The Beautiful Miscellaneous
A Novel
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
From the New York Times bestselling author of The Last Painting of Sara de Vos, a dazzling new novel explores the fault lines that can cause a family to drift apart and the unexpected events that can pull them back together.
Nathan Nelson is the average son of a genius. His father, a physicist of small renown, has prodded him toward greatness from an early age—enrolling him in whiz kid summer camps, taking him to the icy tundra of Canada to track a solar eclipse, and teaching him college algebra. But despite Samuel Nelson's efforts, Nathan remains ordinary.
Then, in the summer of 1987, everything changes. While visiting his small-town grandfather in Michigan, Nathan is involved in a terrible accident. After a brief clinical death -- which he later recalls as a lackluster affair lasting less than the length of a Top 40 pop song—he falls into a coma. When he awakens, Nathan finds that everyday life is radically different. His perceptions of sight, sound, and memory have been irrevocably changed. The doctors and his parents fear permanent brain damage. But the truth of his condition is more unexpected and leads to a renewed chance for Nathan to find his place in the world.
Thinking that his son's altered brain is worthy of serious inquiry, Samuel arranges for Nathan to attend the Brook-Mills Institute, a Midwestern research center where savants, prodigies, and neurological misfits are studied and their specialties applied. Immersed in this strange atmosphere -- where an autistic boy can tell you what day Christmas falls on in 3026 but can't tie his shoelaces, where a medical intuitive can diagnose cancer during a long-distance phone call with a patient—Nathan begins to unravel the mysteries of his new mind, and finally make peace with the crushing weight of his father's expectations.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Following a car crash, Nathan Nelson, 17, is recovering from a two-week-long coma in July 1987. His father, Samuel, a physics professor at a Wisconsin college, wanted a genius for a son. Nathan, who narrates, has always been uninspired at best, but finds that the accident has left him with heightened senses, and a prodigious memory. Cerebral Samuel, whom Nathan can't help revering, rejoices. Even when sent to a school for the gifted, however, Nathan mostly watches TV and smokes cigarettes with girlfriend Teresa, whose talent is a kind of X-ray vision. Teresa soon uses this talent to spot a tragedy looming in Nathan's immediate future, and his life afterward, for the reader, is all frustrating anticlimax. As the years pass, Nathan works at a dead-end library job, stalks townspeople and parties with former schoolmates. This narrative's strengths are its abundant humor, occasional lyrical patches and portrayal of the quirky but reliable Whit Shupak, a retired astronaut and family friend. But Smith (The Mercury Visions of Louis Daguerre) never allows the immature, lackadaisical Nathan to really develop or emerge from his father's shadow.
