Thinking ahead about what the ending might be in The Car Thief: tragic, uplifting, ambiguous?

Alex (the eponymous Car Thief in Theodore Weesner's 1972 novel) gets out of the juvenile detention center and is home with his kindly alcoholic father and it's just before xmas - and things are going pretty well, for the moment. Alex remembers previous xmasses, when he and younger brother, Howard, shoplifted most of the presents - now he has a little money and gets a tree, decorates, gets a Zippo for his dad, of course Dad goes on a bender and completely forgets the holiday, forgets his son, but when he does show up they have a nice celebration - and then Alex has to go back to high school. He's apprehensive but for the first time in his life he's focused, figures which courses he can pass (having missed almost half the year) and which he can't, talks about going out again for the basketball team - he's no star, but maybe a good JV player - but it's something, he's not the complete outsider that many teenage car thieves would likely be - he even makes tentative overtures to the girl he has a crush on, and she doesn't completely push him off - yet in the background, he learns that one of the school toughs needs to "speak" with him, and we know right away what this is about: Alex not only stole 14 cars but he stole about $30 mostly in $1s for the wallets he pinched in the locker room. This is a much bigger crime, in the high-school world, than the car theft - the cars all got back to their owners, unharmed, apparently  - and Cricket demands double payment in return. How can Alex possibly manage that? The third section is titled "The Beating," so we have a pretty good idea of where he'll end up. The tone of the novel is often elegaic - but the structure will not be clear until the fourth and final section: Is it a bleak and tragic ending, an uplifting ending of triumph over circumstances, or a freeze-frame ending (cf 400 Blows, Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner - for 2 other works about juvenile detention) that is open and ambiguous, full of possibility and full of dread?