Hampton Road is a psychological thriller told from the perspective of three characters. Their overlapping narratives unravel a mystery that begins one fateful summer night and ends months later in a mental institution when a young man is forced to confront the source of his personal anguish.
The novel is also a social commentary, in the manner of Catcher in the Rye, although the driving force of the novel is the mystery surrounding the protagonist's incarceration and his psychopathology.
The novel opens with the teenage protagonist suddenly awakening to find himself in a state mental institution, one that looks more like a prison than a hospital. When he demands to know why he is being held against his will, none of the hospital personnel give him a straight answer. To make matters worse, he realizes he has a serious case of amnesia, especially when he is asked to recount any details about a tragic incident that occurred on Hampton Road. In fact, whenever the topic of Hampton Road comes up, he panics and experiences a blinding flash, in the form of a mental explosion of light, that blocks any further thoughts on the subject.
When he attempts to recall details about his own life and his relationship with his former friends, the information he gleans is incomplete. Nothing seems right. When his mother visits him he doesn't recognize her, and his girlfriend, unsettled by his strange demeanor, addresses him as though he is someone else. Just as puzzling, his closest friend never once calls on him and seems to have disappeared from the face of the earth. It is only his sharp wit and flashes of dark humor that save him from despair.
As time passes, his present life seems less and less real. Its center can no longer hold. Everything thing around him strikes him as surreal. The doctor, the hospital, the visits from his mother and girlfriend, even what he remembers of his own past. It all seems to belong to someone else. His uncertainty causes him to feel like an imposter, a phony, and a helpless prisoner. He distrusts the doctor and believes, more than wanting to help him, he wants something from him. Something he doesn't feel capable of giving. And that something has to do with Hampton Road.
It is through numerous sessions with the psychologist that he is eventually able to dredge up enough of his past to shine a bright light on that fateful summer night when the world as he knew it ended. At the end of the novel, he and the reader solve the mystery of his identity and understand what factors in his life transfigured him into a tortured soul, an embodiment of his own remorse and desperation.
