Barbara Solow recommends Honky, by Dalton Conley (Vintage Books, 207 pp., $12 pb.)

Dalton Conley’s moving and often hilarious memoir of his New York City boyhood sets out to explain how and why his growing up was not that of “your typical middle-class white male.” His artist parents had no money, so the family wound up living in a mostly black and Latino public housing project on Avenue D. There, Conley’s status was turned on its head: As a white child, he was the minority longing for acceptance, the one distanced from his own culture by the non-white majority.He puts that distance to good use. “I’ve studied whiteness the way I would a foreign language,” Conley writes. “I know the subtleties of its idioms, its vernacular, words and phrases to which the native speaker has never given a second thought.”

In another writer’s hands, a book about a childhood that was “like a social science experiment” could easily become boring or didactic. But Conley’s talents as a storyteller make Honky an extraordinary page-turner. From his early attempts to secure a black sibling, to his anguished double life as a student in mostly white schools (though poor, his parents still knew how to work the system), the narrative moves at a subway express-car pace. His refusal to turn away from the injuries of race and class–even the ones that he inflicts–make Honky well worth reading. EndBlock Barbara Solow is the managing editor of The Independent Weekly.