COAST MAGAZINE By Tim Wilcox The setting for Andrew Winer's debut novel, slated for publication this month, is 1990s Alameda, a mixed-race community in the Bay Area. When a Navy base shuts down, hundreds of workers are suddenly jobless. It's a life-shaping event for Conrad Clay, 10-year-old protagonist of The Color Midnight Made (Washington Square Press). Out of work, Conrad's violence-prone father sips self-prescribed medications, while his mother grows ever more neurotic and reclusive. And so Conrad, a white boy attending a mostly black school, immerses himself in the skateboard-focused hip-hop culture of his "street gritty" classmates. He also finds shelter, in the fullest sense, with the family of his closest friend, Loop, who's black. There, in that household run by a single mother of three, Conrad begins a spontaneous journey from anger and anxiety to remarkably mature self- and other-awareness. Conrad is color blind, but the author refuses to construe that condition as a facile figure for racial acceptance. Instead, the journey--traversed between poles of comedy and tragedy--is primarily about discovering his own unique color, "a color that no one has ever seen." Throughout the volume, Winer, an Orange County resident who earned his M.F.A. in creative writing from UC Irvine and who claims an M.F.A. in painting as well, displays a startling gift for description and dialogue. He grew up in the Bay Area, so the book's sense of place is compass-true. And perhaps he mined childhood memories for conversations such as this one between Conrad and Loop's older brother, Midnight, who years before had blinded himself during careless gun play. Midnight says, "The thing I miss seeing the most--it's the ladies." Then he asks Conrad to describe a certain Sandra. "Her skin," he said, his faced tilted down, deep in concentration. "What about her skin?" "Brown. No, tan. Like inside a cracked-open almond." "Huh," he said. He smiled and nodded: "Yep." "Her mouth looks nice when she smiles. Her bottom lip." "Mm," Midnight said. . . . "She beautiful?" "Yeah." "I knew it." There's no pretense in such dialogue. It's spare, to the point, from the heart. And that aptly describes Winer's timeless, yet oh-so-contemporary, story.