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August 5, 2009

Cramming a Lot Into a Youthful Literary Life

Charles McGrath:

Nick McDonell ought to be an easy person to dislike. He is young, smart, good looking and ridiculously well connected. His father is Terry McDonell, the editor of Sports Illustrated, and he grew up in the kind of gilded New York household where Joan Didion, Jay McInerney and George Plimpton were drop-in guests. His godfather is Morgan Entrekin, the publisher of Grove/Atlantic, who bought Mr. McDonell's first novel, "Twelve," when Mr. McDonell was just 18. He heard news of its acceptance while cruising home in the carpool from Riverdale Country School, where he was president of the student body. Hunter S. Thompson, another family friend, came through with a timely blurb, saying, "I'm afraid he will do for his generation what I did for mine."

Nick McDonell on the New York set of "Twelve," the movie based on his first novel.
If that weren't insufferable enough, Mr. McDonell, now 25, has a third novel, "An Expensive Education," being published on Wednesday by Atlantic Monthly, and "Twelve," meanwhile, is being made into a movie starring Kiefer Sutherland, Chace Crawford and 50 Cent. On your way to meet Mr. McDonell you can find yourself half-hoping that he might be dinged by a pedicab -- not seriously, but enough to give him a limp, say, or an embarrassing facial tic.

As it happens, though, he is the kind 0f overly well-behaved person who waits for the light to change even when there is no traffic. He is also shy, earnest, a little naïve, disarmingly modest, polite almost to a fault. And he writes so well that his connections are beside the point. In The New York Times the book critic Michiko Kakutani said that "Twelve," which is about the downward-spiraling adventures of some druggy New York private-school students over Christmas break, was "as fast as speed, as relentless as acid." "An Expensive Education" ingeniously combines elements of a le Carré or Graham Greene-like international thriller with a campus novel set at Harvard, from which Mr. McDonell graduated in 2007. There are scenes of double-crossing C.I.A. activities in Somalia, as well as of campus rush parties and two cocktail-swilling guys who are famous on campus for ironically wearing tuxedos all the time -- the college-age versions, perhaps, of two adolescent stoners in "Twelve" who are always saying things like "Shiz fo a niz!"

Posted by Jim Zellmer at August 5, 2009 3:22 AM
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