The Long Island Expressway (L.I.E.) runs through Harlan Kessler's world, permitting passage west to the tony neighborhoods of Nassau County and New York City. But to Harlan, this seems like an impossible journey, something beyond his Long Island birthright. Raised in Medford, a blue collar town, Harlan has just graduated high school. He rarely thinks about the future. His orbit of strip malls and housing developments is at once ordinary and strange, an almost postmodern version of American Graffiti. In L.I.E., David Hollander has created a highly distinctive portrait of the passage to adulthood; and in Harlan Kessler, readers will find elements of their own searches for identity rooted in Hollander's wholly original view of a teenager's first steps into life.