A lucid portrait of the artist as an adolescent mental patient, whose self-destructive despair is overcome by therapy, connections with other patients, painting, and poetry ("even if the poem was about despair and suicide, it wasn’t depressing"); and at the last by the kindly intervention of influential arts patrons. His 14-16 year old Kostos has the vulnerability of Holden Caufield combined with the anguished visions of, say, van Gogh, William Burroughs, Robert Lowell, or Richard Yates.