Is it dreamed?: Ten Thousand Saints

Started Eleanor Henderson's "Ten Thousand Saints" and finished only first chapter so far but pretty impressive start - not going to be an easy novel, clearly it's about very sad people on the margins of society, first chapter about two skateboarding, drug-abusing slacker teenage boys in a small city obviously based on Burlington, Vermont - so you can see right off that this is not well-trod ground for contemporary fiction - not in New York or London or LA, not on either coast, not about preppies or vampires - it's material more familiar in movies that in contemporary literary fiction (quite a few films about slacker guys, often comedies - but there was one recent one set in Portland or Seattle area that struck a similar chord). The boys, Jude and Teddy, aren't exactly sympathetic characters, but Henderson does a good job putting their lives in context: we get just enough info about their irresponsible parents and their 60s holdout mentality, probably a common family dynamic even today in Vermont (novel begins in the late 1980s I think). Henderson breaks the convention by telling us, in the first paragraph, that this will be the last day of Teddy's life - building an immediate dramatic tension and helping guide us as readers: we know to pay more attention to Jude, as he will more likely be an abiding character. Also have to love the first line of the novel: "Is it dreamed?" [he] asked. "Or dreamt?"