Thumbsucker

the long version

"This eighties-centric, Ritalin-fueled, comic novel by a writer to watch brings energy and originality to the classic Midwestern coming-of-age story."--BOOK JACKET. "Meet Justin Cobb, "the King Kong of oral obsessives" (as his dentist dubs him) and the most appealingly bright and screwed-up fictional adolescent since Holden Caulfield donned his hunter's cap. For years, no remedy - not orthodontia, not the escalating threats of his father, Mike, a washed-out linebacker turned sporting goods entrepreneur, not the noxious cayenne pepper-based Suk-No-Mor - can cure Justin's thumbsucking habit. Then a course of hypnosis seemingly does the trick, but true to the conservatism of neurotic energy, the problem doesn't so much disappear as relocate. Sex, substance abuse, speech team, flyfishing, honest work, even Mormonism - Justin throws himself into each pursuit with a hyperactive energy that even his daily Ritalin dose does little to blunt. Each time, however, he discovers that there is no escaping the unruly imperatives of his self and the confines of his deeply eccentric family. The only "cure" for the adolescent condition is time and distance."--BOOK JACKET.