We the Animals by Justin Torres – review

It takes the nerve of a debutant to stray from the first- or third-person singular narrative voice. Jay McInerney wrote in the second person in Bright Lights, Big City; Jeffrey Eugenides inhabited a Greek chorus-like "We" in The Virgin Suicides; Joshua Ferris also chose the first person plural for his debut, Then We Came to the End. But it is a rather different book that Justin Torres's feted and slender first novel calls to mind. In Sheila Kohler's Cracks (2000), a darkly lyrical school story told collectively by a cabal of increasingly unhinged young girls, we are at once drawn into the group of friends and yet made to feel our distance from them. The novel's story is mirrored in our relationship to the narrative voice.

We the Animals tells of the coming of age of the anonymous narrator and his two older brothers. Thick as thieves (and often, simply, thieves), the brothers speak with an inviolable "we" to begin with. But as the narrative progresses, and fissures begin to show in their relationships, that "we" begins to fracture, and is winnowed down to an eventual "I".

Torres's prose style is unctuous, dense with metaphor and surprising imagery. The 19 chapters, individually titled, initially feel like a collection of short stories focused on the three boys and the tempestuous relationship of their parents. At the start, there is little plot, and no clear attempt to situate the reader in time or space. This is how our memories of childhood operate: a series of images and sensations that our older minds retrospectively link. It is here that the novel works best, as the chapters oscillate between violence and affection, pathos and humour, enriched by Torres's fresh and ornate prose.

The animals of the title are the three brothers, whose mixed-race origins (their father is Puerto Rican) make them feel like a different breed in poor, white upstate New York. The world they inhabit calls to mind Daniel Woodrell's Ozark Hills in Winter's Bone: a bleak, unforgiving landscape of rusting trailers and grim-faced locals. The rambunctious carnival of the boys' life, where even their parents' fighting takes on the appearance of a game, is a challenge to their daily drudgery.

The novel loses some of its edge as the story coalesces into a more traditional narrative and a rather predictable ending. Before we reach the narrator's final "I", the splintering "we", aware of its approaching end, makes a final, desperate play for our attention: "Look at us, our last night together, when we were brothers still," it insists. A few pages later, this becomes "let us look at me kneeling on the living-room floor". The "we" of the three brothers has morphed into a "we" that knits together the anonymous narrator and the reader. Expelled from that tight fraternal world, we must join the narrator on his solitary path towards the last chapter's brief, poetic rendering of adulthood.

Alex Preston's The Revelations is published by Faber