E-Mail This Article to a Friend Screen test Nick McDonell’s next big thing BY NINA MacLAUGHLIN
	THE THIRD BROTHER By Nick McDonell. Grove Press, 267 pages, $22.
	Related Links Nick McDonell's Web site Mike Milliard interviewed Nick McDonell when he was eighteen.

Nick McDonell was born in 1984. He goes to Harvard. His first novel, Twelve, was about rich Manhattanite kids and their drugs. It was published when he was 18. Michiko Kakutani liked it. Joan Didion called it "an astonishing rush." Hunter S. Thompson feared that "he will do for his generation what I did for mine." Both writers were pals of the McDonells, and much has been made of Nick’s connections. His father is managing editor of Sports Illustrated, and Morgan Entrekin, who runs Grove/Atlantic, is a family friend. You can whine about nepotism, but that’s how the world works. And 27 foreign publishers felt strongly enough about Twelve to publish it. Some people are lucky. And anyway, Nick McDonell’s got some guts.

His second novel, The Third Brother, throttles along like a movie, jumping from scene to scene. And it pulls you with it — McDonell knows pacing — but if there’s breathlessness, it results from speed alone and not from any emotional breath taking. Mike (also the name of the protagonist in Twelve) is a rich New Yorker who goes to Harvard; his parents are alcoholics; his older brother is mentally unwell. The first half takes place in Bangkok, where Mike is on assignment for an internship at a magazine in Hong Kong. The second half takes place on and after September 11, 2001, in New York and in Cambridge. The parts are so severed, they feel like two different books.

In Bangkok, Mike is supposed to talk to backpacker druggies for the magazine, and he finds plenty in a string of club scenes, sex shows, and ecstasy dens. He’s taken by the exotic energy of the place, and the writing reflects it: "He can look anyone in the eye and tell them — I was out. I was doing something. I did not just stay in my room and watch TV the way I wanted to . . . I talked with Hardy and saw Lucy Long Legs and almost died on a motorcycle. I went."

But his main quest is for Christopher Dorr, an old friend of his dad’s from Harvard, an ex-journalist, lost and haywire somewhere outside Bangkok. He finds the Kurtz-like figure, stoned, surrounded in filth. It’s here that the story gets interesting. And it’s here that McDonell ends it.

And then Mike’s back in New York. And — WHAM! — his childhood home has burned down. And — BAM! — both his parents are dead. And — POW! — his brother’s lost his mind. And then — BOOM! — two planes fly into the World Trade Center. That’s a lot to throw at the reader in the span of a page and a half. And there’s no way McDonell can land the punch because of the distance with which Mike experiences all of it, particularly while he’s racing downtown to find his brother as the towers crumble.

That’s not to say McDonell need include photographs of a body falling to make people feel, as Jonathan Safran Foer did in his September 11 novel, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. But McDonell’s fictional account is too reportorial, too removed. The writing is visceral in that it’s filled with blood and guts: people are executed; a prostitute shoots a dart from her vagina; Mike sees body parts "like strange, horrible animals sleeping on the streets" just north of the attack. Yet too much of it feels like peering at events through the wrong end of a pair of binoculars.

Perhaps the distance is McDonell’s point. Perhaps that’s the only thing you can do when you witness too much — turn the binoculars around, remove yourself, and try to tell the story. More power to any 21-year-old who tackles September 11 in a novel. But it’s easier to take risks from a privileged position. As Mike muses, "Let’s just see how far it can go, let’s see how much trouble a white kid from New York can actually get into. Is there a hole in the world so deep that my father can’t track me down and pull me out?" With The Third Brother, McDonell has not dug so deep a hole.

Nick McDonell | Newtonville Books, 296 Walnut St, Newton | October 5 | 7:30 pm | 617.244.6619 | + Benjamin Kunkel | Harvard Book Store, 1256 Mass Ave, Cambridge | October 13 | 6:30 pm | 800.542.READ