Résumé
Résumé
The highly anticipated second novel from the author of the internationally best-selling TwelveNick McDonell's Twelve created a sensation around the world, establishing its seventeen-year-old author as one of the new and important voices of his generation. The book sold over 300,000 copies, was published in twenty-four countries, and was hailed by The New York Times as "fast as speed, relentless as acid." The Third Brother is his highly anticipated second novel. "The story is backpacker kids going to Bangkok to do ecstasy," Analect says. "Just don't get arrested." Mike is interning in Hong Kong when his editor, a friend of his father's, gives him the assignment, and a mission: find Christopher Dorr, a brilliant journalist gone AWOL. So begins a propulsive journey that will take a young man grasping after his identity headlong through fast nights in Thailand, into the grip of family tragedy, and into the heart of September 11, 2001. Along the way he encounters a kaleidoscope of characters-the Flying Circus, a hard-living band of journalists trying to expose the Thai government's murderous repression of drug dealers; Tweety, an inexplicably alluring prostitute hungry to leave her world of poverty and desperation; and the third brother, a mysterious, imaginary sibling created by Mike's haunted older brother. Through it all, Mike must come to terms with the legacies of his troubled family and privileged upbringing. "He knew that if you grow up with money, you don't think about being rich and that the same is probably true of courage. But if you grow up with lies, you find out that some lies become true. Mike knew this and so did not lie. Except to himself, about his parents." The Third Brother moves with the speed and purpose of a bullet through the complexities of life in a Third-World capital of illicit hedonism, to the unspeakable horror of 9/11, and to the polished life of academia, offering a devastating portrait of a family caught between love and turmoil, and of a young man stretching to come to terms with his past and to find his future.
Critiques (6)
Critique de School Library Journal
Adult/High School-Having delivered his first critically acclaimed novel, Twelve (Grove/Atlantic, 2002), when he was still a teenager, McDonell shows that his talent is substantial as he turns to a different scene and character type. Mike, demonstrably sensitive and insightful, is a college student who grew up wealthy and is vaguely haunted by the mythologies of his parents' generation. He spends the first half of the book working as a journalism intern in Thailand, self-conscious of his role in the Bangkok of student tourists and expatriates, some of whom may once have known his parents in their own youth. He tries to live up to his ambition to investigate, not perpetuate, the Western fantasies of the Far East any more than is necessary to get both the story about backpackers and some personal info about his parents' college days. Back in the United States, the story takes an unexpected turn: Mike's parents have died in a house fire and his older brother has been released only recently from a psychiatric facility. The story begins again, in Manhattan, on September 11, 2001. While Mike disintegrates psychologically as these plotlines cross, McDonell offers a realistic bit of hope for his hero in the form of a faith assertion that older adolescents frequently find in the face of crisis. Teens who like the independence of Holden Caulfield will appreciate Mike.-Francisca Goldsmith, Berkeley Public Library, CA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Critique du Publishers Weekly
McDonell's first novel, published when he was 17, was an acclaimed 300,000-copy bestsellerAa 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 taleAmost chapters are two or three pagesAis 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.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Critique du Guardian
Nick McDonell's first book, Twelve , written when he was 17, was a minimalist, filmic novel about wealthy and anomic New York teenagers. The effect was a terse, empty repetition of an empty story that both writer and reader had already seen and heard. It was good in a way that you couldn't articulate without unpicking an irony within an irony. The key character was White Mike, who saw a lot, thought a lot, but didn't really act. The protagonist of The Third Brother , Mike, sees a lot, thinks a lot, but doesn't really act. However, the issue in this, McDonell's second novel, is not a failure to display a progression or a shift in style - he has effortlessly come out from behind Twelve 's mimicry of Easton Ellis with a loaded brevity that is his alone. The problem is that the disengagement that worked for Twelve 's protagonist fails in The Third Brother In part, the novel reads as a portrait of an affluent, outwardly successful, inwardly unhappy American family. In earlier childhood, Mike's troubled brother, Lyle, jumpy because their parents are arguing, lets a firecracker off in his hand. Even as Lyle is taken to hospital, the fractures in the family refuse to be sidestepped: "Lyle, through the pain, was glad to be with just his father in the car. It was better to be with just one parent than two. Mike, with his mother, was thinking the same thing. 