Twelve

Rating:
Summary: How did this get published?? Oh yeah, I remeber Connections!
Review: Though this book could have been promising, my skepticism was confirmed even more than I had expected. Being a 19 year old aspiring author who has been writing all through high school and now is majoring in creative writing in college, I only feel more bitter towards the little rich kids who want ot publish a book so they get daddy to hook them up with a sweet deal and plenty of false promotions. When I first heard of Nick McDonell in a magazine, I thought:
1) Child Prodigy?
or
2) Spoiled Brat!

This book is a confirmation of the mediocrity that is realeased into our culture through power and money. It saddens me to think that some frustrated prep school kid could get his book published when the rest of us writers no matter what age have to go through hell just to get somebody to read it.

In short, I feel sorry for those who bought this book hoping to find something special. Holden Caulfield will always rule over new age Kopy kats. Chao!

Rating:
Summary: Nepotism at its finest.
Review: I don't understand the hype about this book. The writing style was amateurish. The ending was telegraphed right from the start, the only shocking think was just how over the top it was. The only reason this manuscript wasn't thrown in the trash where it belongs, is clearly because of his father who just happens to be the editor of Sports Illustrated.

Rating:
Summary: Heard It All Before....................
Review: I, for one, tried to like this book, but when I FINALLY finished it, I felt totally disappointed and cheated. I make it a point not to read other people's reviews before I read a book, that way I am not influenced by their thoughts and feelings, whether positive or negative. This is another story with the same plot that we have heard so many times before. It is about rich kids who love to party, do drugs, have unsafe sex, get drunk, and then get violent. I felt really disgusted with the ending.

The only reason I gave this book three stars was that I thought the main character, White Mike, might turn out to have some redeeming value. What did not make sense to me was the fact that White Mike did not smoke, take drugs, or drink. Yet, he was out there getting rich, dealing and destroying young lives, and nobody seemed to care. He was "too clean" to be realistic. As for the writing style, this must be the new acceptable writing style of young novelists today, short, choppy, and terse. If the ending had been different, I might have taken a more positive approach in reviewing this story. Instead, I felt the ending was a cop-out.

I think McDonell could turn out to be a good writer, given another year or two, if he had a more realistic, interesting, or unique story to tell. This is a debut novel, by a very young author, so perhaps his next book will surprise us all!

Joe Hanssen

Rating:
Summary: Not so bad, not so good
Review: Everyone who reviews this book either gushes about the great, nitty-gritty expose of idle rich drug addict kids, or else they complain about how it is not fair that Nick McDonell got his book published by his friends. Neither view seems true to me. I read this book because it was in the Talk of the Town in the New Yorker a few months ago, and I will admit: I was jealous of Nick McDonell's ins with the publishing honchos. I read this book hoping that it would be bad and that I could hate it. However, I did not hate it, but I also did not drool over it.

It is about White Mike, a drug dealer, who was the only character I liked. He remained detached from the drug addicts in the book, and wanders throughout Manhattan, thinking about his mother and birds and college. The other characters are nowhere near as developed as White Mike,I found myself speeding through the sections on the other characters to hear more about him. There are some witty, and even a few profound, comments about the rich, bored youth, but the allegedly "TERRIBLE AND TRAGIC AND SHOCKING EVEN OUR JADED SOULS" ending seemed forced and more pointless than shocking. Most of the characters who figure in this scene are stock characters, like Lionel the drug lord and Andrew the in-over-his-head-all-mixed-up-Anthony-Michael-Hall kid, or else to inexplicable to care about, like Claude the maniac.

All in all, this book was a fine, quick read. I wouldn't recommend it to strangers, but I also don't regret the two and a half hours I spent reading it.

