Surferboy by Kevin McAleer

About the book

Surferboy is set in L.A.'s San Fernando Valley and along the beaches of Santa Monica Bay circa 1980. It takes the form of fifteen more or less self-contained stories that interweave the same characters and build on one another. These prose dioramas depict various stages in the surfing life of the novel's teen-protagonist Steve, who is a "Val," or inlander, and at pains to shed that identity and become an accepted member of the surfing tribe. Although the narrative possesses two official "antagonists" who accompany Steve on his waveriding adventures, in effect surfing itself is the plot's prime antagonist, the novel tracing Steve's rocky and sometimes ambivalent relationship to this quintessential California sport over the course of four high school summers.

At one level the novel can be read as a tableau of Southern California surf culture, oozing fun and zaniness and replete with oddball characters and dialogue that's swimming in an ocean of slang; at another level it is an attempt to vitiate the shopworn surfing stereotypes so often propagated in Beach Movie and other surfploitation fare by capturing the authentic flavor of surfing and its attendant milieu; and at a third and more personal level, Surferboy is the account of a California teenager's struggle toward self-definition, with surfing carrying the theme.

About the author

Kevin McAleer is a writer and translator living in Berlin. In addition to "Surferboy", he is the author of "Dueling: The Cult on Honor in Fin-de-Siécle Germany" (Princeton University Press, 1994), co-author of "Zwei Amerikaner im deutschen Exil" (Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1998) and co-editor of the two-volume work "Everyman in Europe: Essays in Social History" (Prentice-Hall, 1990).