Word: mcdonellã
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...each other. That novel, which McDonell wrote during the summer of 2001 before his senior year of high school, climaxed in a bloodbath more befitting a B-movie than a serious literary work. Nonetheless, the book elicited effusive praise from critics in the U.S. and the United Kingdom, and McDonell??s pithy prose was appropriately likened to Hemingway?...
...McDonell??s second novel seems to attempt a far more ambitious task: to grapple with the tragedy of 9/11. Unfortunately, by the end of the novel, McDonell and his main character Mike shrink back from that task...
...distinction between the two professions becomes blurred in the novel—while researching an article on the Thai ecstasy scene. (Though the protagonists of “The Third Brother” and “Twelve” share a common first name and several character traits, McDonell??s second novel is not a sequel to his first...
...from his girlfriend Jane during the chaotic hours after the attacks, evoking memories of the pair of lovers in Dante’s epic – Francesca and Paulo – who are tossed around by the “stormy blast of Hell.” McDonell??s image of a turban-wearing taxi driver – unconscious and blood-soaked in a smoking cab on a West Side sidewalk – is perhaps a reference to Dante’s heretic, Pope Anastasius, who lies inside a flaming sepulcher in the Inferno...
...this drawn-out allusion to Dante is purposeful, it raises the discomforting and rather absurd suggestion that New Yorkers are themselves somehow guilty for 9/11. But even if the allusion to Dante is unintentional – as one would hope – then McDonell??s treatment of 9/11 is still both mystifying and maddening. The terrorist attacks are portrayed as a sort of reflection of Mike’s personal tragedies. His mother and father, who form a dysfunctional and unloving couple, have cast a shadow over his childhood, and the fall of the Twin Towers...