Disobedience Jane Hamilton Doubleday, 273pp, £12.99 ISBN 0385601905

Henry Shaw, the 17-year-old narrator of Jane Hamilton's Disobedience, is a modern-day Holden Caulfield. Using his mother's password (Liza38), he logs on to her computer and, like any teenager, is outraged to discover that she has "got mail". "What was the old girl up to?" Why, she is having an affair with a man who lives in Wisconsin, no less.

But there's a potential problem. A Holden Caulfield would not be able to penetrate the torment and torture of his mum, Beth Shaw, and her lover, Richard Pollaco. Not without help, that is. What adolescent boy would understand why his mother talks endlessly about Pollaco at home? "She wouldn't bring him up if she was deceiving my father, if she was deceiving us. Would she? Not in front of us all. Not at dinner," responds the prim, disapproving teenager. But then comes the mature afterthought: "She wanted to both hold his name in her mouth and say it. Say it again and again in our presence. Richard Pollaco. Pollaco, Pollaco, Richard." And what regular guy would see why his mother keeps fondly remembering - even urging her son, daughter and husband to join her in remembering - favourite family moments? At this moment in her life? Yet he grasps it effortlessly - she is testing the weight of the family history to see what it is worth, to see if it is worth staying.

The 17-year-old Henry is cleverly overlaid by an older Henry, musing a decade later, with adult insight, on that turbulent year in the Shaw family. But both voices are important, because Henry the man would never remember the fiddling minutiae of family life with such clarity. In slipping back and forth between the two Henries, Hamilton never hits a wrong note.

But another pitfall is Henry's gender. He knows far too much about how women think. He even knows the shocking truth about why women join book clubs. But, by a further sleight of hand, Hamilton plays with our expectations of gender, so nothing surprises any more. The wife is having an affair while her husband shops, cooks, does the washing-up and waits for things to return to normal; the daughter, Elvira, a civil war re-enactor and part of a hardcore infantry unit, shaves her head to pass as a boy; and Henry lets his "unusually clean and shiny" hair fall down his back and wants to major in women's studies.

In the eccentric Shaw family, it is the absence of a television until Henry is 14 - something that must surely amount to child abuse in the United States - that astonishes us most. Hamilton's off-the-wall characters, dry wit and perception into the seduction of assuming a new identity - in which Henry's mother can become "someone other than the usual and approved Beth Shaw" - make this a wonderful read.

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