The morning after a tryst with an older woman, Michelle finds Liz making a sandcastle. It is on a private beach, one you could be on only if you owned land in the town. Liz did, which perhaps gives a deeper meaning to her silent castle-making. Michelle owns nothing anywhere, so she builds her own kind of edifice. "The Darth Vader of sand castles," she says. "Nuggets of styrofoam, a Snickers wrapper.... This Is My Kingdom," she tells Liz. "I Think We're At War."

Later she takes Liz and her friend Teri's life apart (in a lyrical sense), writing:

Sitting around their apartment with sun coming in through the porch and splashing onto the wood floor where the cats swam orange and grey in the light. I always thought that some people had money and some people didn't and I never asked questions of the ones who did because I figured it was something I just wouldn't understand. Thick blue glass that held coffee, an antique sewing table with rows of little drawers like secrets, I didn't want to know their history; I just touched them and accepted that they were there. The bathroom was filled with things to put on your skin, mango things and avocado things, it was like Liz and Teri were from another country and this was the stuff of their culture.

And she trumps herself at the vignette's end. "Actually they were whores." These are the girls who, although privileged, lead Michelle into a life of prostitution. The subtle but emphatic suggestion is that all girls in the comfy harem of the middle class are whores. It's a belief born of rage and deprivation, sure, but also one rooted in observation of what comes first, loyalty to people or things.

One of the hallmarks of bourgeois fiction is a preoccupation with contentment and privacy, with beautiful places and the lives conducted within them. Perhaps the core requirement of this genre is that a story move along at an even, almost businesslike clip, nothing too weird, please, as the characters get teased out evenly and obediently. The novel this yields is a moderate yarn, and what Tea is spinning is really quite the opposite. I would link her with Charles Bukowski, both Jane and Paul Bowles, Violette Leduc and a less obvious predecessor, Christopher Isherwood, who dedicatedly tracked his own days in the demimonde. More recent writers keeping a loose narrative rein like Tea include Cookie Mueller, Rebecca Brown, Kathy Acker, Linda Yablonsky, David Wojnarowicz, Dorothy Allison, Sapphire, Dennis Cooper and Lydia Davis.

Certainly Michelle Tea maintains a shaky but constant upper hand in this novel of gaudy triumph (over meanness and hypocrisy) and class war. Ultimately the author is an observer of the total crusade of "kids," the growing underclass of those who, by inclination, identity or lack of possessions, are never confirmed "adult" by society, and so we are deprived of their stories, and they of their own reality. Tea's lyric inventory illuminates the cultural split between owning and being, and the importance of naming all those who just are.

There is a glitch in this book, for me, because of an episode that doesn't get told. Michelle's stepfather was a peeping Tom, it seems, and several times his habit of observing Michelle and her sister in their early teens is alluded to as a crime that resulted in much else. The impact is therefore immense, but the story never gets told. Those tiny holes in the bathroom doors, in their bedroom walls, represent such a loss of privacy, so much forced divulgence, that I wonder who's being protected in the narrative by not writing out the episode more boldly. It feels like the only shame in this book. Perhaps Tea is afraid that her experiences as a sex worker or a dyke will be interpreted in light of this abuse, and the power of her narrative will be dissipated or dismissed outright. Conveniently pathologized. I'm convinced that would not be true, and I find myself thirsting for the details. I hope we get them in Tea's next book.

The last story in Passionate Mistakes is about a betraying girlfriend, and there's nothing shocking in that. Everyone betrays everyone else in this book, and of course in life--which here darts and heaves and stops and releases itself with elegance in the lyric wilderness of one girl's mind.

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