BAND: Catch Her in the RyeGUITAR: Frank Port Man Is A GeniusBASS AND LAUGHING MY ASS OFF: J.D. SalingerFIRST ALBUM: King Dork LOL! Which is about all I did while reading Frank Portman’s KING DORK. Besides wanting to initiate Reader’s Theatre and read passages aloud to my friends, family, or basically
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BAND: Catch Her in the RyeGUITAR: Frank Port Man Is A GeniusBASS AND LAUGHING MY ASS OFF: J.D. SalingerFIRST ALBUM: King Dork LOL! Which is about all I did while reading Frank Portman’s KING DORK. Besides wanting to initiate Reader’s Theatre and read passages aloud to my friends, family, or basically anyone within earshot. This clever parody of J.D. Salinger’s CATCHER IN THE RYE is packed with enough sarcastic humor to make Mad Magazine look like Highlights for Children. Holden Caulfield, step aside for the new king in town: Tom Henderson, great American nobody, Chi-mo, Hender-fag, Sheepie, and King Dork. His Hillmont High School life is a combination of unsuccesses—from his exploits with girls, to his wannabe band that doesn’t even have a drummer and amps...or guitars, to his father killed in a hit and run (or is that just what they told everyone?), to his ground-proximity position on the social totum pole. But when his alphabetical-order friend, Sam Hellerman, drags him to this party where he meets the mysterious fake-mod Fiona (who disappears and leaves him wanting), his life spirals into a humorously-obsessed scavenger hunt for the first girl he’s ever made out with. The spiral gets bigger when he finds an old copy of C.I.T.R. in a load of his Dad’s old books and discovers a secret code within the pages. The Catcher Code, or something. Tom’s desire to know more about his Dad, and making out with Fiona for that matter, leads him into experiences he never thought he’d have. Dead bodies, devil heads, shrinks, bloody noses, monks, a little red book, child molesters, laundry receipts, TIT, the Bible, police investigations, an accidental fight, and tranquilizers. Cause without that kind of stuff, life stays sort of typical.For a book that's as random as it is strategic, fresh as it is a copy, ordinary as it is hilarious, and smallscale as it is worldchanging, it won't be dethroning CATCHER IN THE RYE anytime soon. It's just a half step away from that special something a novel can do to my insides. I don't even know I can put my finger on it, besides to say that I didn't have to think. But I laughed out loud till I started to wonder if people thought I was faking it. And Tom's forever enshrined in my brain right there next to Holden. Maybe therein lies its genius.
