BOOKS . . . "RULE OF THE BONE"

The advance press for the new book by Russell Banks (HarperCollins; 390 pages; $22) tries hard to pass the novel off as the story of a Huck Finn-esque mall rat in upstate New York. Unfortunately, it was a lot easier to be an American archetype when Huck and Jim floated down the Mississippi, a ready-made metaphor. It's a much more difficult, and much less interesting, trick for Bone, the 14 year old narrator of this book, who's stuck not with a river but a mere shopping mall, a place whereTIME book critic John Skowsays "you can sort of float, but not too far, just around in the same old circle, which gets kind of boring even if you manage to score some decent weed."

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Thursday's TIME Daily