Synopsis
Mike was a lucky child: A vacation house on Long Island. Famous family friends. An Ivy League education. And also an older brother, Lyle, who looked out for him and protected him from his parents' volatile marriage.
In 2001, Mike is a summer intern at a magazine in Hong Kong. Sent on assignment to Bangkok to interview backpacker kids doing drugs and to track down a brilliant journalist gone AWOL, Mike finds the city electric with violence and hedonism, a dangerous blur of drugs and oblivion. Nothing goes according to plan.
When terrible news arrives from home, Mike rushes back to America. In the aftermath of tragedy, his brother, Lyle, is seeing things. He's unstable and suffering from visions of an imaginary third brother.
And then, a clear September morning is broken by catastrophe. While the Twin Towers burn, Mike makes an epic trek through the ghostly streets of New York to find his brother, to save him.
From Patpong to the World Trade Center to Harvard Yard, as his life and country come apart, Mike struggles to find his footing and go on. The joke, it turns out, is on him.
Reviews
Adult/High School Having delivered his first critically acclaimed novel, Twelve (Grove/Atlantic, 2002), when he was still a teenager, McDonell shows that his talent is substantial as he turns to a different scene and character type. Mike, demonstrably sensitive and insightful, is a college student who grew up wealthy and is vaguely haunted by the mythologies of his parents' generation. He spends the first half of the book working as a journalism intern in Thailand, self-conscious of his role in the Bangkok of student tourists and expatriates, some of whom may once have known his parents in their own youth. He tries to live up to his ambition to investigate, not perpetuate, the Western fantasies of the Far East any more than is necessary to get both the story about backpackers and some personal info about his parents' college days. Back in the United States, the story takes an unexpected turn: Mike's parents have died in a house fire and his older brother has been released only recently from a psychiatric facility. The story begins again, in Manhattan, on September 11, 2001. While Mike disintegrates psychologically as these plotlines cross, McDonell offers a realistic bit of hope for his hero in the form of a faith assertion that older adolescents frequently find in the face of crisis. Teens who like the independence of Holden Caulfield will appreciate Mike. Francisca Goldsmith, Berkeley Public Library, CA
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McDonell's first novel, published when he was 17, was an acclaimed 300,000-copy bestseller—a daunting achievement for this emotionally intricate but iffy sophomore effort to match. The author of Twelve, now 21, is a bit too experienced to be a boy wonder, but he's not quite a mature writer, a 'twixt phase that bedevils this novel about tragic family secrets, sibling madness and the abrupt onset of adult responsibility. Part one of the rat-a-tat-tat tale—most chapters are two or three pages—is set in Thailand, where Mike, a well-bred Harvard freshman interning for the summer at a Hong Kong magazine, is researching a story on stoned Western travelers. Part two takes place back in Manhattan as September 11, 2001, nears: Mike's quarrelsome parents are dead in a house fire and his revered older brother, perhaps responsible for the blaze, is prone to paralyzing hallucinations. McDonnell has a knack for capturing place with sharp-eyed, vivid prose: scenes set in Bangkok's whirl of sex and drugs, and his evocation of 9/11 disbelief and horror are both charged with a reality that's reportorial in its authenticity. But the two halves of the novel, linked loosely by Mike's search for the truth about his family, don't quite gel.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
McDonell was 17 when his hip debut novel, Twelve (2002), garnered avid attention. In his second compulsively readable effort, Mike, a 19-year-old intern for a Hong Kong magazine, thanks to his father's connections, is sent to Bangkok ostensibly to write about the backpacker drug culture. But his real mission is to find a famous journalist who was once close to his parents and is now famously out of touch. Mike is young and inexperienced, but he is also smart and hypervigilant as he hooks up with a group of foreign journalists who call themselves the "flying circus" in acknowledgment of their preference for getting high over reporting. McDonell's clipped chapters hit hard, Mike is magnetic, and the ambience is intoxicatingly cryptic, menacing, and erotic. Then Mike returns to New York. There's been a violent family disaster that culminates on 9/11. McDonell is boldly explicit in his rendering of the World Trade Center catastrophe, but the tragedies he addresses mushroom beyond his control. McDonell is immensely talented; he is just not ready for the monumental. Few are. Donna Seaman
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