Bloodbrothers is an old American story with a new ending: an adolescent undergoes a rite de passage, then returns home instead of lighting out for the territories. Mr Price's technique mirrors this tension between freedom and captivity. On the surface the novel is liberated from decorum and cliché. The dialogue has the energetic authentic sound made familiar by [Hubert Selby's] Last Exit to Brooklyn and recent films like Mean Streets and Dog Day Afternoon. But underneath it is conventionally authoritarian: heavily plotted, not in the serio-comic manner of Thomas Pynchon, but in the more ordinary sense of seeming contrived. For instance, Stony has a friend who seems almost magically transformed from a moron to a sage dispenser of friendly counsel when he takes over the management of his uncle's lingerie store—a rather obvious foil for Stony. The events leading to Stony's final renunciation seem especially hard to...