SOURCE: Mesic, Penelope. “Adolescent Adrift: Russell Banks' Remarkable Portrait of a Modern-Day Huck Finn.” Chicago Tribune Books (11 June 1995): section 14, p. 3.

In the following review, Mesic lauds Banks's vivid and believable characterizations in Rule of the Bone.

You see the young drifting in shoals through malls, clustering together and then slipping away, hair lank or shaved to nothing or twisted into dreadlocks, tender ears tagged with multiple silver rings as if repeatedly captured and released. Their clothes are ripped and nondescript, protective coloring in a drab and dangerous world. From this inscrutable throng of no-longer-children, not-yet-adults, Russell Banks has chosen a resourceful, undersized, 14-year-old boy to serve as narrator and hero of his latest novel, a brilliantly funny and heartfelt work called Rule of the Bone. Named Chapman, nicknamed “Chappie,” later “Bone,” the boy is good-natured, shrewd and more than a little screwed up, but—and this is Banks'...