Reviewed by John Burdett
20th January 2008
Las Vegas is the expression, in glitter and concrete, of America’s brittle Continue Reading »
and mutating id. This is not the argument of Charles Bock’s exceptional
Beautiful Children, so much as the fact from which he explores the survival
strategies - usually doomed - of the citizen-mutants themselves.
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. Continue Reading »