The Tangerine Tango Equation: Or How I Discovered Sex, Deception, and a New Theory of Physics in Three Short Months (Contemporary Fiction Series) - Hardcover

Targan, Barry

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1560250097 ISBN 13: 9781560250098

Publisher: Thunder's Mouth Pr, 1991

Synopsis

Nick Burden, a college freshman with a genius IQ, tries to cope with the celebrity status brought about by his intellectual accomplishments and learn about real life

About this title

From Kirkus Reviews

Targan's second novel (after Kingdoms, 1980)--about the freshman year of a boy-genius faced with exploitation--takes aim at easy targets in prose that is sometimes flat, while the aim is true and, at its best, zany. Narrator Nick Burden, only 16, is a superboy with an intelligence no IQ test can measure. His sweet parents deposit him in a dorm room at a New England college, and he's drenched with sharply etched stereotypes: roommate Mike Tremain is a budding entrepreneur with money-making schemes; Tod Culver is the scientist with a lab that is always lit ``just like in the first second after the Big Bang''; William Appleton is the wild-eyed English prof; and Sara Vogan is the student reporter hot for fame. Nick meets them all and ``begins to imagine the universe God would imagine and create.'' He also discovers art, especially Bruegel and Bosch (``And I could not do it quickly''). Exposition in place, then, Targan shifts into high gear: a bigwig professor tries to recruit Nick for Princeton; Sara sleeps with him; Mike hawks personal appearances (as well as the Nick Burden Tutoring Service); and things turn sour--Culver steals his notes and presents the ``Tangerine Tango'' as his own; Appleton writes a booklength essay on a prodigy, stealing Nick's words; Sara sells glossies to the tabloids; and Mike, secretly selling cocaine, gets both of them arrested, leading to a dark night of the soul that Nick survives by dropping out (before penning ``this lingua franca of love''). A quest fable of the Holden Caulfield variety with some cleverly cosmic pseudo-science added in before the naive and sympathetic hero discovers life's secret: ``At last, having failed significantly, now I could begin.'' -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

From Publishers Weekly

Nicky Burden, a 16-year-old physics whiz whose spectacular intellect cannot compensate for his naivete, undergoes rites of passage in this second novel by Targan ( Kingdom ). Sheltered and kept outside traditional schools because of his immeasurably high IQ, brilliant but gullible Nicky enrolls in college to pose experimentally as a "normal" student. He becomes a partner in what he thinks is a poster business conducted by his huckster roommate, never questioning the contents of the tubes he delivers to a sleazy guy at a bus stop; he falls in love with campus journalist Sara Logan, convinced that her desire for him extends beyond her quest for a major scoop; he unwittingly supplies his encouraging but self-serving professors with his best ideas. The first-person narration raises the tricky problem of how a teenage super-genius might think and speak, but it is a relief to find Nicky portrayed as an outwardly average young man rather than a standard plaid-shirt-and-taped-glasses nerd. This refreshing, idealistic novel encourages stubborn individuality and acknowledges the complementary merits of science and the arts.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Thunder's Mouth Pr
• Publication date: 1991
• ISBN 10: 1560250097
• ISBN 13: 9781560250098
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 313