/lit/ - Literature

1982
Coming-of-age novel taking place in a small Indiana town. The protagonist is a more credible and moving teenager than Holden Caulfield. He falls in love, loses friends, gets into fights, grasps that life is pain, loses his dad, gets cucked, develops a special relationship with language and storytelling, all in the space of the summer after graduating high school
Out of print in the US.

I don't think I've ever come across this book on /lit/. There's a scene where the teenage protagonist locks eyes with his teenage "girlfriend" as she is getting fucked by her actual boyfriend, a man old enough for said protagonist to previously believe him to be her father.
Tesich's two novels are depressingly underrated