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Young and passionate authors, celebrated for their raw and fiery prose, are often allowed to get away with less-than-skillful technique, hole-ridden plots, unrealistic characters and messy dialogue. Authors whose first books are published before they can legally drink are lauded (and rightly so) just for being so good at such a young age. With the publication of their subsequent works comes the questions of whether they can transcend their youthful literary style, whether their style and technique has matured, whether they have a viable literary voice, and whether their fame and recognition was solely reliant on their youth.
With the publication of his second novel, THE THIRD BROTHER, Nick McDonell faces just such a test. His debut work of fiction, TWELVE, which was hailed as "fast…relentless" and "a beautifully tragic and unsettling story," launched the then-17-year-old author headlong into a kind of literary celebrity that recalled the reception of LESS THAN ZERO by Bret Easton Ellis in 1985. In both cases, the praise of the novel was inextricably bound up in the youth and youthful voice of its author. Ellis managed to outgrow that initial swoop of fame and prove to be more than just a transient literary fad. With THE THIRD BROTHER, McDonell shows promise enough to follow in Ellis's footsteps and establish himself as something more than just a 17-year-old flash in the pan.
The novel begins with blue-blooded, Harvard-educated Mike's forays into the drug-addled hippie hangouts of Bangkok, Thailand, where he is on assignment for his internship in Hong Kong. Ostensibly there to infiltrate the scene, he also has been sent by his boss --- his father's ex-Harvard chum --- to undertake the task of tracking down an old roommate, a close friend and an ex-reporter named Christopher Dorr, whose history with Mike's father and their close-knit circle of college friends is thorny and convoluted. Dorr had gone to Bangkok to research a story and never returned, dissipating into a sultry and debauched world.
What Mike discovers in Thailand --- about his father, about Dorr, and about himself --- is enough to throw his once-stable conception of identity, of family, and of good versus evil completely off-kilter. And Mike's struggle with, and final acceptance of, the closest truth he can find is well-depicted. We see the initial Mike, a serious but coddled young man who is accustomed to easy answers, face ugly truths about human nature and human instinct. We see those truths change him, but in a way that is natural and steady, and never forced.
When we meet up again with Mike, his parents have died in a fire, the work of his always-troubled older brother Lyle. Lyle has descended into a kind of madness, and Mike has transferred to Columbia to look after him. Mike and Lyle's story begins and ends on September 11, 2001. Any writer who attempts to make use of that day in their work faces the inevitable allegations of literary manipulation --- of attempting to milk an instant so full of national pathos that the author can lazily fall back on the emotions it induces in readers and imagines there is no need to create any with his or her words.
Yet McDonell evades this accusation simply by presenting Mike's life as relatively gloomy even before the first plane hits. The collapse of the towers, the chaos in downtown New York, and the panicked, nervy journey that Mike makes downtown to see his brother are all written at a kind of frantic pace. McDonell captures the breathless fear, the seeming absurdity and need for movement --- for action of any kind --- that that day invoked. As the novel propels itself to a climactic finale, the delusions of Lyle echo the madness of the world, made suddenly very real to a once-sheltered nation. And the capacity for evil that America suddenly must bear witness to echoes Mike's own revelatory experience in Thailand.
The novel is divided into three sections. The first, in Thailand, takes place over about a week. The second, in New York City, details the events of just one day. The third takes place a year later and darkly presents the consequences of the first two. All three are made up of quick --- often less than three-paged --- chapters. All are interspersed with a series of flashbacks to Mike's childhood and the events that culminate in his parents' deaths. Thus, THE THIRD BROTHER is rather technically complex --- asking the reader to travel with Mike's subconscious back and forth in time, to jump from the laconic heat of Thailand to the rapid-fire events of September 11th and beyond, and yet to still remain engaged. McDonell succeeds in holding his reader to the potentially unwieldy story with his uncanny ability to render scenes and places with simple language and direct sentences.
It is in describing a very specific scene --- a backyard in the slums of Bangkok, or the 24-hour bar of a sleazy hotel --- that McDonell proves his staying power. His skill lies in his very real ability to bring his reader into the world on the page. It is to McDonell's credit that he doesn't try to infuse his prose with flowery descriptions and complicated sentences; it bespeaks a kind of self-assurance that, for a 21-year-old, is both unsurprisingly age-appropriate and surprisingly earned. He is a talented writer who will keep getting better --- and luckily we are along for the ride.
--- Reviewed by Jennifer Krieger
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