by JULIET WATERS

Somewhere outside the world of the 12-year-old narrator of Dan Pope's first novel, In The Cherry Tree, people are reading I'm OK - You're OK. The year is 1974 and pop psychology is in its infancy. Those people, however, aren't living on the same middle-American street as Timmy. The folks on Apple Hill Road talk and treat each other with a brutal and often hilarious disregard for concepts like self-esteem, dignity and empathy. It's not that they don't care - it's much more that they just don't have a clue.

Timmy and his friends gleefully abuse each other and small animals with an abandon that these days would land them on a list of potential highschool assassins. Meanwhile, they worship Elton John, and know the lyrics of "The Night Chicago Died" by heart. When Timmy has problems falling asleep because of a particularly disturbing fight between his parents, he mentally replays his favourite movie, Killdozer, the story of a demonically possessed bulldozer that chases its victims around a Pacific island. Throughout the book, he refers to his parents only as The Mom and The Dad, as though they were B-movie monsters.

In a certain sense they are. His sharp-tempered WASP mother and extravagant, self-indulgent Italian father are a textbook case of opposites attracting. As they and their friends knock back the afternoon Scotches, they torture each other in a cruel theatrical banter that sounds like an uncensored episode of an ABC after-school special. It's debatable whether this is how his parents really are, or if this is how Timmy's emotionally stunted mind is remembering them. Either way, the point is made: these people are not going to be much help to him in figuring out the highs and lows of adolescence.

When Timmy's mother gathers the kids together to tell them that she's kicked their father out of the house, it's pretty clear she's never considered buying a book on how to help kids through divorce. "This isn't your father's decision," she tells them when they want to know what he has to say about it. "He has no choice in the matter whatsoever. I'm sorry but that's the way it is. He's going to have to move out of the house. From now on, it'll be just the four of us. We'll get along fine without him. It'll be like an adventure, you'll see."

Pope's achievement is to simultaneously capture the brutality and the normality of this setting. The ineptitude of these characters is so perfectly understandable in the culture they're living in. Still, when neighbours stand idly by as a bully kicks his middle-aged mother in the stomach and when Timmy's mother confiscates a child-porn magazine left by a stranger in his tree house and does little but admonish Timmy for looking at "filth," Pope reminds us that this era is not especially worthy of nostalgia.

In the Cherry Tree is an extremely clever and unexpectedly poignant mood piece. If Todd Haynes is looking for a sequel to Far From Heaven, he should take a serious look at this novel. Beneath the melodrama and the bright, kitschy memories, Pope taps into some very real wounds. This is not, however, the kind of novel that will move every reader. There's a hopelessness to Timmy's life that's ultimately pretty depressing, and the irony often creates a distance that undermines the emotional punch. As to whether this novel will appeal to anyone who didn't hit puberty in the mid-'70s, it's hard to say. Puberty isn't exactly a problem that's been solved. Ten years ago Anne Lamott wondered "how on earth anyone can bring a child into this world knowing full well that he or she is eventually going to have to go through the seventh and eighth grades," a point that seems just as funny and just as true today.

In The Cherry Tree by Dan Pope, Picador, pb, 262pp, $14