Word: mike
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...point, McDonell’s protagonist, Mike, wants us all dead. As he walks across campus on a late December evening, Mike tells us: “I imagined that it wasn’t Christmas Eve and people were around, but everyone was frozen, suffocated under the snow. It was a very beautiful scene...
...Just as the Bangkok characters start to come alive, McDonell abruptly drops his “Heart of Darkness” subplot and cuts back to the Upper West Side of Manhattan. On a crisp September morning, Mike (who has transferred to Columbia) is buying a blueberry muffin in a coffee shop as the first plane strikes the World Trade Center. Mike races toward ground zero to find his older brother Lyle, who lives near the site...
...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...
...first half of “The Third Brother,” set in Bangkok, traces Mike, a rising sophomore at Harvard and a summer intern at an Asian newsmagazine, as he befriends whores and journalists-—the 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...
...trip to Bangkok quickly becomes a sort of Thai version of “Heart of Darkness.” The country’s prime minister, Thaksin Shinawatra, is waging a ruthless war against drug traffickers, with innocent civilians and foreign tourists caught in the crossfire. Meanwhile, Mike tracks down his father’s onetime Holworthy Hall roommate, Christopher Dorr, a freelance journalist who has moved into a dense Bangkok shanty-town and who has become a modern-day version of Conrad’s sadistic Captain Kurtz...