Rating:
Summary: Disecting a generation.
Review: Nick McDonell's "Twelve" is absolutely fantastic. The author is raw, merciless, unforgiving, and writes the absolute truth, completely uncensored and unimaginably powerful. As a teenager, I was able to connect with this work on so many levels, from his critical use of recent pop culture references and trends, to the novels echoes of the Columbine tragedy. Also, the characters and situations are all too familliar to me, I go to school with people like them everyday, and the work hit home in more ways than one. The terrifying finale has humbeled me,and is extremely relevant, and should be read, especially by our post Columbine generation. This book, I feel, does an excellent job of disecting our generation and offers insight into teenagers stumbling through the new millenium,our dark, twisted, superficial side, as well as our sensetive, and innocent; it reveals the broad spectrum of our capabilities as human beings from poetic beauty, to inhuman savagery. Although the book may be too much for the weak of heart or the sheltered/narrowminded, and some more mature readers my be frusturated with McDonell's youthful point of view, I think for the large part, that other readers my age (17) will connect very strongly with the book, and come to view it with the same affection, and respect that I have. If only more of us would actually read...

Rating:
Summary: Poor Little Rich Kids...
Review: White Mike is a drug dealer who dreams of something better. He doesn't like selling drugs, he just does it because he's good at it. What he wants out of life is recognition and praise. He wants to be good at something - anything - just to feel better about himself.

White Mike enters and walks out of the life of many teens, all of them rich, all of them clueless about what it means to live. These kids have everything they desire, so much so that they are actually bored with their own little existence.

The title refers to a drug. Twelve is a new drug that gives its user a new kind of thrill. But these kids don't need drugs to live on another planet. They already do live in their own little world. They lack guidance, they lack parenting, they lack good influences. They lack everything except money. And this emptiness they felt throughout the whole book.

Nick McDonell has written a great novel about our times. It is not trying to make us feel bad about these rich kids. It is actually trying to show us how troubled and empty these kids really are. Written in short chapters and very brief and uneloquent prose (many whats, ifs, and likes are used to add colour to the prose), the novel captures today's youth to perfection, which is not an easy feat to achieve. McDonell is the new voice for today's generation.

Rating:
Summary: well done
Review: This book has an amazing prose style and a fast-paced clip which moves the plot along briskly. It is entertaining and the characters are (at least to a prep-school graduate) easily recognizable, which lends them more depth than they are actually given. The characters are less stereotype and more caricature and work well within the novel. The ending is what kept this book from a 5-star rating. It leaves many things unexplained and gives some things too much explanation. Otherwise, it is brilliantly done and well worth the read.

Rating:
Summary: Waste of Paper
Review: TWELVE is 18 year old Nick McDonell's first attempt at a novel. It has a plotline that is furthered by many characters, all vaugley related. It's written in the same style that Brett Easton Ellis uses. It is, essentially, a recycled, slightly modified, East Coat version LESS THAN ZERO. It got rave reviews by prestigious authors (Hunter S. Thompson, Richard Price). Turns out, McDonell's grandfather (I've also heard it's his godfather, but either way, they're very close) owns Grove-Atlantic, the company that published the book, and all the reviewers are family friends.

I read some of ZERO and all of Ellis's AMERICAN PSYCHO and I will say it: I am not a fan of Ellis or his style, and I realize that McDonell was trying, on some level, to imitate him. This novel makes Ellis's work look appealing to me--it's that bad. One advance review reads: "The ratio of age to talent is horrifying" (Thompson). It is, but that can be interpreted more than one way.

The protagonist is White Mike, and there is a long list of other characters. Maybe it's just me, but I like it when characters are in some way simpathetic. Even if I can't identify with the character, I want to like him, I want to care about what happens to him. White Mike is in no way a likeable or really interesting or unique character, nor is anyone else. What are these characters' motivations? Thoughs? Inner feelings--not "I'm hungry, I think I'll eat Cheerios," I'm talking about real feelings. The deep ones. Apparently, they're none of our business. And when put under pressure, they don't do anything realistic either. I understand that a person, when grieving or shocked, will not behave rationally. But there are some things that make no sense at all; for example, White Mike. When finding out some devastating news, first he goes to church, looking for some inspiration--which is perfectly reasonable--but then he goes to the big New Year's Eve bash. I know McDonell was just trying to get him to the party, but honestly, he could have done better. Anyone could have done better.
None of the other characters are realistic, either. Honestly, Nick: If, when you were ice skating, you accidently cut a stranger with your skate, would you keep skating, and then go get coffee with your friends? Well, some girls in TWELVE do that. At another time, a girl offers sex for drugs she can't pay for. That, okay, I can believe that. But her dealer actually accepts this--sex instead of five hundred dollars. That is hard to swallow. Which brings me to another character point: McDonnell doesn't really know the opposite sex all that well.
All characters are superficial and I found myself asking: WHO CARES?

