All in Owen King's debut is a pretty hate machine BY JOHN FREEMAN
	We’re All in this Together By Owen King | New York: Bloomsbury | $23.95 | 223 pages | Owen King reads at Books Etc., in Portland, on Wednesday, July 20 | call 207.781.3784

Is there anything more delicious than kicking off your shoes, taking a load off the dogs, and indulging a long afternoon of hate? Until last year, Red Sox fans had turned this pastime into an art form; they hated the Yankees, they hated the League, and they hated everyone for turning them into haters. Oh what a championship does to spoil a bubble bath of hate, though.

Not to worry, however, as there are plenty of other things worth hating these days. How else can you explain the prevalence of reality TV, the new design of say, the BMW 3-series, or most aptly, our current President? In fact, I bet a great deal of George W. Bush’s popularity has to do with the anthems of hatred he inspires. Oh, it feels so good!

Owen King has his finger on this angry pulse in America, and he has an idea of how it warps the red, white, and blue. Just watch tornadoes of hate tear up the ground and rip out the flowers in his literary debut, We’re All in This Together, a novella and stories set in an around Maine, but also Florida and Coney Island, too. No one gets out this collection unscathed. They’re too busy nipping and snarling at each other like a pack of feral bitches forced to walk around the block together on a short leash.

The biggest dog pile takes place in the collection’s stupendous title novella. Unfolding in a leisurely, novel-like rhythm, it revolves around a 15-year-old Mainer named George (not that one) who is hell-bent on sabotaging the romance blossoming between his mother and Dr. Vic, a cad straight out of a Richard Russo novel.

George has a few allies in this game, namely his radical old grandfather, Papa, and his friend, Gil, a hedonist cancer patient who spends all day smoking medicinal marijuana and looking at T&A on cable. This trio spends nights at Papa’s house, peering out the window with paintball guns in their laps, waiting for the paperboy to vandalize a sign that Papa has erected on his front lawn. The sign is worth quoting in its entirety:

Albert Gore Jr. won the 2000 election by 537,179 votes, but lost the presidency by 1 vote. DISGRACE. The leader of the free world is now a man who went AWOL from his National Guard unit, a huckster of fraudulent securities, a white-knuckle alcoholic, and gleeful executioner of the mentally handicapped. CRIMINAL. Our nation is in the midst of a coup d’etat, perpetuated by a right-wing cadre that destroys the environment in the name of prosperity, hoards in the name of fairness, intimidates the voices of its critics in the name of patriotism, and wraps itself in the word of God. FARCE.

Next to this screed is a "solemn ink drawing" of Gore and a caption that reads: THE REAL PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES.

In all truth, I can’t even imagine what it’s like to disagree with this sign. Nor, for that matter, can George or anyone else in this story. Regardless of your leanings, though, it’s a brilliant spoof of the way political hatred can spiral out of personal loss. The trio’s insularity becomes a metaphor for the way George has shut his future step-dad out of his life, along with anyone else who tries to pierce the bubble of pique he spends his days polishing and admiring.

Eventually, there is a comeuppance to this indulgence — as there is in the other four stories collected herein — but King isn’t quite so skilled at managing this as he does the atmosphere of hate.

The son of a certain famous Bangor-based horror novelist, King shares none of his father’s penchant for genre. He is an exceptionally pretty writer who knows when to drop in little details about the way driving at night makes a car fill "up with sweet night smells, oak and wet lawns." He understands that memory is a sensory feast — a scratch and sniff affair. Several of the other stories here invoke this truth.

This lyricism keeps We’re All in This Together from going hard, the way some of George Saunders’s stories occasionally do, but there’s not enough of it in one or two stories. "Wonders," the story of a baseball player who takes his pregnant girlfriend to a circus freak to get an abortion ends with a brutal and mean twist. And "Frozen Animals," the story of a dentist’s visit to a remote village to work on a trapper’s wife, tongues its weirdness like a sore tooth.

But these are just warm-downs from the main act, which is indeed a hard show to follow. Some day, when all the recordings of talk radio have melted and been corrupted by time, when historians are panic-stricken, in search of artifacts of the Age of Hate, I think they will stumble upon We’re All in This Together." It has that kind of longevity. Let’s just hope it gives them pride that we saw the way things were going and listened to those, like Owen King, who showed us our folly — and not the other way around.

John Freeman can be reached at jfreeman4@nyc.rr.com