TROUBLEMAKER HAD ME baffled for at least 80 pages. How could the narrator, Nebraskan ne'er-do-well Earl, be so stupid? At first I tried to explain it away as adolescence, but once his age (22) is revealed, there can be no excuse for his logic-defying thought patterns, nor for the irrational actions skillfully encrypted in the judiciously unreliable narration deployed by 24-year-old Memphis writer Brian Pera. Not even the brain-deadening regularity with which Earl devours liquor and heroin could explain his stupidity. Then it struck me: He's retarded!

Like The Sound and the Fury, Troublemaker strains its narrative through the fractured drawl of a "simple" Southerner. Whether unconsciously stealing jewelry or cowering in fear of the possibility that dead animal-head trophies will come back to life and eat him, Earl's behavior just doesn't make sense--and yet, because he is so genuine in his wrongness, you can't help but want to believe him. That his reality and the world's reality can never align is a well from which the reader may drink this book's great sadness.

Earl yearns for an impossible connection with the most unreachable creatures. First from a dying father, from whose room of death Earl pilfers his most treasured artifact--tellingly, a flask. Mother just doesn't understand and sends him to live in Memphis with his nana, whose perception is even more distorted than his. Her insanity sours their relationship to the point where Grandma sticks a shotgun in his face and deports him to foreign concrete (New York City), and inadvertently ends Earl's only real relationship (with a boy named Fletcher).

New York breeds hunger and desperation, and sends Earl into the arms of a stern madam's seamy bordello, made tolerable only by the drowsily dizzying deception of daily China-white. The descent only gets steeper as Earl descends into a world of johns and junk he cannot seem to understand. Kept boy or 42nd-Street chicken, it does not seem to matter, nothing seems to matter without a place to call his own.

Hard traveling ensues with cruelty close behind until Earl finds himself lost in a carnival. Only there does he glimpse meaning: He becomes a boy of many names for whom he invents another--Red. With no idea who or what Red is, Earl follows blindly in the false hope that Red can locate him, Red can put him on the map.

The temporal world of Troublemaker is as fractured as Earl's mind. The text skips back and forth schizophrenically, from place to place and time to time. The overall effect is to sweep readers off their complacent feet, to make the readers as homeless as Earl, with no comfortable ground to rest on. As soon as one setting starts to become comfortable, the author revokes it, and readers find themselves in a different time and place completely, until the narrative becomes one big, disorienting blur. The end comes without ever reaching any conclusion, leaving us right where we started, with nothing but a snapshot and the feeling that something authentic has transpired.

The author's age is, I think, important. From a generation raised in this video jungle, where replications of reality grossly outnumber authentic experience, Brian Pera joins J. T. Leroy (whose book Sarah shares Troublemaker's subject matter, if not its tone) as one of the first writers of explicitly self-conscious fiction. What I mean by that is that this generation has been exposed to so much media, it has bred a new fiction derived largely from movie memories. While writing has always been about transcribing the cinema of the mind, that terrain is far more cluttered now.

It's difficult to read Troublemaker without thinking of films like My Own Private Idaho or Midnight Cowboy, with which Troublemaker shares an entire scene (naive Southern whore hooks up with wealthy bald man, needs money to travel, hits bald man in head with lamp, leaves bald man bleeding, maybe dead). Or to read the line "So two steps forward and two steps back" without thinking of Paula Abdul's magnum opus, "Opposites Attract."

Much of today's literature feels as though it were written simply to be adapted as a movie; the novel itself is merely a formality. Troublemaker stands out from the pack in that its pleasures lie in its form and its tone, two aspects unique to the written word. Whoever directs the film or video version of Troublemaker is going to have a laborious task indeed, trying to duplicate the linguistic heights Brian Pera has scaled in his prodigious and promising first novel.

Brian Pera reads Wed Aug 16, 7 pm, at the University Bookstore, 4326 University Way NE, 634-3400, free.