Review by New York Times Review
BEN DOLNICK'S FIRST two novels, "Zoology" and "You Know Who You Are," were intelligent, amiable books, about the coming-of-age of middle-class male protagonists. They were warmhearted and strikingly perceptive about their heroes' feelings, the petty as well as the generous. But their painstaking rendering of childhood and adolescent struggles felt at moments overly wide-eyed, almost twee. His third, "At the Bottom of Everything," is far more sophisticated. Dolnick has retained his strengths - his sensitive gauge for emotional states and his empathy - but his writing is more taut, more piquant, not only observant but wry in its depiction of human fallibility. The result is a lively, often funny book about being young and smart and confused, fumbling through life in a middle-class American sort of way. There is tragedy here, too, but it is dressed in such ordinary clothes that it feels less like tragedy as we are used to it in art and more like the heartbreak we know from experience, the kind that comes from having the misfortune to care about other people. At the heart of the story is Adam Sanecki, an appealing yet somewhat callow Ivy League graduate a few years out of school, living in his hometown, Washington. He has spent years trying not to think about his former best friend, Thomas Pell. Adam's current antipathy extends to Thomas's parents: he recalls with a wince that he had even, "one especially, unproud morning, turned and speed-walked out of Safeway because I'd seen Thomas's dad, or someone who looked like Thomas's dad, rooting around in the bin of red peppers." Adam isn't so lucky the next time, when he spots Thomas's mom at a drugstore on Wisconsin Avenue: Mrs. Pell sees him before he can slink off. Chatting with her, Adam silently laments: "Childhood friends, given a decade or two, turn into strangers. Their parents don't." Only now Mrs. Pell looks "pale and defeated." She implores Adam to write to Thomas, who is apparently in India. Adam says he will. (He won't.) The encounter dredges up memories. We learn that Adam and Thomas became friends in middle school, where Thomas had been universally acknowledged as the smartest kid in their class. Adam was the more socially adept. Thomas turned to him for advice about girls, and for several years, they were a good pair. Adam also came to love Mr. and Mrs. Pell, who were warm and sophisticated, more intellectual than his mother and stepfather. Mr. Pell read his English papers; Mrs. Pell listened to Adam more attentively than any adult ever had. (Dolnick is particularly skilled at rendering the texture of these relationships, which are at once ordinary and vitally important to the people involved.) Since then, Thomas's life has taken a turn for the worse. He dropped out of college and spent the better part of the next few years lying on his parents' couch before taking off for India. His e-mails to his parents are sporadic and increasingly unhinged. After their chance meeting at the drugstore, Mrs. Pell steps up her e-mails to Adam. She says Thomas is "drowning." She writes: "I'm asking you to care. ... He never had another friend like you. I think he might still say you're his best friend, even now." Adam ignores her. He is not a monster; he's just a regular guy consumed by his own problems: a breakup that leads him to spend far too much time on Facebook, tortured by his ex's chirpy status updates; his failure to launch a career. (At 26, he notes dryly, "no one wanted to know now what I wanted to be; they wanted to know what I did.") What he does is work as a tutor - "which seemed, along with being a nanny, to be one of the loopholes people my age had discovered in the professional world." In the context of his professional and romantic missteps, Adam starts to take on a blandly sympathetic everyman quality, but the book regains its footing once its focus returns to the Pells. It turns out Adam and Thomas share a secret, something they did that had horrific consequences for another person. "At the Bottom of Everything" is essentially a book about guilt, specifically the kind that results from a small mistake whose reverberations are disproportionately large. This secret proved after a while to be too much for Adam and Thomas's friendship. Dolnick nails the casual brutality with which teenagers drop people they were once close to: this friendship's end was sealed the moment Adam, whose popularity, unlike Thomas's, was on the rise, "stopped saying hi to him in the halls," leaving Thomas pretty much friendless. Thomas's is not the only pain we are made to feel. Mr. and Mrs. Pell are among the most powerful characters here. An affluent, liberal-minded couple, they are devastated by their only son's breakdown. Nor can they quite forgive themselves for their own moments of middle-class embarrassment, the "cursed vanity" that made them shrink from their neighbors' glances at the strange, scarecrow-thin young man - the former "reader of Kant" and "pride of A.P. chemistry" - who, before he left for India, couldn't even hold down a job at Subway. Adam eventually gets in touch with the Pells. He agrees to go to India to look for Thomas. But Adam can't think about Thomas without thinking about their secret. Lingering affection for Mr. and Mrs. Pell is not all that compels Adam to make this trip. It is part of the strength of this novel that motives are almost always hard to untangle. INDIA IS A bewildering place for Adam, who views it not with an appreciation for difference but with the apprehension of a young American who'd much rather be at home, or at least in a place with air conditioning and reliable Wi-Fi. After