Steve says of the Motorcycle Boy, "[H]e is the only person I have ever met who is like somebody out of a book. To look like that, and be good at everything, and all that." Thus does one of the book's characters state the main problem about the Motorcycle Boy: People in books should not themselves appear to come out of books; that's too much of a jump for any character to make, and the Motorcycle Boy, who doesn't make the river at the book's end, doesn't make the jump into fully realized existence either. He's just too distant, too idealized, too detached, and finally, too inhuman to be taken seriously as a character. Robert Berkvist, in his otherwise not very probing review of Rumble Fish in the New York Times Book Review, makes the entirely accurate observation that the Motorcycle Boy "clanks through the story...