Alicia Erian: Towelhead

Whither the after-school special? How many years--decades, even--have passed since networks presumed to instruct young adults about scary things like drugs and moral relativism in the great wide world? Sure, adept viewers can intuit basic life strategies from The Real World--don't party all the time or expect that every hookup will end painlessly. The Lifetime channel's endless retelling of woman-in-peril stories fuses fear and empowerment in a post-feminist concoction. Religious television, with its call for chastity before age 40, has picked up the rest of the portfolio.

Yet there's still a certain kind of contemporary ethical riddle that deserves comparison to the original well-meaning, if often gawky, art form. Towelhead is a novel you can knock back between 3:30 and 6:00. And it's topical, telling the painful, yet ultimately redemptive, story of a half-Irish/half-Lebanese teen coming of age during the first Gulf War. Dad is the prudish tyrant, well meaning but haphazardly brutal. He's angered by the lack of "the Arab perspective" anywhere in the media, and flustered by anything emotional, biological, squishy. Mom is estranged, off in upstate New York, a narcissistic kid herself who keeps using the phone to thrust daughter Jasira into the front lines of marital conflict. For irony's sake, the whole stew takes place amid the grotesquely overbuilt condos of the burbs of oil-boom Houston.

But there was a reason after-school specials endured as long as they did, and it wasn't camp mockery. So it is with this book by first-time novelist Alicia Erian, whose unflinching contemplation of teenage confusion, longing, and pain-warped-into-love mostly worms its way past your defenses.

For most of the story, Jasira is a mess, a willingly blank canvas across whose scarily mature body few men can resist scribbling their narcissistic whims. Her father enforces his dream of hoarding her from every pain and injury through blows; her neighbor, a he-man reservist, forces her into sex she's hugely unready for. Even her first sorta-boyfriend, Thomas, thinks she can't get enough of his lovin'. Jasira's body keeps betraying her, sending out signals she can't control and responding to gestures she'd rather turn down.

Yet Jasira isn't just a victim. Sometimes she's alarmingly adult in her inklings of morality and desire. More often she's hopeful that someone will offer her a hint of the right thing to do. And occasionally, she's irritatingly inert or removed from the consequences of her actions. In other words, she's a real teenager. The strict honesty of her voice ("When the orgasm came, I looked in the mirror and thought I might be pretty, but then it ended and I changed my mind") is appealing. And Erian tugs the heartstrings effectively: You can't help rooting for Jasira. She's not plucky, exactly, but she's the kind of kid adults hope will muddle through, even if she stumbles a lot along the way. As the genre requires, the Gulf War backdrop offers token relevance rather than serving as an organic component of the story, and the novel's resolution, though authentically touching, is far too neat.

Occasional nuggets hint at this book's spikier potential: Jasira's father protests America's delaying the invasion until January. "Daddy said he wasn't going to buy presents this year, for anyone. He said my present would have to be knowing that my father was not a pawn of the regime." But most of it works as an entirely respectable lead-in for the hometown news team at 6:00 and 10:00.