Slouching toward Burlington: Second part of Ten Thousand Saints

The second part of Eleanor Henderson's "Ten Thousand Saints" does indeed take place in Vermont, but it's not exactly a version of the pastoral: we join the fetal-alcohol-syndrome teen Jude and his tattoo-artist macho but secretly gay older friend Johnny as they try to set up a band and to push the "straight edge" movement - no drugs, no alcohol, no sex, no meat - movement among the hard core punk kids of Burlington. So it's still a very rough around the edges crowd - but now without the hallucinogenic dynamism of New York City - they're in the sticks and they know it and perhaps overcompensate. So does the plotting, to some degree: Jude is looking for vengeance against the Burlington punks who smashed up his mother’s glass studio and improbably provokes a pretty violent fight; Johnny – recently married, but a marriage of convenience, manages to keep his sexual orientation secret but just learns that his NYC lover has AIDS, and he heads back to NYC to be tested himself and perhaps to face death (this is the 1980s). Cannot fault Henderson for building her novel thick with events and incidents and keeping the pace moving along fast – lots of characters but over time it’s easier to keep them straight – but it does seem she may be building toward some melodrama at the end when I think the novel could use a darker and more ambiguous tone – but we’ll see how it goes.