Pizza Face Or, the Hero of Suburbia

Friendless misfit Andy--plagued by pimples and unpopularity--begins a campaign for recognition, corresponding with Jimmy Carter, befriending a Sears Roebuck model, and making a blind date with a celebrity

Andy is a gawky teenager with a bad complexion living with his distracted parents in Charlotte, N.C. , in the late '70s. He collects presidential campaign buttons and signed portraits, counts President Carter among his pen pals and lobbies his school to sponsor a penmanship contest. He is a nerd, surely, but he is also gay, an awareness of which unfolds so naturally--for both the reader and Andy--that an affecting message of tolerance is silently and eloquently conveyed. Siman's main intent, however, is capturing a time and place by showing the painful accommodation of someone who is different, for Andy surely sticks out. His only "real planned outfit" is "yellow bell-bottoms, an open-necked slippery shirt with brightly colored parakeets, a puka shell necklace . . . and earth shoes." Then there is the pecking order for teenage employment at the mall: "The popular people sold Levi's; heavyset ones worked at the Cheese Hut; cool people worked at the Record Bar." Andy ends up at the Burger Chef--with colleagues "Iced Tea" and "Peanut Butter"--on the "other side of town." Siman's deadpan humor and sharp eye distinguish this engaging and finally triumphant passage of a self-conscious boy into a healthy acceptance of his otherness, and Andy's terminal crush on a college roommate is touchingly rendered.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

A comic debut that takes a fast trot through the homosexual coming-of-age of a middle-class North Carolina adolescent: a series of superficial set-pieces mostly, but the novel finally builds when its locale shifts to Washington, D.C. Andy, who ``was always looking for the right candidate,'' fills his loneliness by building a shrine to Jimmy Carter in his bedroom and by calling older men who collect political memorabilia: ``In high school, Andy's goal was to have the biggest Jimmy Carter collection in the whole country.'' Through this obsession, he meets a string of grotesques as well as Preston, who ``models underpants in the `Dads-n-Lads' section of the Sears, Roebuck catalogue.'' As Andy discovers his sexual orientation, he also gets a case of the zits--he ``preferred being called `Pizza Face' to `Monster Face.' '' The story bogs down in some low-rent satire of suburbia and officious types before Andy moves on to Chapel Hill for college and an unrequited crush on roommate Ryan. After participating in a study of a new acne medication (``By the end of the study, Andy's face was coming off'') and meeting Mary Alice (which results in a tepid affair while he fantasizes about Ryan), Andy gets involved in political reporting and nabs a job as an intern in Washington, D.C. His introduction to high-rolling political types, overtly gay young men, and cocaine results (the book's liveliest section) in a bland, unsatisfying affair with manipulative Ryan--Andy finally rejects him by knocking him unconscious--and in an older-but-wiser understanding of the world. Siman is so intent on getting every adolescent humiliation recorded that the final effect is blurry and, in places, sophomoric. Still, the voice is quirky and original, making him a writer to watch. -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.