Though direct in style and unforgiving in content, Hardy Jones’s Every Bitter Thing is a bit too one-note to be memorable. The narrator rarely infuses the story with emotion or passion, the characters are static, and for a novel that runs on paternal abuse and homosexual rape, it never really manages to dive below the surface to explore the resonance of such incidents. Still, Hardy Jones has the talent to see a reader through to the end. Every Bitter Thing is a quick, if unchallenging, read, and you certainly won’t feel cheated if you give it a free afternoon. It’s a novel that hints at better things from its author.

It’s the early 1980s, and Wesley Royal is a rather meek and tubby twelve-year-old in a house dominated by his beer-swilling, unrelentingly critical and bellicose father. When Wesley, Sr. sees his son toppled by some neighborhood kids, he decides it’s time for young Wesley to learn how to fight. From the next day on, the elder Wesley says, he’s going to hit his son every time they cross paths, and young Wesley must always be on his toes. It’s a trick, of course; seconds later, Wesley, Sr. backhands his son in the face. “You said you’d start hitting me tomorrow,” son says. His father’s response echoes throughout the rest of the novel: “You can’t always believe what people say. No one! Fuck them before they can fuck you. That’s the key to life, son: you’ve got to beat the other guy to the fuck.”

This advice takes on more sinister meaning after Wesley enrolls in tae kwon do classes and meets Rubin, a 16-year-old black belt and master’s pet. Wesley’s dad makes friends with Rubin’s parents in the hopes that Rubin will help Wesley become the youngest black belt in the nation, but Rubin has other plans for the boy. After the abuse Rubin heaps on Wesley, the question becomes, will Wesley stand up for himself and fight back?

Well, that’s a line that could have been ripped straight from the book, as too often Jones relies on rhetorical questions to relay Wesley’s hopes and fears. Wesley’s is a retrospective narration, as he looks back on these events from an undefined future, but the passage of time doesn’t seem to have made his past any clearer: “What made him think I was going to place my mouth on it? But was this what teenagers did? Was I glimpsing a sneak peek of future days? These and other questions remain unanswered.” Wesley brand of detachment, while perhaps realistic (abuse victims often live the rest of their lives with detachment), is frustrating as fiction.

Jones makes some attempts to ground us in the early ’80s, sometimes to amusing effect (Wesley at one point has performance anxiety “to the max”). Other times, though, he seems to lose himself in a nostalgia that adds little to the plot: “Space Invaders had three settings: beginner, intermediate, professional, and the difference between the three levels was the speed at which the spaceships come at you. They looped down from above and you had to move side-to-side and shoot them. If one of them made it through your electronic bullets, then it was up to you to dodge it. At the professional level, this was difficult because spaceships kept coming at you without any break.”

Perhaps this passage is intended to serve as a metaphor for the flurry of punches—literal and figurative—that keeps coming at Wesley, but it’s a stretch. Either way, Wesley dodges some and is undone by others, but Jones rarely gives us a glimpse of what’s truly happening beneath the surface.

Which is a shame, because with some deeper exploration this could’ve been a very good novel. Instead, it’s merely a readable debut from a writer with good things ahead of him. Jones will do better next time.