Twelve
Nick McDonell Atlantic Books, 244pp, £9.99
ISBN 1843540711
Nick McDonell is the latest literary wunderkind on the block, apparently. Clever, cute (and well connected in the world of books), he is being hailed as the voice of New York's dissolute, smart young set.
Unlike other recent puppies (precocious up-and-coming publishing sensations), McDonell has eschewed big themes and clever conceits for the more healthy, adolescent attractions of sex, drugs and a slickly violent storyline. After all, at only 18, he makes the other bright young talents look like late starters. And, as his literary forefathers F Scott Fitzgerald and Bret Easton Ellis proved, youth can be an advantage in capturing the pulse of a generation.
On the first page, we learn that the hero, White Mike, was inspired in his gap-year vocation as a drug dealer by the kid in American Beauty. Later, White Mike, like the boy in the film, spies on the family in the opposite apartment watching TV together, inventing personas for them all.
Set on Manhattan's affluent Upper East Side, this is a world of poor little rich kids, neglected in every way but financially by their wealthy parents who, for the most part, "come from the land of crazy people. Or maybe the land of assholes." The palatial parental apartments are merely places to throw "parties or something" (the parents are always away, after all); motherly advice means recommending a decent shrink; and fathers give their kids cash for Christmas: "I never see him, you know, but he got a little tree for the kitchen table. He's sort of sentimental."
Their offspring, unsurprisingly, aren't much better. Tobias, a model, boasts about how, when he was 12, "he took a shit in his bed just so the maid would have to clean it up". Molly, another model, throws a tantrum and flings her top out of a 20th-storey window, declaring: "I am not a tank-top girl! I am not, I am not." Chris has a thing for pornography; his older brother, a more worrying weakness for weapons. But they are regular preppy kids at heart, as concerned about securing a place at Harvard as getting laid. They worry about their acne, hang out at the ice rink, and turn to Camus for consolation.
What the mums and dads begin, drugs, in particular a new drug called Twelve, finish off. Although some are still anxious about smoking their first joints, others are dangerously cool. Jessica - pretty, big brown eyes, nice breasts, fake nose - a "jock who does track", swims and snorts coke at parties, is soon bargaining her lovely body for Twelve. Not White Mike, however. Like the author, he doesn't even smoke or drink. He just deals.
So what's new in the bright-lights big city of the 21st century? Apart from the names of the drugs and designer labels, not a lot, it would seem. With Hunter S Thompson and Jay McInerney as family friends, it seems only natural that some of their habits should be picked up by impressionable young ears. McDonell is certainly a gifted ventriloquist, and not just of other writers. The teen idiom is authentic, and his parody of hip white nigga slang - "What in the damn shiz fo a niz?" - absurdly comic.
Written with the urgency and economy of a good screenplay, the novel's multiple plot-lines, which take place over four days after Christmas, run parallel and intersect, like the New York streets on which they are set. The intensity builds to a New Year's Eve party where the narratives converge in a dramatic climax. With a heady cocktail of hormones, drugs, guns and grudges, we know things are going to get messy.
If White Mike is the novel's confused conscience, its heart belongs to Manhattan itself. This is a city of insatiable desires, waste and want, frenzied aimlessness and crowded loneliness. In his restless wanderings through "the capital of the world", White Mike encounters loners and losers, outsiders like himself. Set against the sharp surfaces of his world, these snapshots of hopelessness give the satire surprising depth and feeling.
Although the city's gilded youth may be tarnished, age means only further degeneracy and despair. Whenever the narrative teeters on the brink of anything as uncool as sentimentality or moralising, White Mike (or McDonell) checks himself: "Don't be an asshole."
In the final, bloody showdown, neither innocents nor the corrupt are spared - they are the beautiful and the damned of our age. McDonell's, at least, has been a youth well spent.
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