An Expensive Education, Nick McDonell
Friday, January 8th, 2010, p.m.
An Expensive Education is a sort of spy thriller-cum-campus novel from
Nick McDonell. It's McDonell's third book, beginning with Twelve, which
he wrote at 17. As soon as I say that, you can guess the kind of hype that
surrounded that book, and that has followed McDonell ever since. Twelve
was apparently a "write what you know" novel about a bunch of NYC prep
schoolers. (McDonell went to Buckley and Riverdale Country.) An Expensive
Education is more of the same, as it focuses on Harvard (where McDonell
went) and Africa (where he has done reporting for Time and
Harper's).
The book's epigraph is a quote from Graham Greene's sorta-spy-novel Our Man
in Havana. The quote is supposed to set the tone for the entire novel, but
no more than a quarter of the way through, I realized that it set the tone in
an entirely different way. McDonell's book, purely on its merits, is no match
for Greene. (Sadly, McDonell himself isn't the only one who has made the
comparison -- his wikipedia page says that reviews have compared him to Greene
and John Le Carre. As you'll see, I find this blasphemous.) On the one hand,
I shouldn't penalize McDonell for this, because, really, who is a match
for Greene? On the other, my cynical side sees the quote as a classic elite
move. Rather than actually learning the lessons Greene has to teach a
prospective writer of spy novels, McDonell instead brands his book with the
quote, showing his erudition. It's a "look at me" move no different from any
other kind of name-dropping, but which seems particularly insidious in light of
McDonell's background (a prep school elite) and his subject (the American
aristocracy). It's hard to take McDonell's apparent criticisms of the elite
seriously when he's so obviously integrated the lessons of elitism himself.
The book gives us an ensemble to follow. Teak is the McDonell character, a New
York prep schooler and Harvard graduate who now works in Africa. Where Teak
presumably departs from McDonell is that Teak works for the CIA. Susan Lowell
is a Harvard professor of some kind, most noted for the publication of her
dissertation on an East African revolutionary named Hatashil. Her background
isn't discussed, but she is married to a wealthy banker. Razi is an Iranian
journalist who worked with Lowell in Africa and is currently at Harvard on a
fellowship. He has not been able to follow up his best-known work, a piece on
the nephew of a Saudi intelligence chief who disappeared some time ago. He
drinks. David is a Somalian student at Harvard with some personal knowledge of
Hatashil. He is in one of Lowell's classes. Jane is David's girlfriend, white
and American. She works on Harvard's newspaper.
Ensembles are difficult enough to pull off without the panoply of weaknesses on
display in this book. The major one is that each of these characters is
essentially passive and reactive. About halfway through the book, Teak finally
gets some forward motivation and momentum and begins taking action of his own,
but the vast majority of the book involves things happening to the characters.
Purely passive protagonists are a tough sell, and McDonell didn't sell them
here. I was, frankly, bored. How many scenes of characters sitting around
thinking about acting can one book have? (Answer: way more than you would have
previously thought.) And again, this isn't a contemplative novel, an exercise
in philosophy, a study of the nature of passivity, or anything like that. It's
a spy novel. Your characters have to act.
Closely tied up with this problem is McDonell's insistence on continually
telling instead of showing. He repeatedly gets us in the heads of the
characters and tells us how they're feeling about this or that. There's no way
around this criticism: it's bad writing. I could count on one hand the number
of events or actions in the book that give us insight into the
characters. Like I said, there are only so many scenes of a character sitting
around thinking and feeling that I can take.
Further, McDonell made the very odd choice to not only put us in the heads of
the five main characters listed above, but to give the reader almost complete
omniscience. Every character we encounter, from the class jesters Lucas and
Willy to the CIA recruiter Alan Green to Susan Lowell's nanny, gets the
full-brain-scan treatment. This is doubly problematic -- not only are we,
again, told instead of shown information about these characters, but we also
don't care. I recall Alan Green showing up twice. He's simply too
peripheral to get the treatment usually reserved for a protagonist, but
McDonell gives him that treatment anyway. The resulting whiplash of
perspective is jarring, almost fatally distracting.
One might begin to question McDonell's motivation in this regard, because
the book is not very long (under 300 pages in the hardcover), and the plot is
paper-thin. Spending a paragraph with the motivations and emotions of every
character we meet starts to feel like filler, especially since little
is actually happening through all of this. The novel begins with Teak
narrowly escaping being killed when an attack is launched on Hatashil, who was
(and still is, as far as Teak knows) an American ally. Eventually, after a lot
of thought and following orders, Teak starts to discover some things about who
Hatashil really is and his relation to the U.S. government. That's pretty much
all that happens.
I will give McDonell this. He tried to write a spy novel that says something about the aristocracy, about geopolitics, and about the
relations between those two things. But, in no small part because of the
variety of weaknesses discussed above, the book fails to say much at all. I
suppose McDonell could be seen to argue that the aristocracy should not be
running things because there's nothing so special about them, they're just
drunks and losers and racists who happen to have been born into the right
families. But Teak, Mr. Aristocracy himself, is both a genuinely remarkable
person (smart, athletic, speaks at least five languages) and someone with a
moral code. Other characters represent the aristocracy, but none so much as he
does, and he's a positive representation.
There's also a pretty straightforward critique of the way America dominates
African business and how the power relations there change with the wind,
depending on how the American government feels at any given time about the
various leaders on the continent. This is nothing new, and if McDonell were
writing the book twenty years ago, he'd have set it in Central America. That's
not to say it's not worth saying, especialy in the form of a novel that might
appeal to people who don't read The Nation or even the newspaper. This
point is actually made more powerful, rather than less, by the way David is
manipulated by Alan Green and others, taking advantage of his quest to move
into the American elite himself.
One final point: remarkably, given McDonell's obvious familiarity with the
places and people at the heart of the novel, it has no sense of place
whatsoever. Harvard could have been any random college. Not just any Ivy
League school (or other elite institution), but almost literally any random
college. There are anarchists and pranksters and drunks and a quad and clubs,
all of varying levels of ridiculousness, but none of which he imbues with any
particular sense of Harvardness or even eliteness. Africa, too, manages to
feel remarkably like "Africa", rather than Kenya or Somalia or wherever Teak is
in any given scene. If part of your point is America's treatment of Africa,
then perhaps you shouldn't come off as just another American writing about
Africa, unable to distinguish east from west, coast from center, north from
south.
Given McDonell's apparent lack of storytelling skill, one wonders whether his
previous two books were better than this one, or whether we ought to take the
references to nepotism on his wikipedia page seriously. Both his mother and
father are in publishing, and you might have heard of his dad, Terry McDonell,
the longtime editor-in-chief at Sports Illustrated. His parents, as
you'd expect, have a lot of friends, some of whom publish books, others of whom
are authors who write blurbs on books, others of whom are agents, etc. etc.
The irony of the situation is blinding.
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