Rule of the Bone

Rule of the Bone by Russell Banks is a 1995 bildungsroman that follows the picaresque journey of Chapman “Chappie” Dorset, also known as Bone. It is in the tradition of books like J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye and Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, though it incorporates themes of drug use and homelessness that set it apart as a more nuanced, grunge-era take on growing up as a troubled youth.

Plot Summary

The book begins with the incident that led to Bone’s homelessness: He is kicked out by his mother and stepfather after stealing from an antique coin collection to buy marijuana. Bone’s stepfather has been sexually abusing him without his mother’s knowledge, and Bone is initially happy to leave his troubled home life. He takes up squatting with a biker gang and his friend Russ. He hangs around the local mall in Plattsburgh, New York, where he encounters a man named Buster Brown and the young girl Buster is abusing, Rose. Bone wants to save her from her situation, but he can’t.

Russ starts stealing from the biker gang, which leads to Bone being tied up and threatened. Russ rescues him, but there’s a fire, and the leader of the biker gang dies. After a series of events with Russ, Bone and Russ part ways. Bone encounters Rose again, and this time he saves her and brings her to an abandoned bus that is inhabited by I-Man, a Jamaican migrant farmer who is squatting on the property and living off of the land. The three of them take up a familial dynamic, but Bone knows Rose needs to be with her family, so they track down her mother and send her home.

Bone uses this as motivation to go home, but it goes terribly: His stepfather threatens to rape him, and Bone cannot confess this abuse to his mother, further severing their connection. Bone returns to I-Man, who has decided to go home to Jamaica; Bone goes with him. In Jamaica, Bone becomes a part of I-Man’s drug operation before finding his birth father, who has been living with a wealthy white woman named Evening Star. His father welcomes Bone with open arms but turns out to be a violent criminal. After Bone finds I-Man having sex with Evening Star and tells his father, his father says he will kill I-Man, and Bone flees with I-Man to the village of Accompong. There, he works the marijuana crop and becomes invested in I-Man’s culture, eventually having a drug trip that shows him visions of a slave uprising.

I-Man is murdered by rivals, though it’s clear that Bone’s father was involved. Bone heads back to his father’s home, where he has sex with Evening Star out of revenge and pushes I-Man’s killer into a fire. Bone flees by taking a job on a boat, where he has time to reflect that his time with I-Man has taught him how he should live.