessed Heart's nuns and priests gleefully breaking the seventh commandment, falls into the hands of the principal, the boys, certain that their parents will be informed, conspire to create an audacious diversion. Woven into the details of the boys' preparations for the stunt are touching, hilarious renderings of the school day routine and the initiatory rites of male adolescence, from the first serious kiss to the first serious hangover.From Publishers WeeklyHeartbreaking yet hilarious, this posthumous novel set in Savannah, Ga., in the 1970s chronicles a school year in the life of narrator Francis Doyle, an eighth-grader at the parish school of the Blessed Heart. Though the plot turns on the youthful pranks of Francis's gang, Fuhrman brings to his characters a near-adult consciousness as rites of passage like the first kiss are interwoven with imaginative acts of adolescent revolt and moments of terrible family life. Francis, soulful and suffering from a hernia, is beaten regularly by his father and turns to drink. He falls in love with Margie--a delicate, off-balance girl with a "wrist fragile as a swan's throat," who attempted suicide the year before--and longs for her with a sensual need that is captivating. When Francis first sees her, in church, the touching, love-at-first-sight moment is juxtaposed with the slapstick antics of a dog, with "tags clinking," who urinates against the altar. By marrying the earnest to the ridiculous, Fuhrman captures the sublime intensity of adolescence. But the novel expands beyond first-rate character studies as Francis and his friends struggle against the racial prejudice that saturates their school and neighborhood and threatens to explode into a race riot when a black schoolmate breaks a duck's wing with a baseball bat. Fuhrman (1960-1991) died of cancer while working on the final revision of this book--his first and last, which can be compared to many of the classic coming-of-age novels. Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc. From BooklistOn the cusp of adolescence, some 13-year-old boys band together, swigging the Sacrament wine behind their priests' backs and drawing illicit comic books depicting nuns and priests engaged in--you guessed it--sex. This fictional memoir of a Catholic boyhood concentrates on the coming-of-age of its narrator, Francis, who a year before the book begins, at 12, attempted suicide. No wonder, considering the dark underside of punitive Catholicism that Francis' story puts generously on display, not least in the figure of the boy's father, who literally beats his son bloody for not eating scorched corned beef. Francis' mother looks on horror-struck and cowed; afterward she is helpless except for the salve she administers. As Francis blunders through his first sexual encounter with a much more experienced girl, gets himself muddy and bloody in school-yard fights with his buddies, and eventually faces the frailty of human life, this darkly comic work by an author who died young well before its publication takes on an increasingly savage tone full of foreboding, grief, and very Catholic reparation. Whitney Scott