An Underachiever's Diary (Paperback)

by Benjamin Anastas (Author) "I started strong, the firstborn of identical twin boys, leading my reluctant brother out into the world by seven minutes flat, give or take a..." (more)
Key Phrases: Francis Street, Faith Crick, San Francisco (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review
Benjamin Anastas's filigreed novella is grounded in a very slim conceit. Of two brothers born into a trendy Cambridge, Massachusetts, household, one twin is set for success, the other for chronic failure. Although ill-fated William actually beat Clive into the world by seven minutes, it's straight downhill from there. The first chapter is filled with hilarious scenes of equal opportunity gone wrong, our narrator balancing each of Clive's triumphs with his own pratfalls. Even their hair is woefully unequal. At three the younger sports a Beatles mop par excellence, while William is the eternal victim: "My mother, no artist with the scissors, had run into some trouble with a cowlick on my top, and I looked more like a lesbian, or David Bowie in his glitter years."

Unfortunately, as the boys hit puberty and William exiles himself to boarding school ("the Boys' Prison"), the book goes awry. The underachiever's later misadventures are no less acutely rendered, but with his foil at more of a distance, William's sorrows and sarcasms lose some of their strength. Despite its brevity, An Underachiever's Diary should not be read in one sitting but savored slowly (or even dipped into in very small doses) for its balanced prose and arch self-deprecation. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Publishers Weekly
"Please do not confuse this diary with a memoir written for a therapeutic purpose," urges William, the narrator of this earnest, tender, achingly autobiographical first novel that reads like a manifesto for Generation Xers. An identical twin born in the mid-1960s to politically liberal parents in Cambridge, Mass., he sets out to define himself through a chronicle of his young life and by everything that his shining-example, more conventional brother is not: an "utter failure," a "screw-up"; in short, an underachiever. Where his brother, Clive, excels (in academics, in making bright friends and winning the heart of the celestial girl next-door and in getting into Harvard), William becomes infatuated with a kind of grotesque failure?attracting an alcoholic girlfriend, choosing a third-rate college, joining a San Francisco cult. He is the loser son every mother fears having, and he's proud of the ignoble distinction. In carefully and formally constructed, exquisitely cadenced prose, Anastas succeeds in capturing an adolescent's naivete, self-absorption and instinct for melodrama?and in filtering it all through a fierce intelligence. Cultural signifiers offering a clue to the influences on the narrator are plentiful: William Faulkner, TV shows like A Family Affair, classical authors and St. Augustine. Though William scoffs at being the representative of his maligned generation ("I hear rumors that my condition is widespread"), there are just the right amounts of candor, wit, puerile humor and perverse irreverence in Anastas's work to succeed at that. (Mar.) FYI: Anastas has won both Story's College Fiction Competition and GQ's Frederick Exley Fiction Prize.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 160 pages
• Publisher: Harper Perennial (March 9, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0380732181
• ISBN-13: 978-0380732180
• Product Dimensions: 6.9 x 4.9 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars See all reviews (31 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #218,240 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A very entertaining and funny novel., December 14, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: An Underachiever's Diary (Hardcover)

An Underachiever's Diary was a very good novel. Not since Catcher in the Rye have I had so much fun reading a novel. I never wanted to stop reading it. The book is about a young man named William, who is a complete loser throughout his whole life and trys his best to not be in the shadow of his own younger twin brother Clive, who is a very successful person. The sad thing is that William has had bad luck ever since his birth in the hospital room. It is funny, however, how he never tries to become like his brother even though he idolizes him and just when things start to go right for him, he gets messed up again. He is like a modernized Holden Caulfield. Overall, this is a very good book to read and I highly recommend it.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Strangely Amusing, April 8, 1998

By	Joey Miller ([e-mail]) (Oxford, MS) - See all my reviews

This review is from: An Underachiever's Diary (Hardcover)

The cover of this book is what first drew me in to it; so dull to be so full of brilliance. A very easy read, it is a wonderfully compelling book, which managed to make me laugh, then feel sad for poor William, and then turn around and cheer for him in the end, hoping that he really does become the greatest underachiever in the world. I disagree entirely with Kirkus. The story does not need a plot, but stands alone as a simple monologue, reminiscent, perhaps, of Kerouac's free form. The "moral" or the story is what's truly important. I must say, it is one of the most refreshing books i have read in a long while. I look forward to reading more of Mr. Anastas' work.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars a candle to Exley's sun, May 26, 2008

By	Caraculiambro (La Mancha) - See all my reviews

I had been wanting to read this book for about five years for one reason: I had repeatedly heard it referred to as being comparable with Frederick Exley's brilliant and searing "A Fan's Notes," a volume I respect like few others. Yesterday I finally got around to it.

This is not just my imagination. The similarity is pushed by the publisher itself: for example, the only thing that appears on the white cover besides the title and name of the author is a quote where the NYT's book reviewer compares the thing to Exley's work. And if that doesn't make the point clear, the "bio blurb" on the inside back cover additionally informs you that the author has won GQ's Frederick Exley prize for fiction.

Well, "An Underachiever's Diary" is a major letdown, folks. If Anastas has been, as he claims, underachieving all his life, then he is in full form with this production, itself a massive underachievement throughout. Exley was enormously well-read, led a life of harrowing misery, and could write like an angel. Anastas sports a smattering of learning, has dropped out of life largely because of self-pity, and cannot seem to craft a memorable character or even sequence.

With these shortcomings in mind, Anastas would have been wise to ask his publisher to tone down the whole comparison thing with Exley.

I kept waiting for the book to take off, to get the point where something incredible, horrid, or at least entertaining happened to Anastas. But page after page saw him doing nothing but envying his twin brother and bumming around the country. I know they tell writers these days to "write about what you know;" too bad they don't also stress the injunction to "make sure you have something to say."

I realize that coming to the book with stratospheric expectations might not have been fair to Anastas, and there are certainly snatches of good writing here and there. Take this:

"The place: New York City, a beautiful, decaying machine with many leaks, gaping holes, and moving parts, all of them hypnotic, and some dangerous to bystanders."

or this:

"At that point I had accepted my fate to live among the homely, or crippled, or slightly disturbed, and I had just begun to see the grace in human imperfection, whether the ultimate cause turned out to be the lottery of genetics or the more traditional original sin."

And the last couple of pages are deft and poignant.

If most of what Anastas has written is true, then writing the book was almost certainly a therapeutic experience for him. But as for any claim this volume might have on the time of someone who doesn't know him, I remain to be convinced.

Mercifully, you won't have to invest too much time following the course of Anastas's life, as the book is only about 150 pages long and can be gotten through in a evening.