Palo Alto

As Daniel Desario, James Franco played an angsty high schooler on Judd Apatow's short-lived television series Freaks and Geeks—and his first foray into literature, the short story collection Palo Alto, follows a group of teenagers just as aimless, angry, and confused. Beginning with a young man named Ryan who hits someone while driving drunk on Halloween night, Franco's characters are upper-middle-class kids who seem to be always at the brink of death. The stories shift among narrators, yet there's little variance in voice even as those narrators change. Mostly, in fact, the speaker's gender can be predictably determined by his or her actions: If beating up a romantic rival or trying to force a younger brother to eat cat excrement, it's a guy; if parrying loneliness through inadequate relations with a boy, it's a girl. Where Franco does succeed is in showing both the inarticulate rage of adolescence and the failure of catastrophe to wake up thick-headed youths: he is unafraid of telling a story without epiphany. As a writer, Franco requires some maturity still, especially if he wants to avoid sounding like a Hemingway spoof. In the meantime, Palo Alto convincingly displays his feel for teenage malaise, packaged in a series of short, declarative, occasionally unique sentences.