Twelve (Hardcover)

~ (Author) "WHITE MIKE IS thin and pale like smoke..." (more)
Key Phrases: White Mike, Mark Rothko, Fifth Avenue (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

On the surface, Nick McDonell's debut novel Twelve (written when the well-connected former prep-schooler was 17) feels like an East Coast Less Than Zero: the laconic style and episodic plot; the privileged ennui, drugs, and pop culture sensibility (with sprinklings of Prada, FUBU, North Face, and Nokia replacing Zero's Armani, English Beat T-shirts, Wayfarer sunglasses, and Betamax); the Christmas break setting; even the italicized flashbacks--it's all there. But Twelve also shares its casual, youthful arrogance with the jaded aggressiveness and jagged style of Larry Clark's Kids.

McDonell has crafted a pulsing narrative that clips along at an after-hours pace, pulling the reader along like an ominous rip tide, shifting easily from the Upper East Side to Harlem to Central Park to introduce a cast of loosely connected characters. White Mike, Twelve's clean-living, Cheerios-loving, milkshake-drinking drug dealer, drives the majority of the barely-there plot. ("Mike uses a teaspoon to eat his cereal, not a big soup spoon, because he likes to have less milk in his mouth with each bite" is about as deep as it gets.) Character development is limited to an easy shorthand ("Long legs, large breasts, blond hair, blue eyes, high cheekbones.") that results in a simple surface-skimming, leaving one too many caricatures of the very youth culture McDonell is writing about. Readers will see the blood-spattered, penultimate set piece coming down Fifth Avenue from page one, but any potential shock value or drama is immediately deflated in Twelve's head-scratching hangover of a denouement. --Brad Thomas Parsons

From Publishers Weekly

"White Mike" dresses in an overcoat and lives with his dad on Manhattan's Upper East Side (his mom died of breast cancer not too long ago). The 17-year-old doesn't smoke, doesn't drink and doesn't do drugs. He dropped out of high school and now sells drugs pot and an Ecstasy-like upper called "twelve" to the city's moneyed teens. In this shocker of a first novel, McDonell who was 17 when he wrote it carries readers through White Mike's frantically spinning world, one alternately peopled with obscenely wealthy teenagers who live in gated townhouses with parents rarely in town and FUBU-clad basketball players in Harlem. In terse, controlled prose, McDonell describes five days in White Mike's life during Christmas break. He introduces a host of characters, ranging from Sara Ludlow ("the hottest girl at her school by, like, a lot") to Lionel ("a creepy dude" with "brown and yellow bloodshot eyes" who also sells drugs), writing mainly in the present tense, but sometimes flashing back in italics. His prose darts from one scene and character to the next, much like a cab zipping down city streets, halting quickly at a red light and then accelerating madly as soon as the light turns green. And although it brims with New York references e.g., the MetLife Building and Lenox Hill Hospital this is really a story about excess and its effects. The final scene, at a raging New Year's Eve party, will leave readers stunned, as well as curious as to what might come next from this precocious writer.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 244 pages
• Publisher: Grove Press; 1st edition (July 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0802117171
• ISBN-13: 978-0802117175
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.7 x 1 inches
• Average Customer Review: 2.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (174 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #669,082 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

39 of 42 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Lack of talent meets sickening nepotism: whee!, January 6, 2004

By A Customer

This review is from: Twelve (Paperback)

As a college student, I felt embarassed for my generation when I read this miserable book. There are better writers on every block of Manhattan than Nick McDonell. Absolutely pathetic. Great to know that his godfather published the book, though, and his dad got it promoted.

Joan Didion came to my school a few months ago and gave a talk. At one point, during questions afterward, I asked her point blank why she gave blurbs to books that it seems hard to imagine she could have had any respect for whatsoever. (I didn't mention Twelve by name, but I haven't noticed her name on many other books, and certainly none as wretched as this garbage.) There was a pause and then she sighed and said, "You get trapped into it. Old friends ask, and you don't want to put a sour note in decades of friendship because you wouldn't write a sentence or two."

Joan Didion is old friends with Nick McDonell's father.

31 of 35 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Hype over substance, June 24, 2002

By	liz (new york) - See all my reviews

The most disturbing thing about this book is all the hype around it. Yes, the kid was just a teenager when he wrote it and that's definitely an accomplishment, but there is no way this book would've gotten published had it not been for all the industry connections he had. Morgan Entrekin, his publisher, and owner of Atlantic Books (Grove is owned by Atlantic), is also Mcdonell's godfather. I mean the book is okay, but there isn't really anything original here. There's no new voice of sorts and the content is old-hat teen druggie stuff, so I can't see how everyone's calling him the New Hunter Thompson, or the new B.E. Ellis. He hasn't had enough writing experience to pull off the hard-fought prose of those who have earned their merits.

41 of 49 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Severely Misjudged, June 26, 2002

By	Arnas (San Francisco, CA United States) - See all my reviews

The bottom line is, this book is mediocre. Another "shocking" story of affluent teens done in by drugs, sex, sleaze, and violence. How many times have we seen this? Yet the done-before idea isn't the problem. The Count of Monte Cristo's plot had been written several times - Hamlet probably being the most famous. It's that the story by itself displays little wit, no charm, and above all, or maybe below, no originality. Nothing to make it better than the rest.

The characters, as admitted by the author, blend together and are consequently as inseperable as Siamese twins. Their speech patterns and actions are one and the same. In the end, McDonell uses a plot technique most frequently employed by 3rd-8th graders, that is to say he kills everyone, which suggests either 1) Drugs will indirectly kill you, or 2) McDonell didn't know how to end it and took the easiest (some might say laziest) way out. I'll admit, #1 doesn't make much sense.
This book isn't terrific, but it isn't awful. It thrives in mundanity. To comment on the author's abilities, I will borrow a quote of Samuel Johnson's: A 17 year old writing a novel is like a dog walking on it's hind legs. It is not done well, but you are surprised to find it done at all.