An ambiguous 18-year-old is the first-person narrator of "Absolute Beginners." And because the story he tells is so insistently his own it is an ambiguous story, with some of the blurred effect which always attends a novel that tries to go two ways at once.

Not that there is any blur in the phrasing. Verbally, this is fresh, bright, exciting work. Structurally, it is sound and solid. But the narrator is always simultaneously two persons. One is a sharp young hoodlum who declares, "Yes, man, come whatever, this last year of the teenage dream I was out for kicks and fantasy." The other is a precocious juvenile philosopher whose values, though grounded only in emotion, are energetically moral and critical. (p. 34)

The central character is at once himself and his own limited but urgent critic. The double role splits him, as it splits the novel, which tries both...