The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys A Novel [Paperback]

CHRIS FUHRMAN grew up as a Catholic in Savannah, Georgia, where he was born in 1960. He received his master's degree from Columbia University. Fuhrman died of cancer in 1991 while working on the final revision of The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys, his first and only novel.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.

Fuhrman handles his material with wit and grace. There are no false remembrances, there is no condescension; the boys appear here in all their gum-chewing, insult-spitting, girl fantasizing naivete and candor.

Fuhrman takes wicked pleasure in scraping teen innocence against the graveled, perverse underbelly of suburban childhood.

Heartbreaking yet hilarious . . . By marrying the earnest to the ridiculous, Fuhrman captures the sublime intensity of adolescence.

One of the most strikingly original novels of recent memory.

The author's real triumph lies in his ability to plumb wild young minds, to reveal the ardent romantic hearts that beat within wisecracking boys. Their wild, unselfclS