The high-toned private preparatory school — with a campus like a college and a tuition bill to match, where the guys all wear ties and blazers — is a bit like Hollywood or Buckingham Palace. Few of us get to go there except as tourists, but we all want to know what goes on.
A host of movies (“Dead Poets Society,” “Rushmore,” “The Emperors’ Club”) and a shelf of books (“A Separate Peace,” “Gossip Girl”) are set there. Even Holden Caulfield, for all his rebellion, was a preppie. (Remember, in “Catcher in the Rye,” he’s just lost all the fencing team’s swords on the subway.)
Now, Wilmington native Nash Jenkins walks those hallowed halls for his debut novel, “Foster Dade Explores the Cosmos.” Jenkins graduated from The Lawrenceville School in New Jersey and reportedly began the germ of his novel while a student at Johns Hopkins.
The setting is The Kennedy School, a fictional institution in New Jersey. (There’s no connection, tour guides emphasize, to the Kennedy family, who went to Choate.) Hogwarts only had six houses; Kennedy has 10.
And into one of these, early in the Obama administration, moves our nameless narrator.
His rooms, he discovers, were once occupied by Foster Dade, a legendary student who was expelled a few years back for selling ADHD drugs at exam time to fellow students. (The “Adderall ring” became such a scandal that Vanity Fair wrote it up.)
Our narrator, who has ambitions as a journalist, starts finding traces of Foster in odd little corners of the room. Soon, he sets out on a quixotic quest to find out just what happened and where Foster went. (He’s gone off the radar, and rumor has it, he’s become an East Asian drug lord.)
It’s a story of preppies gone bad, much like Wilmington native Nina De Gramont’s “Gossip of the Starlings.” Jenkins, on the other hand, picks up tropes of “The Great Gatsby” and Donna Tartt’s “The Secret History.”
Foster stumbles into a circle of what Evelyn Waugh would have called “Bright Young Things,” dazzling campus stars with pedigree, money and looks. But it’s a hard circle to break into, even for Foster, whose dad was a BB&T vice-president and whose mom worked in the Clinton White House. There’s an inevitable romantic triangle and, inevitably, it ends badly.
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“Foster Dade,” however, is not exactly a beach read. Jenkins aspires to literary fiction, and he poses readers some challenges.
Our narrator, for example — possibly a highly unreliable narrator — is a bit full of himself. He wears his erudition on his sleeve; in the age of TikTok, he writes almost like Henry James, with a polysyllabic vocabulary and convoluted diction. Example: “Foster Dade arrived at Kennedy … still believing in a certain homeostatic happiness to adolescence.”
On the other hand, when we hear Foster’s voice directly, through his blog posts or his English essays, he sounds, well, almost like Holden Caulfieod.
Of some interest is Jenkins’ handling of digital media. Where earlier novels reprinted exchanges of letters, we get a chat thread. When earlier writers would short-cut characterization by listing the titles on someone’s bookshelf, Jenkins gives us their playlists.
“Foster Dade” will probably not prove a best-seller, but Jenkins at least gives us a vivid picture of one small, very select part of the cosmos.
‘FOSTER DADE EXPLORES THE COSMOS’
By Nash Jenkins
Overlook Press, $30