"Rose of No Man's Land": Wry commentary, teenage sass

"Rose of No Man's Land"
by Michelle Tea
MacAdam/Cage, 306 pp., $22

The heroine of "Rose of No Man's Land," Michelle Tea's riotous paean to teenage-girl lonerdom, is Trisha Driscoll, a world-weary 14-year-old who sits in her room guzzling beer. She lives in a blue-collar suburb of Boston with her hypochondriac slacker mom, her mom's "mulleted loser" boyfriend and her hairdresser sister Kristy, whose big plan for the summer is to put together an audition tape for "The Real World" — "so that some stupid MTV person fascinated with white trash people will see that Kristy is the real thing, stick her on the show and wait for her to say ignorant things to the black person and the gay person." Trisha may not get out much, but she's wise to the ways of the world.

Her own ambitions are touchingly modest: to make a friend. She meets an unlikely candidate at the mall. Waifish and street-savvy, Rose leads Trisha on a wild hitchhiking adventure involving a stolen cellphone, a drug-dealing pedophile and a tattoo parlor. Hopped-up on crystal meth, the girls get frisky with each other at the local putt-putt. Not bad for a first night out.

What keeps you glued to the page through the weavings of plot is Trisha's wry commentary, delivered with teenage-girl brio, on everything from family life and mall culture to the evils of television and cigarettes.

Here's Trisha on the subject of her mother's live-in boyfriend: "Ma says about Donnie: 'At least he doesn't bother you girls.' By 'bother' she means 'try to have sex with,' and she says it like we, me and Kristy, should drop to our knees and kiss the peeling linoleum and prostrate ourselves to the patron saint of creepy dudes for sending us such a winner. I think the biggest problem between me and my family ... is we have really different standards."

For Trisha, the evening with Rose is also a journey of sexual self-discovery and a hard lesson in the quickly shifting allegiances of female friendship. Tea — who has published four other books, including "Rent Girl," an illustrated novel based on her experiences as a lesbian prostitute — strikes a nice balance between drug-fueled sexual experimentation and the quieter concerns of a traditional coming-of-age story. Her novel is full of fire and sass and honest, good writing, and it seems marked for cult status among teen girls.