The Third Brother

I've not read this author's first book "Twelve", but heard good reviews and decided to read his second novel. I loved the book. It's well written. It has a feel of being a story told by a very young man, almost a teen. He is very observant and thoughtful. He is a liar and a coward. He is a son of rich but dysfunctional parents, and a brother of a crazy brother with a third imaginary brother. He was a summer intern in Hong Kong and met a hooker girl in Thailand, who was killed by police ... almost in his presence and almost because of him. I liked his Thailand story more than 9/11 story. It feels that the author had visited Thailand himself. After reading his travel notes, I know, I will never go there for a vacation. Thanks for a truthful story.

The Third Brother is a strange, disparate novel. Made up of short, sharp chapters, author Nick McDonell seems intent to frame his story around a series of punchy, sensory vignettes of Mike, his young main protagonist. Mike comes from a well-to-do family on Long Island, and Mike's father uses an old network to get his son a holiday job working for a magazine in Hong Kong. Mike is intitially thrilled at the idea, especially when the editor, Elliot Analect, sends Mike with a seasoned journalist to report on backpackers and party drugs in Bangkok. The real purpose of this expedition is to locate Christopher Dorr, a missing reporter. Analect, Dorr and Mike's father all went to college together and Mike will slowly discover the complexity of the relationship between the three men, which is convoluted as it is mysterious. Mike becomes a tourist in Bangkok's underworld where he experiences an urge to save as much as to describe. Amongst the seedy nightclubs and run down hostels of Khao San Road, Mike meets are variety of shady characters. Mike is a pure, Harvard educated young snob, but his encounters in the back alleyways of Bancock, shape his reaction to his family, and to the world around him. He hangs out with local journalists and hippie backpackers, survives some brushes with the law, and witnesses some ugly stuff, such as drug deals, and even becomes attracted to a local prostitute. Mike is as tangential to the hip scene around him as he is perennially inactive and indecisive. It's as though he's on a dare, to see how naughty he can really be, to see how far he can go, 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 rack me down and pull me out?" Throughout the first half of the novel, McDonell immerses the reader in the sites, sounds, and smells of Bangkok, and sets up an interesting juxtaposition between the native Thais, the Western back packer kids eating their ecstasy pills, and the "farangs," the white men who don't know anything and yet get into trouble, and also the Thais who want to be like them - "yellow on the outside, white in the inside." It's not that Mike believes in ghosts, it's that he knows you can be haunted, and when he finally returns home to New York disaster strikes, his parents have been killed in a house fire, and Lyle, his brother has become deranged, believing that the fire was caused by a "third brother." Mike ends up in Manhattan, on the day of September 11th, frantically searching for Lyle amidst the dust, dirt, and debris the World Trade Center. The chaos of the day reflects the disarray of his own family, when Mike looks at a snapshot of his family he sees the potential craziness himself, "just like it was there in all of them." In tightly measured and articulated prose, McDonell details a young man's journey through twenty-first century angst, exploring grief, "causalities and orders and children and friendly fire all interwoven

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

I loved this novel! I read quite a bit and think this is the best book I have read in a long time. The symbolism is incredible but not so, "in your face," that it is annoying. All of the different threads come together in a fascinating way at the end of the book. I could not recommend it more. Margaret Krause

This book is awesome. I read it straight through because I couldn't put it down. I didn't think Nick McDonell could write another book as powerful as Twelve--but this is actually better. Besides being a really great story, it's also an amazing (sometimes heartbreaking) picture of a family that could have had everything.