Nick McDonell: Twelve

By MARGIE THOMSON

The name of this sharp little novel might be Twelve, but 17 is the number that saturates any reading of it, because that's how old the author was when he wrote it.

You can't help but take that into account - marvel over it, in fact - and as the author, who's now the grand old age of 18, has acknowledged, his age has formed a large part of the marketing of the book, and public interest in it. That, and the fact that Hunter S. Thompson has allowed his name to be emblazoned on the cover, stating that "Nick McDonell is the real thing", and both Joan Didion and Richard Price heap praise just inside.

McDonell is a Manhattan boy who comes from the same milieu as the group of teenagers he's writing about: the children of the very rich, who have everything but nothing, who have been brought up by nannies, sent to private schools and boarding schools and who, on the few days between Christmas and New Year that are the frame for Twelve, are rattling around in their mansions alone, while their parents pleasure-seek elsewhere.

Not that McDonell's life is necessarily like that, but he certainly attends the same schools (is head boy at private Riverdale, edited the school paper, excels at sport - in a word, overachieves) and has parents who are at the heart of a certain section of New York society. His father Terry is a magazine editor who ran Esquire and Rolling Stone and is now managing editor of Sports Illustrated and is an old friend of Morgan Entrekin, president and publisher of Grove/Atlantic (which published Twelve) and of Hunter S. Thompson.

In the Bulletin with Newsweek, McDonell admitted to being "unfairly connected" and said: "One of my fears about all of this is that I am going to get undeserved praise. The worst thing in the world would be to have a book that was not really your own and was sort of built up when it shouldn't have been."

So, what's it like? Reviewers in the most prestigious publications in his home town loved it; so did reviewers in the most prestigious publications on the other side of the Atlantic. They all compare him to Bret Easton Ellis, saying Twelve will be to the 00s what Less Than Zero was to the 80s. Some also mention Jay McInerney and J.D. Salinger as well (the New Yorker reports on a dinner party given in McDonell's honour at a swank Manhattan restaurant, where McDonell was approached by McInerney and invited out to dinner with him and his good friend Bret).

In other words, and almost despite the good "connections", McDonell is being recognised as the authentic article, a genuine voice of a generation, a Writer.

Told in 98 chapters, Twelve moves fast and desperate in a relentless series of flashing scenes that scan back and forwards, televisually, around Manhattan and most particularly, around what the New Yorker describes as "the 10021 zip code" - the territory of the very wealthy, where ennui sends unbridled teens on an endless quest for drug highs and sex.

White Mike is taking a year off between high school and Harvard to deal drugs. He introduces high-achieving Jessica to a new one, Twelve, which is to Ecstasy what crack is to cocaine.

At the same time, White Mike's cousin Charlie, also a dealer, goes missing; White Mike's friend Hunter is arrested for a murder he didn't commit; spoiled rich kid Chris is lusting after "it" girl Sara, while his brother Claude becomes increasingly obsessed with weaponry; shy Andrew also lusts after Sara, whose only concern is for more and more social recognition; Timmy and Mark Rothko are white boys trying so hard to look and talk black they can't understand each other.

The story lines gradually converge on one final event, an orgy of, well, everything: drugs, sex and violence. It's an urban parable, a moral tale that draws together many myths about the youth of New York (and has, apparently, "freaked out" the parents of McDonell's friends, although he insists it is not autobiographical).

It's not original in concept or voice, yet there's a freshness and energy - and a definite narrative skill - that marks McDonell out as a preternaturally authoritative writer with amazing observational and imaginative powers. This is a book that reads itself. Recommended - for more than its curiosity value.

* Published by Text, $24.95

* You can meet Nick McDonell at the New Zealand launch of Twelve at Unity Books, 19 High St, from 6pm, on Tuesday.