Anastas, Benjamin Underachiever's Diary ISBN 13: 9780380732180

Underachiever's Diary - Softcover

9780380732180: Underachiever's Diary
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In the mid-1960s, william was the firstborn of identical twin boys. it is the last time in his life he will ever be first in anything.

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Review:
Benjamin Anastas's filigreed novella is grounded in a very slim conceit. Of two brothers born into a trendy Cambridge, Massachusetts, household, one twin is set for success, the other for chronic failure. Although ill-fated William actually beat Clive into the world by seven minutes, it's straight downhill from there. The first chapter is filled with hilarious scenes of equal opportunity gone wrong, our narrator balancing each of Clive's triumphs with his own pratfalls. Even their hair is woefully unequal. At three the younger sports a Beatles mop par excellence, while William is the eternal victim: "My mother, no artist with the scissors, had run into some trouble with a cowlick on my top, and I looked more like a lesbian, or David Bowie in his glitter years."

Unfortunately, as the boys hit puberty and William exiles himself to boarding school ("the Boys' Prison"), the book goes awry. The underachiever's later misadventures are no less acutely rendered, but with his foil at more of a distance, William's sorrows and sarcasms lose some of their strength. Despite its brevity, An Underachiever's Diary should not be read in one sitting but savored slowly (or even dipped into in very small doses) for its balanced prose and arch self-deprecation.

From the Publisher:
"I would be proud of myself if I ever underachieved so brilliantly."
--Ann Beattie

"Ben Anastas's underachiever is the most heartbreakingly likeable, brilliantly convincing character of this type since Holden Caulfield."
--Francisco Goldman

"From the first paragraph, Benjamin Anastas has got you. His witty, sorrowful hero speaks in a voice that snares the listener as fully as Salinger's Seymour Glass once did. An Underachiever's Diary--the cleverest literary monologue in a long while--is in fact an extremely precocious debut."
--Thomas Mallon

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  • PublisherHarpPeren
  • Publication date1999
  • ISBN 10 0380732181
  • ISBN 13 9780380732180
  • BindingPaperback
  • Edition number1
  • Number of pages160
  • Rating

Other Popular Editions of the Same Title

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ISBN 10:  ISBN 13:  9780385319980
Publisher: The Dial Press, 1998
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Anastas, Benjamin
Published by HarpPeren (1999)
ISBN 10: 0380732181 ISBN 13: 9780380732180
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