'Divide and conquer', was their joke." Later, Mike, reliving his brother's strange behaviour that day, says wonderingly to Lyle: "You set that thing off into your chin," but when a friend who was also present adds his reminiscences, Mike immediately closes access: "I'm just bullshitting with my brother." Swiftly, deftly, McDonell sets up this conspiratorial decay at the heart of The Third Brother and then falls short of the demand imposed by its darkness; instead, he gives us the family from Mike's perspective - an inadequate one, because Mike is not really a character, but a substitution for one, an uninspired parcel of silence and awkwardness. Mike is a college student and aspiring journalist; he spends a summer working as an intern on his father's friend's magazine in Hong Kong before being sent to Bangkok, not only to write a drugs story but also to find another friend of his father's, Christopher Dorr, who is missing. This mission, which fails in every aspect to convince, finds fruition in a jaw-droppingly opaque encounter in which Dorr talks menacingly at Mike while puppies die in the background. The early narrative also leans on aphorisms that evade the context of being a farang in a foreign country, jumping instead at the jugular of universality: "We are invincible until the first heart attack. This is a modern idea." Comments of this sort crop up with uncomfortable frequency in the exposition of Mike's interior monologue. The draw of this book is the promise posited by sensitive, intelligent Lyle, who has always made Mike feel "that he did not see problems his older brother saw". When Mike returns from Bangkok, his parents have died in a house fire. Lyle is the fire's only survivor, and, in his state of shocked trauma, fabricates a third brother, an evil brother who is responsible for the death of his parents. At last the careful dislocation in Mike's family puts its true, battered face into the light. "He is not joyless," Lyle whispers in reference to the third brother, who danced and sang around the family piano after he had set fire to it. The characters and the events in The Third Brother speak of late consequences, of a night deferred until the only thing it can do is destroy. But without a pathway for us to follow into his mind, Mike's bright, tense, ill brother becomes a caricature, a sketch holding a sign saying "This is madness". The novel spirals in on itself in its self-consciousness, until it becomes a mood. But that mood is nervous, foggy, and impressively lingering - it suggests that, for McDonell, the third time is the charm. Helen Oyeyemi's novel The Icarus Girl is published by Bloomsbury. To order The Third Brother for pounds 9.99 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0870 836 0875 or go to guardian.co.uk/ bookshop Caption: article-mcdonell.1 In part, the novel reads as a portrait of an affluent, outwardly successful, inwardly unhappy American family. In earlier childhood, Mike's troubled brother, Lyle, jumpy because their parents are arguing, lets a firecracker off in his hand. Even as Lyle is taken to hospital, the fractures in the family refuse to be sidestepped: "Lyle, through the pain, was glad to be with just his father in the car. It was better to be with just one parent than two. [Mike], with his mother, was thinking the same thing. 'Divide and conquer', was their joke." The draw of this book is the promise posited by sensitive, intelligent Lyle, who has always made Mike feel "that he did not see problems his older brother saw". When Mike returns from Bangkok, his parents have died in a house fire. Lyle is the fire's only survivor, and, in his state of shocked trauma, fabricates a third brother, an evil brother who is responsible for the death of his parents. At last the careful dislocation in Mike's family puts its true, battered face into the light. "He is not joyless," Lyle whispers in reference to the third brother, who danced and sang around the family piano after he had set fire to it. - Helen Oyeyemi.
Critique de Kirkus
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. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Critique de Booklist
McDonell was 17 when his hip debut novel, Twelve (2002), garnered avid attention. In his second compulsively readable effort, Mike, a 19-year-old intern for a Hong Kong magazine, thanks to his father's connections, is sent to Bangkok ostensibly to write about the backpacker drug culture. But his real mission is to find a famous journalist who was once close to his parents and is now famously out of touch. Mike is young and inexperienced, but he is also smart and hypervigilant as he hooks up with a group of foreign journalists who call themselves the flying circus in acknowledgment of their preference for getting high over reporting. McDonell's clipped chapters hit hard, Mike is magnetic, and the ambience is intoxicatingly cryptic, menacing, and erotic. Then Mike returns to New York. There's been a violent family disaster that culminates on 9/11. McDonell is boldly explicit in his rendering of the World Trade Center catastrophe, but the tragedies he addresses mushroom beyond his control. McDonell is immensely talented; he is just not ready for the monumental. Few are. --Donna Seaman Copyright 2005 Booklist
Critique du Library Journal
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 (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.