Tripping
A young reporter stumbles into Bangkok drug-trafficking.

Reviewed by John Burdett
Sunday, November 6, 2005

In 2002, at the astonishing age of 17, Nick McDonell wrote a fine novel about Manhattan called Twelve, which became an international bestseller and was highly praised for its mastery of teen-talk (comparisons with Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye were made). I’m prepared to bet that once the euphoria faded, McDonell became the victim of a form of panic that follows every such triumph: Can I do it again, or was it just a fluke? Shrewdly, he realized that his gift was all about the imaginative recreation of contemporary urban experience, but he didn’t want to repeat himself; in other words, he needed another New York.

Sadly, for his second novel, The Third Brother , he has flown to Bangkok, a city he does not know or understand, and made it the centerpiece of his narrative for the first 158 pages. So we find ourselves in an incomprehensible landscape without a backup plan as various moronic, dope-driven backpackers come and go without explanation; a woman blows darts from her vagina; marijuana and yaa baa (methamphetamine) are everywhere; a corrupt cop inexplicably starts waving his gun around; backpackers and traffickers get into deals that go wrong; we are perpetually looking for a character called Dorr whose name appears with monotonous regularity, just so that we can exhale when he finally arrives.

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