Foster Dade Explores the Cosmos
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- £4.49
Publisher Description
Prep meets The Secret History in Nash Jenkins’s Foster Dade Explores the Cosmos, a searing debut novel about a tragic scandal at an American prep school, told in the form of a literary investigation through a distinctly millennial lens.
“Juicy . . . Jenkins [is a] huge new literary talent.” —Curtis Sittenfeld, The Guardian
“If Holden Caulfield had been dropped into the Obama era, he might be Foster Dade.” —The National Book Review
When Foster Dade arrives at Kennedy, an elite boarding school in New Jersey, the year is 2008. Barack Obama begins his first term as president; Vampire Weekend and Passion Pit bump from the newly debuted iPhone; teenagers share confidences and rumors over BlackBerry Messenger and iChat; and the internet as we know it is slowly emerging from its cocoon. So, too, is Foster emerging—a transfer student and anxious young man, Foster is stumbling through adolescence in the wake of his parents’ scandalous divorce. But Foster soon finds himself in the company of Annabeth Whittaker and Jack Albright, the twin centers of Kennedy’s social gravity, who take him under their wing to navigate the cliques and politics of the carelessly entitled.
Eighteen months later, Foster will be expelled, following a tragic scandal that leaves Kennedy and its students irreparably changed. When our nameless narrator inherits Foster’s old dorm room, he begins an epic yearslong investigation into what exactly happened. Through interviews with former classmates, Foster’s blog posts, playlists, and text archives, and the narrator’s own obsessive imagination, a story unfurls—Foster’s, yes, but also one that asks us who owns our personal narratives, and how we shape ourselves to be the heroes or villains of our own stories.
Foster Dade Explores the Cosmos is about privilege and power, the pitfalls of masculinity and its expectations, and, most distinctly, how we create the mythologies that give meaning to our lives. With his debut novel, Nash Jenkins brilliantly captures the emotional intensities of adolescence in the dizzying early years of the 21st century.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Jenkins debuts with a capable if overlong story of a New Jersey boarding school scandal. An unnamed narrator recounts the disastrous education of fellow student Foster Dade, who enrolled at Kennedy School 11 years earlier, in 2008. After a doctor prescribes Adderall and Vyvanse for Foster's panic attacks, he sells the pills to his classmates. Dealing drugs provides Foster with access to the school's inner circle, which includes Jack Albright and Annabeth Whittaker. Foster is attracted to Annabeth, but she couples up with Jack, and Foster romances another student. When Foster is caught kissing Annabeth, he is exiled from the elites, and things get worse with the death of one of Foster's clients and a vicious Facebook chat thread. The prose sometimes thuds ("I covet a wistfulness that was foreclosed to me" the narrator suggests), but stylistic flourishes in the form of playlists, legal papers, and entries from Foster's blog provide a convincing if overloaded panorama of the school's microcosm. Some purple prose aside, Jenkins proves to be a keen world builder and a mostly engaging raconteur.
