The Beautiful Miscellaneous: A Novel [Hardcover]

Dominic Smith (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 5, 2007

NATHAN NELSON IS THE AVERAGE SON OF A GENIUS. His father, a physicist of small renown, has prodded him toward greatness from an early age -- enrolling him in whiz kid summer camps, taking him to the icy tundra of Canada to track a solar eclipse, and teaching him college algebra. But despite Samuel Nelson's efforts, Nathan remains ordinary.

Then, in the summer of 1987, everything changes. While visiting his small-town grandfather in Michigan, Nathan is involved in a terrible accident. After a brief clinical death -- which he later recalls as a lackluster affair lasting less than the length of a Top 40 pop song -- he falls into a coma. When he awakens, Nathan finds that everyday life is radically different. His perceptions of sight, sound, and memory have been irrevocably changed. The doctors and his parents fear permanent brain damage. But the truth of his condition is more unexpected and leads to a renewed chance for Nathan to find his place in the world.

Thinking that his son's altered brain is worthy of serious inquiry, Samuel arranges for Nathan to attend the Brook-Mills Institute, a Midwestern research center where savants, prodigies, and neurological misfits are studied and their specialties applied. Immersed in this strange atmosphere -- where an autistic boy can tell you what day Christmas falls on in 3026 but can't tie his shoelaces, where a medical intuitive can diagnose cancer during a long-distance phone call with a patient -- Nathan begins to unravel the mysteries of his new mind. He also tries to make peace with the crushing weight of his father's expectations.

The Beautiful Miscellaneous is an extraordinary follow-up to Dominic Smith's critically acclaimed debut, The Mercury Visions of Louis Daguerre. This dazzling new novel explores the fault lines that can cause a family to drift apart and the unexpected events that can pull them back together.

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Following a car crash, Nathan Nelson, 17, is recovering from a two-week-long coma in July 1987. His father, Samuel, a physics professor at a Wisconsin college, wanted a genius for a son. Nathan, who narrates, has always been uninspired at best, but finds that the accident has left him with heightened senses, and a prodigious memory. Cerebral Samuel, whom Nathan can't help revering, rejoices. Even when sent to a school for the gifted, however, Nathan mostly watches TV and smokes cigarettes with girlfriend Teresa, whose talent is a kind of X-ray vision. Teresa soon uses this talent to spot a tragedy looming in Nathan's immediate future, and his life afterward, for the reader, is all frustrating anticlimax. As the years pass, Nathan works at a dead-end library job, stalks townspeople and parties with former schoolmates. This narrative's strengths are its abundant humor, occasional lyrical patches and portrayal of the quirky but reliable Whit Shupak, a retired astronaut and family friend. But Smith (The Mercury Visions of Louis Daguerre) never allows the immature, lackadaisical Nathan to really develop or emerge from his father's shadow. (June)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

*Starred Review* At 17, Nathan Nelson has no idea what he wants to be. His particle-physicist father, however, has already made up his mind: Nathan will be a genius! The boy, who considers himself only slightly above average, has his doubts. "Being less than brilliant with a genius parent," he notes, "is like being the bum who stares, midwinter, through the restaurant window." But things change dramatically when--as the result of an accident--Nathan develops synesthesia; he begins seeing, tasting, and feeling words. He also develops an encyclopedic memory. Filled with new hope, Nathan's father enrolls his son in the Brook-Mills Institute for Talent Development, a research facility that Nathan's blind pianist roommate calls the "Taj Mahal of weird." When his father develops a brain tumor, Nathan's struggles to satisfy the man's great expectations before it's too late become increasingly poignant. This unusual, gorgeously written novel is filled with pleasures: among them are richly imagined supporting characters, including Whit, the astronaut and improbable best friend of Nathan's father, and Teresa, the medical psychic with whom the boy falls in love. Best of all, though, is the book's invitation to wonder--about the imponderables of life and death, the nature of intelligence, and the ultimately inexplicable relationships of fathers and sons. Michael Cart
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 336 pages
• Publisher: Atria; 1 edition (June 5, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0743271238
• ISBN-13: 978-0743271233
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.6 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (18 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #845,569 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Dominic Smith grew up in Sydney, Australia and now lives in Austin, Texas. His short fiction has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and appeared in numerous journals and magazines, including The Atlantic Monthly.

His awards include the Dobie Paisano Fellowship from the Texas Institute of Letters, the Sherwood Anderson Fiction Prize, and the Gulf Coast Fiction Prize. In 2006, his debut novel The Mercury Visions of Louis Daguerre was selected for the Barnes and Noble Discover Great News Writers Program. It also received the Steven Turner Prize for First Fiction from the Texas Institute of Letters. Dominic's second novel, The Beautiful Miscellaneous, was optioned for a film by Southpaw Entertainment and was a pick for Booklist Editors' Choice.

Dominic's third novel--Bright and Distant Shores (2011)--was first published in Australia, where it was shortlisted for The Age Book of the Year and the Vance Palmer Fiction Prize. In the US it was a Kirkus Reviews' "Best Books of 2011" selection.

