The year is 1953, that peculiar pocket of time between Eisenhower's inauguration and the advent of tail fins and rock and roll. The place is southern California, sunny and swollen with Cold War-driven prosperity. The prescribed cultural attitude is a grimly clenched optimism. "Everybody in the land was under one mandate: Be happy!" observes the irresistible hero of The Mortician's Apprentice, eighteen-year-old and appealingly clueless Ozzie Santee.

Just about to graduate from high school, Ozzie understands his marching orders perfectly, and they scare him to death. The fact that he may not have a future doesn't diminish his energetic, if unfocused, attempts to escape it.

1. The future presents itself most insistently, though, in the person of Colleen Vogel, the beautiful daughter of San Diego's most successful undertaker. The archetypal tender trap, Colleen represents everything Ozzie knows he should want: energetic sex, well-padded domesticity, assembly-line reproduction, and especially lifetime prosperity. There's a place reserved for Ozzie Santee at the Vogel-Darling Funeral Home as a mortician's apprentice, putting him in a working relationship with death.

As Ozzie careens between flights into the ecstasy of hard bop jazz, which "burned gaping holes all the way through the dismal shit that passed itself off as the world" and drunken adventures with his buddies in Tijuana, followed by fitful attempts to get with the program, a whole era is magically invoked. Rick DeMarinis refracts through his young hero's post-adolescent angst all the patriotic fever, nuclear anxiety, political paranoia, and raw capitalist cupidity that fueled the psychology of the fifties.

If you crossed James Thurber's hilariously affectionate and deadpan feel for Americana with the black comedy of Evelyn Waugh's The Loved One, you might come up with the unique charm and poignance of The Mortician's Apprentice. But only if you were very, very lucky.