Elliot Allagash [Paperback]

Simon Rich (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 5, 2010

Seymour isn't cool, but he isn't a geek either. He's a lonely, obedient 8th grade loser at Glendale, a second tier prep school in Manhattan. His chubbiness has recently earned him the nick name Chunk Style and he has resigned himself to a life of isolation. All of this is about to change. After successfully getting himself expelled from every reputable school in the country, Elliot Allagash, the arrogant heir of America's largest fortune, finds himself marooned at Glendale. Try as he may, Elliot cannot get expelled this time; his father has simply donated too much money. Bitter and bored, Elliot decides to amuse himself by taking up a new hobby: transforming Seymour into the most popular student in school. An unlikely friendship develops between these two loners as Elliot introduces Seymour to new concepts, like power, sabotage and vengeance. With Elliot as his diabolical guide, Seymour gradually learns about all of the incredible things that money can buy, and the one or two things that it can't. Hilarious, ingenious and tightly plotted, "Elliot Allagash", like a teen movie in novel form, reminds you what your teens were like, and why growing up is so hard to do.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Seth Meyers Reviews Elliott Allagash

Seth Meyers is completing his ninth season on Saturday Night Live, his fourth season as head writer, and his fourth season as anchor of "Weekend Update." Meyers heads a writing staff that has won three Writer's Guild Awards as well as a Peabody for the show's 2008 election coverage. Read his review of Elliot Allagash:

We hired Simon Rich at SNL because of his amazing short fiction. When he told us he was writing a novel we made it clear that were it not up to his previous high standard we would have no choice but to terminate his employment. Well, I just finished Elliot Allagash and I’m happy to say, he still has his job.

Elliot Allagash takes place in eighth grade and this is great news for anyone familiar with Simon’s writing. Every comedy writer I know went through eighth grade but none render the details of it quite like Simon. Familiar schoolyard archetypes from nerds to bullies to hot girls all appear but they’re sharper than ever.

And it would be enough if Simon just spent his book examining the status ladder of Glendale Academy but fortunately there is so much more. Because the title character, Elliot Allagash is one of the best villains I’ve ever encountered in fiction. By age thirteen his offenses include "vandalism, truancy, unprovoked violence, drunkenness, hiring an imposter to take a standardized test, and blackmail." In a classic deal-with-the-devil arrangement Elliot offers to make Seymour, our hero, the most popular kid in the school with the simple condition that Seymour must do everything Elliot says. What makes this journey delightful is that Elliot is extremely rich.

The details of Elliot’s wealth are joyous to read and too numerous to count. My favorite--the Allagash family belongs to the Seven Circles Club, a club so exclusive that they denied George Washington’s only son membership because "his father was a farmer."

A lot of very successful adults I know still wish they could re-live high school as someone popular. Reading this hilarious morality tale about the cost of that popularity makes me happy that I went through my high school years as an outsider. And it makes me even happier that Simon Rich did.

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--This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Publishers Weekly

Saturday Night Live writer Rich's first novel (after two humorous collections) is a hit and miss riff on Pygmalion in which genial high school loser Seymour gets a life-changing makeover after meeting Elliot, a fabulously wealthy malcontent who has transferred to Seymour's Manhattan private school. Elliot's lessons on the power of money and the fine art of popularity are given in exchange for chubby Seymour's agreement to do whatever Elliot tells him to do, and, sure enough, Seymour transforms from consummate outsider to a Harvard-bound, straight-A class president. But as the book constantly reminds readers, there are things money can't buy, even for the Allagash family, whose astronomical wealth comes, believe it or not, from an ancestor's invention of paper. Elliot knew the functions of all his father's companies... [but] never seemed to know what I was thinking or feeling, opines Seymour, who grows increasingly complacent in Elliot's schemes and alienated from his dimensionless, doting parents. While Rich is undoubtedly funny and quick-witted, his novelistic chops are underdeveloped, and the narrative's inevitability and the lack of character development detract from the book's finer, funnier points. (May)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 224 pages
• Publisher: Serpents Tail (August 5, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1846687543
• ISBN-13: 978-1846687549
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.2 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,966,123 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars I was an 8th grade zombie, June 22, 2010

By 

M. Feldman (Maine, USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Elliot Allagash: A Novel (Hardcover)

"Elliot Allagash" is a fantasy for adolescents. Can Seymour Herstein, a chubby, unpopular eighth grade prep school boy consigned to chugging chocolate milks at the loser lunch table be transformed almost instantly into an athletic, straight-A class president? Yes, he can! Enter Elliot Allagash, a fabulously wealthy, martini-swilling, completely amoral classmate and his sidekick, the protean and vaguely menacing chauffeur, James; for the two of them, there is nothing that money, lies, and guile cannot buy, from the answers to the French quiz to a slot for Seymour (along with Elliot, of course) at Harvard.

Like a fairy tale, it is completely improbable---characters, plot, the whole thing. Or perhaps a better comparison is to a video game. One of Seymour's favorites is Ninja Streets, the highest of whose 256 levels is impossible to reach, unless you have the secret key. When Seymour finally gets to the highest level, the action hero character disappears and the screen goes black. "Elliot Allagash" is like that; each action (Elliot gets Seymour on TV, Elliot gets Seymour the popular girl, Elliot ruins the reputation of a restaurant that insults him, Elliot makes everyone believe that Seymour is researching the cure for a terrible disease, and so on) requires more cunning and is more unbelievable than the last.

Fairy tale? Video game? Overcoming one's eighth grade demons? Gaming the college application system? This isn't comedy for adults, it's Young Adult Literature. Appropriate to that genre, there's a nice moral ending, too, when Seymour's increasingly tenuous persona DOES go black, like the video game, and he returns to the loving arms of his nice but clueless parents.

There was one puzzle. Why does the evil young Allagash bear the name of a remote Maine wilderness? Maybe it's a clever little anagram for what Elliot does (figuratively) to just about everyone in this goofy, not very funny, and exceedingly slight novel, more deserving of a review in Library Journal than (twice!) in The New York Times. I fear that this book will never reach its true audience, as the eighth graders I know don't generally peruse the Times book review section. Maybe they'll read it on their cell phones; it's just the thing for whiling away the time in the orthodontist's waiting room.
M. Feldman

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Good idea....not well executed, August 13, 2010

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JRH (Philadephia) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Elliot Allagash: A Novel (Hardcover)

I also wanted to love this book after hearing a snippet of Rich's interview on NPR. The story idea sounded great, I liked his interview, and I couldn't wait to see what he did with it. Unfortunately, except for a few good one-liners, it's just not well written and the characters are really thin. That may be why so many of the positive reviews I've read largely just detail the plot without a lot of real praise for the actual elements of the novel.

The oddest part is that Elliot's character seems to exist in a vacuum when it comes to all the other students at the school. Except for Seymour--the "loser" whom he sits down to in the cafeteria one day and decides to make his pet project--there is absolutely no student interaction with or reaction to Elliot and his plots.

Suffice it to say that the book just doesn't work. I can't help but wonder whether Rich's circle of writer/editor friends just heaped on the praise for his efforts without giving him the honest constructive criticism that might have made this better.

3.0 out of 5 stars Never Really Went Anywhere, September 25, 2011

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Klocker - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Elliot Allagash: A Novel (Paperback)

My Book Club chose this book with the hopes that it was going to be a funny story. However, it wasn't that funny. In fact, the story really never went anywhere. I felt the anticipation of the story rising as I read, but it came to an ending that was somewhat flat.