The real name of the Perfume Factory was International Scents and Essences of New Jersey, but everyone in Port Beach called it the Perfume Factory, and there wasn't a place in the town from which you couldn't see the factory's towers and smokestacks[...] Even on a Friday night, the factory spilled out the sickly sweet odors that made Port Beach smell like the bottom of an old woman's handbag.

The "sickly sweetness" of The Perfume Factory's home town, Port Beach is deceiving. It is in fact a dilapidated resort town on the coast of New Jersey where the unemployment is as high as the number of taverns and misguided teenagers.

The story is set in the 1960s. Sam is nearly eighteen, a high-school dropout and the oldest of three. His parents are both drunks. His father is unemployed, an abusive and bitter ex-military man. Sam's mother is weak but loudmouthed, and her tenderness for Sam instigates his father's temper. Sam is tormented, wise for his seventeen years. He reads Kant and Hume and Schopenhauer and might have been a philosopher himself if born into a different time or life.

Alex Austin's gritty coming-of-age novel opens with an abrasive encounter with Sam's family, after which he goes "down to the Front."

Friday night always began at Jack's Café[...] Like the two bars that made up the trio of businesses on the east side of Front Street, Jack's was set right on the beach, whose yellow sands piled up against the foundation and curled around the bottom of the front door like a yellow tentacle.

Sam runs into his wild friend Leo and they go out for a joyride. Sam meets Julie, a beautiful sophisticate from Jersey City. Her family is staying in Keysburg, a richer sister-city to Port Beach, for the summer. His first words to her are lies. He makes up an alternate, better life, at first to amuse himself, but maybe also to impress her. He tells her he is going to school at Princeton. "I gave myself a dead father, an inventor who had perished while testing a one-man submarine off the coast of Nova Scotia[...] I spun a world that I never came close to living in. I started getting so good at it, I started believing it. It was exhilarating, and it wasn't until later that I wondered if I could only interest this girl in me by fabricating myself, even if she didn't believe a word of it." But she does take an interest in him, even if for whatever twisted realities he has told her. And with Julie, Sam experiences his first real tastes of love and pain; because of Julie, he finds himself in all kinds of the usual trouble.