All About Lulu

Helmed by the instantly likeable Will Miller, All About Lulu painfully zeros in on adolescent obsession and heartbreak. The story opens in a suburb of Los Angeles in the late ’70s, as seven-year-old Will’s mother succumbs to cancer. A vegetarian weakling in a family of meathead musclemen, he spends the next few years in a lonely fog, until the arrival of his new stepsister, Lulu.

Will is a goner from the moment he sees her—a verbose little girl with a pieced-together beauty—and the two grow inseparable. They create their own language with 118 words for “two,” and stealthily explore each other’s bodies. But when Lulu returns from a summer at cheerleading camp, she’s mysteriously closed and distant, and Will spends much of the novel’s remainder trying to figure out why.

As Lulu passes through a painful adolescence and into a tortured young adulthood, Will builds a strange, rich life out of very little. A burger-flipper and philosophy student, his gift for observation and his sharp sense of the ridiculous keep him from utter Lulu-less despair. He runs with acne-scarred Lotharios and an Eastern European entrepreneur, and finds transcendence in hot-dog peddling and a fledgling radio career. Lulu’s away but never forgotten; the angsty, schizophrenic letters she sends from Seattle are so maddeningly convincing that you wonder whether Evison mined creased and tear-stained source materials from his own youth for inspiration. When Lulu’s secrets are revealed, in a sepia-toned chapter that reads like a coda, it’s with a leaden grace more true to life than revelation.

With high wit and a pitch-perfect ear for the comic mundanity of everyday speech, All About Lulu earns its moments of painful, pure tenderness. At times it hits you right in the place that good music does, with a sharp, heady sweetness. Unfolding under Evison’s unerring eye, even an aimless life seems full to bursting.