Twelve, by Nick McDonell

A new hero for the less than zero generation

"Twelve" is the name of the novel, but the number that runs through it, graffitoed in invisible ink across every page, is 17: the age of the author when he wrote it; one year younger than Bret Easton Ellis when he wrote Less than Zero, gasps the publicity. The comparison is apt. The same super-rich, emotionally vacant US teenagers populate both books, though here they are of the east-coast, not west, variety.

Set, like that book, during the yawning stretch of days between Christmas and New Year, Twelve shows us a parentless New York of house parties, shopping expeditions and, of course, drugs. Meaning coke, pot and a mysterious new wonder-drug called "twelve"; it makes one tearaway feel "like when you first read that part of the Gettysburg address". This equation of a drug high with well-bred patriotism is characteristic of Nick McDonell's confused adolescents. Getting blitzed is easier than getting laid, and looming adulthood is felt more in the first pangs of nostalgia for things lost than in anything gained.

Our beacon through five days of purgatory is White Mike, an intelligent (McDonell insists on this too many times) loner who displays that alchemical mixture of intensity and dissipation called cool. His cool factor is doubled by the fact that, with both Harvard and his father's restaurant business at his feet, he chooses to tread the city's mean streets and carpeted lobbies as a dealer. He doesn't touch the stuff he peddles, and this gives him the purity to observe and judge the male models and comical white gangstas that surround him. Not that he does judge them, mind. That privilege is left to the reader – and there's the book's weakness.

If White Mike can't decide if he cares about his customers and friends, neither can the author. On the one hand, he never stoops to the awesome pitilessness Ellis shows, and gives enough glimpses out through various eye-holes to breed the beginnings of compassion. But he refuses to commit to the characters enough to give them consequences for their actions, or indeed futures of any kind. The book's "apocalyptic climax" – which would have been visible miles off, even if the jacket hadn't advertised it – is more than an abrogation of responsibility. It's a gesture of embarrassment.

As for whether McDonell himself has a future, while that's not hindered by the personal connections of someone who grew up around Hunter S Thompson (jacket quote) and Morgan Entrekin (godfather and publisher), it's certainly not dependent on them. His debut is no Secret History, but it is a perfectly acceptable calling-card. The short chapters, dazed present-tense narration and affected disaffection make it a fast, familiar read.

The plot is more delicately wrought than would first appear, so it's a shame the author hangs it on a hardened drug-dealer stealing a pearl-handled revolver from a client he has killed. On nearly everything else in this city of poor little rich kids, McDonell seems perfectly credible. Every generation has a right to its own novelistic cry of anguish, and the class of 2002 should be happy with this. Anyone outside that demographic really has no business reading it.