The Third Brother: A Novel

by Nick McDonell

Overview

Nick McDonell's debut novel, Twelve, was a publishing sensation. It was an international best seller and established its seventeen-year-old author as an important literary voice. In The Third Brother, McDonell delivers another remarkable novel, a haunting tale of brotherly love, family tragedy, and national grief.

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. It's 2001, and Mike is a summer intern at a magazine in Hong Kong. Sent on assignment to Bangkok, Mike finds the city electric with violence and hedonism. Nothing goes according to plan. When terrible news about his brother arrives from home, Mike rushes back to the States. Lyle is 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 and save Lyle. 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780802142672
Publisher:	Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Publication date:	04/10/2006
Edition description:	REPRINT
Pages:	280
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.25(h) x (d)
Age Range:	14 - 18 Years

About the Author

NICK MCDONELL was born in 1984 in New York City. A graduate of Harvard University, he is the author of two previous novels, Twelve and The Third Brother.

Editorial Reviews

Mr. McDonell writes best about the precise dynamics of class, loneliness and spiritual decay.
— The New York Times

Janet Maslin

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. Agent, Melanie Jackson. (Sept.) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

After receiving a tremendous amount of attention for his first novel, Twelve, which he wrote at the tender age of 17, McDonell, now 21, has followed it with a more meditative effort that reflects a more sophisticated, experienced outlook on life. Mike's well-connected father has helped him land an internship with a magazine in Hong Kong. The work primarily consists of tedious Internet research until Mike's editor, an old college friend of Mike's father, sends him on an assignment to Bangkok both to help a veteran reporter on a story and to find an award-winning journalist from the magazine who hasn't been heard from in months. As Mike searches for the reporter, while also experiencing the licentiousness of Bangkok life, McDonell intersperses the narrative with flashbacks to Mike's privileged but troubling childhood and his close relationship with his older brother. McDonell's authorial confidence borders on audaciousness when he includes the events of 9/11 in the book's denouement; there are still signs of his youthfulness-for example, one hopes that he will eventually expand his average chapter length to more than a few pages. Still, McDonell's prodigious talent is without question, and his current development is evident throughout this work. Recommended for most general fiction collections.-Kevin Greczek, Ewing, NJ Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

McDonell, who at 17 made a splash with his debut, Twelve (2002), delivers an assured and heartfelt second. The narrator, Mike, 19 when we first meet him, works as an intern for an English language news magazine in Hong Kong. It's a job he got because managing editor Elliot Analect is an old Harvard friend of his fathers's. It's a job that pretty much bores Mike silly, so that he jumps at the chance to go to Bangkok to help research a story on back-packing kids and their drugs of choice. " 'Just don't get arrested,' " his boss tells him. He almost does, and on one occasion he's almost killed. Much that happens to him in Thailand is unsettling, nightmarish even, but what calls him home is worse. Mike's is a family on the far side of dysfunctional-both parents alcoholics, a brother whose hold on emotional equilibrium is tentative to say the least. And yet he loves them, and when they can, they love him back. Rich, talented, charming-he thinks of them as a "catalog people, handsome and expensive"-they have made his growing up both pain- and pleasure-filled. He returns from Asia because tragedy has struck, forcing him into a complex and unwelcome role-his older brother's keeper. Most of Part Two is devoted to the horror of 9/11, understatedly but brilliantly reported, as Mike, fearing that Lyle, his brother, might be one of those trapped, works his way toward a devastated downtown. Part Three is a kind of coda, a squaring up, as Mike, now 21, attempts to come to terms with life's savagery. Engrossing, with indelible scenes and a protagonist to care about.

Kirkus Reviews