"[A] striking debut. . . funny, heartbreaking, and real."--SAM
LANSKY, author of Broken People
Prep meets The Secret History in this searing debut novel about a
tragic scandal at an American prep school, told in the form of a
literary investigation through a distinctly millennial lens
When Foster Dade arrives at Kennedy, an elite boarding school in New
Jersey, the year is 2008. Barack Obama begins his first term as
president; Vampire Weekend and Passion Pit bump from the newly debuted
iPhone; teenagers share confidences and rumors over BlackBerry Messenger
and iChat; and the internet as we know it is slowly emerging from its
cocoon. So, too, is Foster emerging--a transfer student and anxious
young man, Foster is stumbling through adolescence in the wake of his
parents' scandalous divorce. But Foster soon finds himself in the
company of Annabeth Whittaker and Jack Albright, the twin centers of
Kennedy's social gravity, who take him under their wing to navigate the
cliques and politics of the carelessly entitled.
Eighteen months later, Foster will be expelled, following a tragic
scandal that leaves Kennedy and its students irreparably changed. When
our nameless narrator inherits Foster's old dorm room, he begins an epic
yearslong investigation into what exactly happened. Through interviews
with former classmates, Foster's blog posts, playlists, and text
archives, and the narrator's own obsessive imagination, a story
unfurls--Foster's, yes, but also one that asks us who owns our personal
narratives, and how we shape ourselves to be the heroes or villains of
our own stories.
Foster Dade Explores the Cosmos is about privilege and power, the
pitfalls of masculinity and its expectations, and, most distinctly, how
we create the mythologies that give meaning to our lives. With his debut
novel, Nash Jenkins brilliantly captures the emotional intensities of
adolescence in the dizzying early years of the twenty-first century.
