The arrival of the search engine has changed the dynamic of the trio of perspectives that come into play when experiencing a work of fiction. It's changed the reader's perspective dramatically because, within seconds, it puts backgrounds of people, places, things, and situations at our fingertips. One can read a novel full of allusions and name-checking with complete comprehension, today, in about half the time it may have taken before the Web existed. It's changed the author's perspective with regard to the flip-side of the same issue—opening up access to amazing depths of information for inclusion in a work, thereby making available infinitely more referents than were previously possible. The Web has also changed the way the characters in fictions behave: the latest, most pervasive available technology usually finds its way into novels and stories immediately (think TV series, or cars).

These might seem trivial observations; and, in a way, they are. That makes it all the more striking to come across a novel, written well into the Internet age, in which none of the three things I've just mentioned are applicable. Hick could just as easily have been written—and taken place—in 1957 as in 2007. There's nothing to look up, here, and the characters certainly don't do or say anything that requires research. In one respect, this is the most challenging sort of novel because everybody in the trio of perspectives—author, reader, and characters—is required to call on their own resources, their own inner vigilance, to make it work. The book creates highways of space inside our hearts that are as large as the highways of Nebraska and Wyoming on which it's set.

The history of the picaresque novel, from Lazarillo de Tormes to The Bushwhacked Piano, teaches us one overriding lesson: the tale, more often than not, has roots that come from deep inside the author's own life. Portes' book follows that general rule. In a press release Q&A, she's asked, "Who is the main character, Luli McMullen, based on?" Her answer: "The main character is absolutely based on me as a teenager", is pretty unambiguous. And what a main character she is. I attended a reading Portes gave at a Greenwich Village bookstore, and was surprised when she read from the book in character, as if she were an actress auditioning for a part. The adventures of Luli McMullen, self-narrated, slowly evolve into a way of perceiving the behavior of others—and the motivations behind that behavior—that leave the essential, badly bruised soul intact. Damaged, jaded, but intact. The first and last chapters end with the expression of the same exact thought—"I'm gonna grab something and make it go boom"—and this shows the optimistic self-confidence is there in Luli, both before and after the atrocious main events of the story. Quite a few reviews of this book portray it as depressing, which, in my opinion, it's not. It's more of an affirmation of the POSSIBILITY of spirit.

The plot is simple. Thirteen-year-old Luli has dysfunctional, problem-drinker parents who don't treat her well. In an attempt to make a better life for herself, she runs away, sets out for Vegas, and meets a bunch of individuals who aren't much better than her mom and dad. Portes makes use of a familiar catalog of devices—the abused kid, the alcoholic parents, the hitcher's time on the road, the grotesque strangers who drift in and out of episodes, the sexual predators; however, as I read the book a second and then a third time, a pattern of signifiers or codes began to emerge, lending the book the zing of authenticity it needs to make it stand apart from the umpteen-hundred others that chronicle these kinds of people in these kinds of situations (reading Portes alongside Raymond Carver, for example, might show you just how overrated an author he was).

When I say "signifiers", I mean either corporeal things or abstract concepts of thought that Luli interprets in the same way throughout the course of the story. The first of these that jumps out is a series of temporal references she makes—to the past and to the future—that indicate she might feel her life at the moment is merely a temporary way-station between some profound mystical past and some much better future. For example, she has the following meditation about Clement, one of the few truly decent people she meets in her travels: "I look up at Clement and he looks back at me, and it's like I met him eight million years ago before time began..." Similarly, in describing a problematic couple, she says: "He and Glenda seem to have some private moment of unspoken meaning that goes back to before I was born." These solipsistic remarks about the past recall Wittgenstein: "The world is my world." And just as these unexplained, inexplicable past events hold only enigma, thinking about the future brings hope and curious wonder:

A second signifier comes in the guise of food or, more precisely, lack of food, or still more precisely, creative, humorous ways to think about and describe the lack of proper nutrition; this is a device Portes uses to stress Luli's awareness of herself and her family's low social status. Brian Tracy once said; food is like money in that, when you have enough of it, you rarely think about it at all, but if you don't have enough of it, you think about nothing else. Luli is a prime example of that observation. There are many samples of Luli's musings about food, but here are a few:

And so on. The acuity of her awareness of her low socioeconomic status is also signified by numerous comments about money, rich people, "wealthypeopleworld", and so on.

The third major signifier is something called "swirl" or "swirling", which denotes a complicated sort of sexual relationship between men and women, a frenzied, out-of-control desire on the part of certain males and the recognition, on the part of females, that this is a potent weapon they can use to manipulate the fellas (who don't exactly have the ladies' best interests at heart, either; this is a kind of warfare). Very early in the book, a 28-year-old sleazeball is trying to force himself on Luli, who's 13. She says:

Later, when she meets the disgusting Eddie Keezer, almost the first thought she has is "I can tell I can make his eyes swirl and that's just about all I want to do." She's eager to employ this new knowledge; however, in her tough innocence, she's unaware that performing the swirling may get her what she wants in some ways but, in others, it can only bring trouble. Again, later: "I'm gonna make his eyes swirl if it kills me." Later, in talking about Glenda, another lowlife she meets on the road, Luli has the exact thought that her earlier attacker had: "...it just so happens that when I look at Glenda, when I listen to Glenda, I get this feeling in my gut like I want to jump inside her ..." And so it continues.

This is a simple outline, but to recap: there are three important codes we can look for to help us understand this novel comprehensively. They concern time, food and money, and swirling, and form a large part of the way Luli perceives and ponders her universe. Another theme to look for—not as frequent, perhaps, as the others, but still noticeable, is the psychological disposition towards danger or trouble, the tendency to enjoy hanging out with negative people and derelicts. In the interview to which I previously referred, Portes responded to a question with "I love trouble. I really do." Luli says things such as "But there's also a side of me that won't ever look away from a dead bird or a car chase or a hold-up at the Alibi at 2 a.m.." Portes told me the root of this predisposition probably has something to do with her moving around a lot as a youngster (which makes perfect sense) and that she's lost this inclination as she's become older.

I think it's also important to mention the way certain parts of the text silently refer to or foreshadow others, making the book fun to read because it sharpens the saw of our alertness. Early on, a gun is bizarrely described as "cockroach-colored"; but, much later, cockroaches come into play in a surprising way. Someone's body is described as a "question mark", a device that pops up two or three more times, later on—a signal, maybe, of the author's appreciation of the language. And there are a number of individual, glittering sentences that should simply be framed and hung in the Smithsonian, such as: "She keeps adjusting and readjusting herself, like somewhere in the position of her belt lies true happiness."

A brief point (in a new historicism sort of way) and remark about some reflexivities of the text:

As regards the first, the book of photographs by Wright Morris, God's Country and My People, is an arresting collection of shots about the Nebraska plains that provides a wonderful framework of placement for curious readers who like to read a work of fiction against one of nonfiction. Also, the road memoir called A Sense Of Place: Listening To Americans,by the great journalist David Lamb, can serve the same purpose as regards to Hick. With respect to the second, there are a few points in the book where the author winks directly at us—for example, channeling Truman Capote—in fact, the very phrase "in cold blood" is used—and the film Bonnie and Clyde (here, obliquely called The Actress and the Thief). There's even an episode that brings to mind some of the despicable behavior from Thomas Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge.

Hick is extraordinary—not only because it gives voice to a 13-year-old with exactitude and complete believability, but also because it offers readers some important lessons in how to experience a novel. It makes us react—laugh, cry, get angry—and never breeds indifference. The success it's achieving in sales and notices is, in my opinion, well-deserved.