Wrapped Up In Books: King Dork
Before I get started, I’d like to say that I had no idea the Onion’s AV Club had a column of the same name. I’m a badly informed geek, evidently. So, if you’ve a name you’d like to suggest for the feature, drop a note in the comments.
This week’s book, King Dork was written by Frank Portman, better known as Dr. Frank of the Mr. T Experience. It’s his first novel, and I’ve alternately described it as “a book for people who hated Catcher In the Rye,” as well as “this book about high school that’s not fake at all, kind of punk rock” and “that book by the dude from the Mr. T Experience.”
Anti-Catcher is a little bit of a cheap explanation for the book, considering Tom Henderson, the main character, carries around his deceased father’s copy around and comments on the book as the action unfolds. There’s a lot going on in the novel, almost too much at times, especially when you factor in the amazing amount of band names dropped. There’s a hilarious glossary in the back, written by Henderson that goes a long way towards helping to explain everything that goes on.
King Dork is a book whose flaws I would have totally ignored if it’d come out when I was in high school. As things went, it came out when I was 26, and I kind of got smitten with it. The scene where Henderson’s band plays their first show, gains a name (there are 19 names picked for the band over the year that the novel takes place), and starts a panic is one of the most well-written scenes depicting a rock show that I’ve ever read. The rest of it: mooning over the girl, using music as a way to express emotions, playing in a band (well, maybe not the band part), everything is written in a voice that makes me think that Portman hasn’t forgotten one bit about how it feels to go through high school. King Dork neither talks down to its readers, nor does it try and ingratiate itself with knowing slang. It’s simply a well-told story that happens to feature rock ‘n’ roll, crushes, conspiracies, mysteries, and girls.
Portman’s second novel, Andromeda Klein has been pushed back time and time again. The trade edition of King Dork featured an excerpt claiming that Klein would be out in the fall of 2008, and even before that, it’d been announced it would be out in January of 2008. It’s now officially coming out August 25 from Delacorte, and I am reserving my copy as soon as I can.
