Foster Dade Explores the Cosmos

March 27, 2023
Jenkins debuts with a capable if overlong story of a New Jersey boarding school scandal. An unnamed narrator recounts the disastrous education of fellow student Foster Dade, who enrolled at Kennedy School 11 years earlier, in 2008. After a doctor prescribes Adderall and Vyvanse for Foster’s panic attacks, he sells the pills to his classmates. Dealing drugs provides Foster with access to the school’s inner circle, which includes Jack Albright and Annabeth Whittaker. Foster is attracted to Annabeth, but she couples up with Jack, and Foster romances another student. When Foster is caught kissing Annabeth, he is exiled from the elites, and things get worse with the death of one of Foster’s clients and a vicious Facebook chat thread. The prose sometimes thuds (“I covet a wistfulness that was foreclosed to me” the narrator suggests), but stylistic flourishes in the form of playlists, legal papers, and entries from Foster’s blog provide a convincing if overloaded panorama of the school’s microcosm. Some purple prose aside, Jenkins proves to be a keen world builder and a mostly engaging raconteur. Agent: Sloan Harris and Julie Flanagan, CAA.

April 15, 2023
This ambitious debut covers 15 months of a teenage boy's prep school yearnings and traumas. The novel's Kennedy School is a costly coed facility modeled on Lawrenceville, also in New Jersey, from which Jenkins graduated in 2011. His narrator is a Kennedy alumnus who decides to trace the rise and fall 10 years earlier of Foster Dade, who became a school legend mainly for his expulsion for dealing Adderall and other stimulating "study drugs." Foster is a smart, sensitive kid who's having panic attacks about not fitting in at Kennedy. He starts selling drugs, initially prescribed by his therapist, to classmates seeking to improve their academic and athletic performance or just to supplement the buzz they usually get from booze and cocaine. (Yes, they're only 15 and 16, but make allowances for big allowances.) Eventually he acquires a major supplier and customers on 17 campuses. He also finds friendship and affection, but several epic binges reveal a darker side of coolness, hookups, and chemically induced euphoria. Jenkins weaves through his disjointed narrative a finely observed account of teen angst and awkward sex in an academically demanding environment marked by privilege and cliques and the cruelty they breed. The disjointedness stems from a pretense of reportage set up in the alumnus narrator's almost comically overwritten preface ("the loose nebula of half-truths has unfurled under the myth-making tendencies of time"). His intrusive commentary often interrupts the story as he explains how he knows what he knows, expanding on interviews, citing medical records. Then there are the textual jolts of age-appropriate, social media-savvy elements: Facebook threads, iChats, phone texts, iTunes playlists, and Foster's online diary. It's possible that Jenkins--who refers several times to coverage by Vanity Fair and other media--is aiming for a pastiche of the expos�s such periodicals trot out in the wake of an eminent school's scandal. If so, his novel suggests that fiction has a better chance of getting at more of the truth. A complex, sometimes confusing work by a talented writer.

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