Milwaukee brood

Full of magnified triumphs and humili-ations, adolescence is notoriously unstable—something to be endured at the time and analyzed later. It’s no different for Yuri Balodis, the protagonist of Pauls Toutonghi’s debut novel, Red Weather. In the story, the 30-ish narrator recalls his life as a 15-year-old in Milwaukee, hoping to make sense of the seismic changes that defined his youth. Yuri is the bookish only child of loving Latvian-immigrant parents, but as his story unfolds, a series of quiet revolutions tosses his mellow life into a state of unrest. Toutonghi’s unflinching and hilarious account summons all the tormented urgency of one’s high-school years, when everything feels so fraught with meaning because it actually is.

It’s 1989. The Berlin Wall is coming down, Yuri has fallen torturously in love with a socialist classmate (much to his family’s dismay), and three Latvian relatives have invaded the small apartment he shares with his parents in a down-at-the-heels section of town. But it’s Yuri’s relationship with his father that provides the book’s central conflict. Rudolfs Balodis—a warmhearted man who loves country music and dispenses boozy wisdom in broken English—is charismatic and hard to pin down; even though Yuri has grown up with him, Rudolfs’s resolute foreignness makes him something of a mystery.

“I knew I wanted to write about a family, specifically a father and son,” Toutonghi explains. “And I had just written a very dark, very serious book about the Holocaust in Latvia—it was very hard to write, very depressing. And then one day I watched National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation and decided I wanted to write about out-of-town relatives coming to visit. My mom’s side of the family is Latvian and I thought, Well, Latvia is definitely out of town.”

A sense of estrangement, from one’s home and one’s family, pervades the novel, and Yuri’s identity as an outsider is heightened with the arrival of the Latvian relatives. Toutonghi, himself a first-generation American, renders the family’s Soviet-inflected speech and mannerisms with wit and sensitivity, and his ear for unusual locu-tion is used to comedic effect without lapsing into condescension.

But you don’t have to be familiar with Latvia under Soviet reign or Milwaukee in 1989 to feel simultaneously wrecked and elevated by Yuri’s recollections. Red Weather tells a fairly universal story, resurrecting the impulsive decisions, irreparable mistakes and exhila-rating highs of adolescence—all instantly recognizable to anyone who’s survived it.

Red Weather (Shaye Areheart Books, $23) is out May 23.