SOME BOYS GROW ON YOU, AND SOME GROW UP TO BE WRITERS

Author: By Katherine A. Powers

Date: SUNDAY, July 26, 1998

Page: F4

Section: Books

The book is written with heavy irony, the sort young people can really sink their fangs into. It is the story of Benjamin Thurlow Ballou, who lives with his parents in Smiles, Pa. Mummy, as she is called, is a grand figure possessed of a college degree, high self-esteem, a bottomless well of love for her son, and infinite contempt for mild-mannered Daddy, a TV repairman. At home, Daddy takes refuge in the big TV set, ostensibly fixing wires, in reality playing solitaire and eating sandwiches (tongue and Swiss on rye, sometimes roast beef). Daddy's soulmate is Sid, an Airedale and gifted catcher of flies who is banished from the house by Mummy when precious Benjy learns to walk. As it happens, that's no skin off Sid's nose, for, among other things, Benjy's ``very special sad-little-boy voice'' makes him ``want to stuff his ears with dirt and pound his head hard on the ground.''

I can't give you the whole story, much as I'd like to; suffice it to say that Benjy, an excruciating prig, is visited by a Good Fairy wearing a baseball suit, toting a cigar, and sporting a hangover, who grants him a wish. The consequences of this are most rewarding for the reader who has developed an exquisite loathing for Benjy and Mummy. We leave the book with Daddy having a beer, smoking his own cigar, and watching a Wild West program on TV with his pal Sid. `` `Have a beer, Sid?' '' asks Daddy. ``Sid shook his head no, but with his paws he thumped the floor in a way which meant, `I like it, but it doesn't like me!' ''

``Benjy'' was much on my mind as I read Roy Blount Jr.'s ``Be Sweet: A Conditional Love Story'' (Knopf, $24). I think Blount is a very funny man, and his short pieces and poems are usually delightful. But I am mystified by this book, which is an account of his upbringing and of his coming to be a writer. He is very upset with his mother, now dead; this much is clear. But why, I kept wondering. To be sure, she didn't ceaselessly praise him and dote on him; and on many occasions, she didn't even say the right thing. Still, it occurred to me that what Blount wants is . . . Mummy! I see her ilk in flourishing, top-volume relationships with precociously vocal tots in Bread and Circus -- where all the world's a stage -- and the spectacle makes me feel like doing a Sid. On the other hand, perhaps I should have been Roy Blount's mother: I can't see tormenting him with ``Now, you be sweet.'' No, no, not that. But I can hear me saying quite clearly, ``Wise up, Buster.''

So, here it is: I have been thinking about boyhood, one of the great subjects of literature. (Girlhood is less so, for obvious reasons, though the novelist Raymond Kennedy is a master at it, and Charles Portis's ``True Grit'' should be on everyone's shelf.) Two most entertaining novels have recently appeared with boys at their center. ``The Way I Found Her'' by Rose Tremain (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $25; reviewed on Page F3) is about 13-year-old Lewis Little, an English schoolboy who is spending the summer holiday in Paris with his mother, Alice. She is translating a novel, and the two of them are the guests of the book's author, Valentina Gavril, a glamorous, 40ish Russian emigre, wildly successful romance writer, and bossy person. She has a dog called Sergei who becomes Lewis's companion.

Very quickly things become not what they seem: Lewis hears a mysterious whistling emerging from a locked room; he discovers that Valentina's last translator departed under sinister circumstances; he senses that there's something fishy about Valentina's new novel, and that his mother is up to no good. He falls in love with Valentina and she disappears. Such drama and adventure. And all informed with the sensibility of a 13-year-old boy who is trying to figure things out: life, love, and now this terrible disappearance.

``About a Boy'' by Nick Hornby (Riverhead Press, $22.95) has one of the most perfectly drawn pictures of an obtuse mother, of a certain kind of laid-back brain, that I have ever encountered in a book. The character in question is Fiona, a woman whose type I know well from life as she, too, may be found in the greengrocer's emporium mentioned above. Fiona is the single mother of Marcus, a 12-year-old who has just moved into a barbaric new school in London. Fiona, illogical, self-absorbed, and relentlessly sincere, is on the brink of sorting her life out -- that is, when she's not on the brink of killing herself. She believes in thinking for oneself, as she puts it, but is adamant about what should be arrived at from this process: the alternative lifestyle, complete with vegetarianism, Joni Mitchell, and goofy clothes.

Poor Marcus; he is an outcast. An unlikely solution to his problems appears in the shape of Will, a wealthy idler, heroic liar, and Lothario who has decided that meetings for single parents are ideal places to pick up women. Frankly, Will's life is not working out as he had expected -- though he's not clear on what that was -- and Marcus becomes for him an even more unlikely entree into reality. Here is a book that not only made me laugh but, in its intelligence, nuance, and generosity toward unlovely characters, was a completely satisfying entertainment.

I finished this excursion into boyhood reluctantly and turned my attention to the sound of a skateboard thumping my way and began to rehearse: ``OK, the first thing I'm going to say is that I've just about had it, and the next time either of you boys leaves the house with your room in the condition that I find it now -- with socks, CDs, and ice cream bowls in promiscuous union, and unmade beds covered with baseball cards and those stupid trousers -- there will be no skating for a week, no, make that a year; no computer games ever again; and heads will roll.''

Can there be any question that my own sons will remember me fondly?