What if Anne Shirley, the sweet heroine of Lucy Maud Montgomery's novels, was born in 1970 and decided to join a rock band? John Stiles's wonderful first novel answers these questions, in a manner of speaking. In the grand tradition of the Bible's prodigal son, Charles Dickens' Great Expectations and James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Stiles gives us The Insolent Boy.