There are, in the true spirit of LESS THAN ZERO, italicized flashbacks, mostly for White Mike, but also for a few other characters. These are supposed to provide insight into his character, but they don't; like the 'normal' occurences in the book, they are purely superficial.

The plot, it seems, like a few other things, was forgotten somewhere between prewriting and publication. It's hardly there, only furthered by the impending New Year's party. Everything is leading up to "an apocolyptic ending" that is supposedly shocking. Well, it's very obvious what that ending will be by about Chapter 5. And as far as shocking, eye opening, awe inspiring, well, let me say one thing: it's not. Maybe when LESS THAN ZERO was written it would have been, but in this post-Columbine, post-9/11 era, it's not. McDonnell, I'm guessing, got to the party scene and realized that if he wanted to end the book the right way, it would take to long, so he went back, and tacked the character Claude onto the book, and commensed ending the book the simplest way possible. If all your characters are dead, you don't have to give any closure. It's not shocking, it's an easy way out. This ending has no place in the book, it comes from no where and has no significance and doesn't affect readers in any way except when they think, "Thank God it's over."
On second thought, though, maybe it was on purpose, because the entire book is like that: a bunch of evens with little significance or little realistic qualities trying to be passed off as this supposed New York underworld.

A few words on the book's structure: it's 98 chapters. Each, luckily, is only a few pages long, some even shorter--Chapter 58 is only two sentence fragments long. It's written in a way that makes me think that perhaps this started out as some excersises in writing and morphed into a book accidentally. Entire chapters (some of which, remember, are only paragraphs or sentences) are about things that happened after some semi-important event and should have been put in other chapters. For example, right after a certain drug deal in the book, consisting of three characters (this is one chapter), there is an entire 'chapter' dedicated to one of the characters walking away (a few sentences). Of course, adding that to the other chapter would have made it longer--god forbid.

All in all, TWELVE seems like a quick crack at fame. The book is terrible, and will make you wonder why you spent your money and your time on it. Spare yourself. Read a book by someone who doesn't have connections--someone who's book was published based on quality instead of family ties. Maybe McDonell will take some writing classes when he goes away to college (Harvard, I believe). Then maybe he'll start writing better things. That is, if this book hasn't permanantly soiled his reputation. Maybe some kids his age looking for a beach book will find this a good read, but intelligent, self-respecting people will want to skip this one.

Rating:
Summary: Curiousity Killed the Cat
Review: I paid full retail for this novel because of all the hype, and yes, I will admit, I was curious about the lives of rich New York kids.

Suffice to say, I am literally poorer for my effort.

For a first novel, it's not bad, especially when you bear in mind the fact that the author was in his teens when he wrote it.
However, many teens write books. Few, if none, have the connections necessary to get their books published. After reading Twelve, I am convinced that that is a good thing.

Rating:
Summary: Nepotism: A Stinging Indictment
Review: This book is bad, and I don't mean bad as in good. McDonnell does have skills as a writer, but his novel doesn't pan out into anything more than a reckless pursuit of excess as an end in and of itself. This book has no plot. Its characters are weaker than a Marlboro Ultralight. After reading the book I could not remember a single name of any of the characters except White Mike, but there are only two things I remember about Mike's character. The first is that he is a drug dealer who is completely straight-edge. This fact was stated on the first page; I could have not read the rest of the book and came away with the same thing. The only other thing I remeber about towheaded Mike (aside from the fact that he is towheaded) is that he appreciated Nietzsche and Camus who were, respectively, a terrible philosopher and a worse writer. .... I question whether McDonnell has ever actually done drugs because his portrayl of the drug culture is so misguided and demented that it disturbs and insults me to know that this book was ever written. McDonnell has also done a disservice to every teenager in this country. The only quality his characters have is being soulless hacks with to much money and no morals. While it is true that many teenagers are cynical and shallow, very few of us are this easily dismissed; the issue is not that black and white. It is clear that this book never would have been published had it not been for the fact that his publisher is also his godfather.