The Third Brother
Nick McDonell Atlantic Books, 267pp, £10.99
ISBN 1843544776
Some novels have the enlivening youthfulness of their youthful authors. You can think of Nicholas Nickleby or White Teeth as young writers' books in this way - zestful, chaotic, wastefully inventive. Their authors were in their mid-twenties. Nick McDonell is publishing The Third Brother, his second novel, at the age of only 21. Yet the book feels young mostly because of its weariness. Its protagonist, Mike - 19 when the story begins, a year or two older when it ends - shares a good deal with his inventor. He is a New York rich kid with a place at Harvard and the world before him. His sophistication, however, produces an emotional numbness that you fear he might also share with the author.
McDonell is the Harvard undergraduate touted by some as the coming writer for his generation. On the jacket of this novel Hunter S Thompson proclaims him "the real thing . . . I'm afraid that he will do for his generation what I did for mine." But then Hunter was an old family friend, and McDonell's publisher is also his godfather. McDonell is, as they say, connected. The son of a magazine editor father and a novelist mother, he made his debut with Twelve, published when he was 17. Set in the world of rich, ennuyes Manhattan teenagers, it was a bestseller. Now, in a novel that again makes its material out of having a privileged life, McDonell tries to take us away from his home territory.
At first, two narratives alternate. One, in the present tense, tells us how, as an intern on a news magazine based in Hong Kong, Mike travels to Bangkok to do a story on backpacker kids and drugs. His real job is to find a missing reporter, Christopher Dorr, a friend of his father. The other narrative, in the past tense, recalls episodes from Mike's golden New York life: the nannies, the dinner parties, the parental bust-ups. This is the best stuff in the book. With its mix of smugness and insecurity, it reads as from life, even if the humourlessness of the protagonist is also the author's. When Mike's mother takes him on a cultural jaunt to console him for failing a Latin test, you might expect something wry. Instead he quotes (actually, misquotes) Cicero at her and she cries, telling him she is proud of him. A typical, would-be-meaningful one-sentence paragraph concludes the chapter. "Mike knew that wasn't why she cried." There are plenty of these sub-Hemingway refusals to tell us more.
In the other narrative, Mike hangs out with various sybaritic backpackers, thin characters who say mysterious or knowing things that make them sound drugged, which indeed they are much of the time. They are about as interesting or individuated as, say, the characters inhabiting Alex Garland's The Beach. Mike tracks down Dorr, who squats in a hut saying Kurtz-like things about death. He talks about how his sister died in childbirth and we are invited to suppose that child was Mike's father's. But this is one of many plot suggestions that the novel cannot pursue. Finally, something does happen. Tweety, a Thai bar girl with whom Mike has had sex the previous night, is, with her pusher brother, shot dead by Thai police. Yet even this hardly seems to register with numb, young Mike, or therefore with us.
A cynical reader will suspect that the novelist is trying to exoticise the anomie of a pampered youth. The thought that the author, as much as his character, is striving for significance seems confirmed when the second part of the novel is set on the day the planes hit the twin towers.
There is structural clumsiness, too. When we slip forward in time to 9/11, there is a sudden past-tense insertion into the present-tense narration to tell us that Mike and Lyle are orphans. "A little over a year ago, their parents died in a house fire." Lyle "lost his mind" and now hallucinates a third brother (this fantasy gives the book its title, yet is bewilderingly irrelevant to anything else in the novel). Mike's journey on foot through a stunned Manhattan, trying to find Lyle, who lives near the World Trade Center, is gripping - McDonell can do description. But the sense of crisis in his character's life is falsely attached to a larger horror.
We skip time again to the third and final part, and Lyle has killed himself. Mike has become the narrator. There is even a half-hearted pretence that this eventless last third of the book is some kind of journal ("whatever it is I am writing now"). Yet the switch to first-person narration is arbitrary. The style is the same: the short chapters, the short paragraphs, the short declarative sentences. Abbreviation is made to look like implicitness, as if suggesting emotions. "Mike was privileged and troubled at the same time," the novel's first sentence told us. If so, the trouble rarely crosses into the narrative.
John Mullan is professor of English at University College London
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