Adam Langer's debut novel, "Crossing California," should come with a warning label: "Abandon all nostalgia, ye who enter here." His story about three Chicago families during the waning years of Jimmy Carter's presidency is brutally funny. But any fondness the fashion industry may be tempting you to feel for that goofy period is stripped away by Langer's acerbic re-creation of the era when America withered under the Iran hostage crisis, high school drug use spiked, and teenage sexual experience began to accelerate dramatically.

The "California" in his title refers to California Avenue, which runs through Chicago's West Rogers Park neighborhood, separating upper-middle-class Jewish families from working-class Jewish families. The novel's immersion in this enclave makes it particularly appealing to Jewish readers, but others will feel no more excluded than non-Greeks watching "My Big Fat Greek Wedding." Langer drives so deeply into the silly and profound qualities of this group that he strikes the bedrock beneath all quarters of American culture.

What might exclude some readers, however, is the novel's sexual content. The libidinous teen antics that Tom Wolfe chronicled in "Hooking Up" (2000) and Catherine Hardwicke showed in "Thirteen" (2003) are described in "Crossing California" with relentless attention. Presumably, Wolfe and Hardwicke were raising the alarm for an adult audience happily in the dark about these goings-on, but in such a consistently funny novel as "Crossing California," this graphic material is difficult to interpret.

You're thinking, it's difficult to interpret only for someone writing in a stodgy newspaper, but Langer's comic treatment of these characters belies a surprisingly harsh moral outrage. It's the same complicated attitude on display in Jonathan Franzen's "The Corrections" or Tom Perrotta's "Little Children." These aggressive satirists employ a laser that incinerates their amoral characters even as it illuminates them with a glare that's sometimes hard to watch.

Though packed with the social and political upheaval of the era, "California Crossing" stays closely focused on the lives of a small group of teenagers blundering toward maturity while most of their parents regress to adolescence. Langer's ability to create such dead-on characters is matched only by his ingenuity in tying them together so cleverly.

Michelle Wasserstrom may be one of the most memorable high school characters ever. Smart, foul-mouthed, and histrionic, she storms through like the survivor of a lost dynasty, mocking everything but her own ridiculousness. Her biggest disappointment is that the culture has broken down so completely that "it seemed nearly impossible to rebel in any way that wasn't somehow secondhand."

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