Rat Life: A Mystery.

Arnold, Tedd (author).

Fourteen-year-old Todd entertains his classmates with gross-out tales, concocting crude metaphors for diarrhea (“sewer stew”), but parallels with Arnold’s irreverent picture books (Parts, 2004) end there. Goofy boyhood preoccupations fade early in this ambitious first novel, in which Todd’s friendship with Rat, a soldier recently returned from Vietnam, awakens the adolescent to ethical ambiguities and often-cruel realities, and pushes his writing hobby in new directions. As details about Rat’s background emerge, and incidents suggest he may fit the “ticking time bomb psycho” profile of a Vietnam vet, Todd reluctantly begins to trace links between his friend and an unsolved murder. The novel’s slow, introspective first half may lose some readers, and there are too many subplots, including a catastrophic flood that feels abruptly introduced and unnecessarily sensational. Even so, Arnold is an impressively adept writer; especially strong is his portrayal of Rat, who keeps readers on the knife’s edge between sympathy and mistrust and whose enigmatic persona lends as much credence to the book’s classification as a mystery as its more traditional gumshoe elements.