Outside Providence

Outside Providence is a hilarious yet melancholy novel of a young man's coming of age in the 1970s. When Timothy Dunphy, native of working-class Pawtucket, Rhode Island, is packed off to a fancy prep school, he finds that the privileged elite is hardly immune to life's screwups. Dunphy must reconcile his pedigreed schoolmates with his mongrel friends back home--including Drugs Delaney, whose diet consists mainly of vitamin Qs (Quaaludes), and Bunny Cote, who thinks New England is a state.Not far below Dunphy's comic demeanor churn powerful fears of abandonment by those he loves best: his…