With his memoir Permanent Midnight, Jerry Stahl established a strange niche for himself as America's premier literary ex-junkie. But while it offered a gripping, well-written account of the depths of heroin addiction, Midnight also had a frustrating tendency to lapse into self-indulgence. (Did anyone outside of Hollywood really buy the notion that being reduced to high-paying jobs writing sitcoms is reason enough to become an addict?) Stahl's first novel, Perv—A Love Story, suffers from some of the same tendencies. Set in 1970, it follows the darkly comic misadventures of Bobby Stark, a 16-year-old who is thrown out of prep school for consorting with a barber's daughter. Sent home to his emotionally unstable mother, he soon hits the road with a disenchanted Hare Krishna with whom he's been smitten since grade school. Stahl invests Stark, and no one else, with a great deal of emotional depth, and in his novel's best moments, he successfully plays this against a grotesque cast of characters, including a booze-addled friend of the family and a dangerously hands-on surrogate father. Stahl writes in episodes rather than chapters and, though it takes a while to get there, Perv's middle sections nicely recreate the morally ambiguous landscape of the early '70s, when the peace-and-love movement woke up to some harsh realities. The problem is that, while clearly a gifted writer, Stahl doesn't know how to edit himself. The book's bloated first chapter is nowhere near as labored as its finale, an excruciatingly graphic, protracted orgy/rape scene involving evil hippies that makes its point, then repeats it again and again. Ultimately, Perv, despite moments of promise, does something of the same thing.