See Dominic's website (www.dominicsmith.net) for more information.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Not Your Typical Coming of Age Story, October 26, 2007

By 

Book Dork (Southern California) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: The Beautiful Miscellaneous: A Novel (Hardcover)

When writing a coming of age novel an author runs the risk of producing yet another formulaic tale of how a young person endures life's hardships and "finds himself." It's a genre we can all relate to, we're all familiar with the trials and tribulations of youth. The test for a writer is then how do you take advantage of this easy way of connecting with readers without becoming cliché? While many fail at this task, Dominic Smith comes out far ahead through his multi dimensional characters, carefully constructed plot and well developed messages.

The main character, Nathan, is a young man who moves through his boyhood years with the keen awareness that he is failing his scientist father; Nathan is not the genius his father had brought him up to be. After barely surviving a severe car accident Nathan develops synesthesia, a condition that affects sensory input and storage, hence allowing exceptional memory capabilities. His father jumps at this second chance at having a gifted child and enrolls him in a type of live-in laboratory for savants. There he comes into his own, developing new relationships and learning about the ones he already has.

The Beautiful Miscellaneous takes on many hefty subjects, including familial relationships, love, death, religion and the unknown. At the same time, Smith keeps the tone light, making it a very enjoyable read. You take away what you want from this novel; an entertaining story about a boy with memory powers or a thought provoking story about what life means to each one of us.

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Fine Second Novel, August 9, 2007

By 

J. Conrad Guest "J. Conrad Guest" (Northville, MI United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: The Beautiful Miscellaneous: A Novel (Hardcover)

The Beautiful Miscellaneous is the second novel from Dominic Smith. The first, The Mercury Visions of Louis Daguerre, is historical fiction, while Miscellaneous is a foray into contemporary fiction. Set in the mid- to late 1980s, protagonist and narrator Nathan Nelson has the self-described misfortune of being the son of a particle-physicist genius, who first waits for the genius gene in his son to kick in, and then tries, unsuccessfully, to jump start it; Nathan of course considers himself average at best, wishing at times to please his father even as he longs for the freedom to simply be who he is, even if he's not yet sure who that is.

Following a car crash, the seventeen-year-old Nathan emerges from a two-week coma to find he has developed a case of synesthesia -- a medical condition which enables him to see, taste and feel emotions associated with words -- along with a photographic memory; he can memorize phonebooks, encyclopedias, and recall dialogue from television sitcoms. Nathan's father, Samuel, sees this as the precursor to great things to come for his son, and so he sends him to the Brook-Mills Institute for Talent Development, a research facility in which Nathan meets a host of other gifted young people, including a blind pianist who plays by ear and Teresa, a young woman who can look into a person and identify medical infirmities, and from whom Nathan learns to smoke and drink, and with whom he eventually falls in love. While Nathan is a charming if somewhat annoyingly passive protagonist, these tertiary characters, along with Whit, Samuel's best friend who also happens to be a retired astronaut turned poet who's verse suffers from an incurable case of the malapropism -- "Up here in the dark, far from the poi-holloi...", are a wonderfully colorful cast of supporting characters.

The narrative is nicely paced, at times humorous and nearly flawless in its poignancy, and if the denouement is a trifle too tidy, it is the journey -- the exploration into the nature of intelligence as well as the father/son relationship -- that makes Miscellaneous worth the read.

Highly recommended.

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Genuis can arrive from across the void., June 10, 2007

By 

G. Messersmith "calliopemuse" (Tennessee) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Beautiful Miscellaneous: A Novel (Hardcover)

Nathan Nelson is the main character of the novel. He is the only child of a genius father. The father is certain that genius can arrive at any time. Although Nathan is above average, he is not like his father. And it soon becomes apparent that no amount of special training by his father or genius camps can transform him into brilliance. Nathan's mother is an extremely bright woman who runs the household with military discipline; loves reading novels; belongs to a travel club; makes exotic dishes for dinner; and attempts some normalcy in their household. In all they make a rather eccentric but loveable family. Not to mention that an ex-astronaut named Whit hangs out at their house a lot and becomes like a member of the family.

A few chapters in the novel, Nathan is involved in a car crash which causes clinical death; resurrection; and then a coma for several weeks. He appears to make a full recovery with one small exception ~ he can memorize everything, a state called synesthesia. First he recites everything from shows on television; then he memorizes the Bible; novels; poems, etc.. Not only can he remember everything but words come to him in color and Smith's literary talents really shine here, i.e., "burn resembled an upright man with a mustache; safe was something substantial, a stone house" (87). He goes on to tell us that every word was married to a mental image in his brain. The word guest is wheat-colored whereas the word patient is slate-gray. Smith's description are wonderful and a big part of the novel.

It appears that the accident may have let Nathan become the genius his father always wanted. Once Nathan has fully recovered he is sent to a school for gifted children where he mostly hangs out with a girl he falls for and learns to smoke and drink. Things are not going quite as planned. Than another unexpected tragedy strikes the family and things change again. Father and son struggle to come together throughout the novel and Smith makes the characters so real - almost touchable.

It's a great novel. It is funny and sad. It's a coming of age story for Nathan and a middle of the road story for his father and mother. It's about family and love and it is beautifully written. I loved every moment of this book and did not want it to end.