his first night in a dingy communal apartment where Thomas once lived, he thinks, "I'm going to need to expand my vocabulary when it comes to the varieties of bad sleep, the way someone on an ocean voyage would need to distinguish between types of storms." Between the food and the living conditions - and, it should be added, his own self-serving anxiety about guarding the secret he and Thomas share - Adam is in a great deal of physical discomfort much of the time he is in India, beset by stomach trouble, heat and "India's versions of horseflies," which "stung with deep, epidural sorts of needles," to name a few of the small-scale trials that Dolnick narrates with a deft comic touch. What happens when Adam finds Thomas confounds the expectations of a reader trained on more conventional novels. There is a lifelike complexity to the way it all plays out. Even the question of whether guilt about what he and Adam did is the real cause of Thomas's anguish or just something his mentally ill mind happened to latch on to is left for us to wonder over, with some evidence pointing one way and some another. And what about Adam? Is he more tortured than he likes to let on? Or is his just the ordinary flailing of a young person trying to figure out his place in the world? Either way, Adam's relative peace of mind is as troubling to contemplate as Thomas's suffering. In this slim, surprisingly haunting book, Dolnick reminds us that part of being a healthy and functional human is a willingness to act a little bit selfish, a little cruel in our ability to walk away from the pain of others. The protagonist can't think about his former friend without thinking about the secret they share. ADELLE WALDMAN'S first novel, "The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P.," was published in July.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 6, 2013]
Review by Booklist Review
In the follow-up to You Know Who You Are (2011), Dolnick expertly magnifies the minutiae of youth, loneliness, and a friendship gone wrong. Living in Washington, D.C., at 26, Adam Sanecki isn't where he'd once imagined himself. Fresh from a breakup and perpetually avoiding law school, he begins tutoring middle-schoolers to give his life meaning. It doesn't help that he has been sleeping with a tutee's mother, has been shirking his family, and, most troublesomely, has received multiple pleas from the mother of his onetime bestie, Thomas, to reconnect with her son. Brainy, unpopular, and unsightly, Thomas endured adolescence by seemingly disabling his emotions, a characteristic Adam once admired. They had sleepovers, philosophized, and dreamed of girlfriends until an alarming accident drove them apart. As Adam sloughs through his twenties, reconfiguring the past, he finally journeys around the globe to reconcile the foreboding secret he shares with Thomas. In this coming-of-age-at-least-twice novel, Dolnick's insights into life's bleaker spells are wise and entertaining, making for an invigorating and transcendent reminder of how haunting old friendships can be.--Fullmer, Jonathan Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Haunted by a secret from his adolescence that resulted in the end of his relationship with his best friend, Adam Sanecki tries to navigate his adult life by ignoring the past, until it comes roaring back, in Dolnick's poignant, if at times cliched, novel (after You Know Who You Are). His time at Dupont Prep in Washington, D.C., was awkward for Adam until he met Thomas Pell, the resident oddball genius. The friendship evolved until the two boys were spending nearly every day after school at Thomas's house; an extra place was regularly set at the dinner table for Adam. Interspersed with Adam's boyhood memories are scenes from his lackluster adult life, where he's working half-heartedly as a tutor, half-considering law school, and sleeping with the mother of one of his tutees. The incident that splintered Adam and Thomas's friendship is certainly horrifying but not altogether unique in the world of fictional seminal moments. In the present, Adam ignores the repeated pleas of Thomas's parents, Richard and Sally, who beg him to help them track down their wayward son-now a mentally unhinged dropout, last seen in India. Adam's eventual acceptance of the task is inevitable, and while Dolnick depicts a journey that is both mentally and spiritually taxing, the outcome and resolution are the least interesting aspects of a story that takes its strengths from the richly drawn characters. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Dolnick's third novel revisits the themes of his earlier work: early adulthood angst (Zoology) and the intricacies of family (You Know Who You Are). Central character Adam admits that he is avoiding a transition to adulthood by becoming a high school tutor. The first half of the book takes readers back and forth between his current conundrum involving jealousy and obsession with two women and memories of a close childhood friendship with the precocious Thomas. These two stories come together when Thomas's parents ask for Adam's help, a journey he is willing to undertake both to escape his current situation and to deal with a defining adolescent incident. His travels to find Thomas take him to India, where he experiences culture shock, which keeps us from appreciating the setting. The conclusion hints at a religious transcendence from the physical and everyday, but the narrative cannot support such complex ideas, and the character's transformation seems abrupt. VERDICT A quick, intoxicating read for those interested in suburban post-college stories. Other readers may find its scope too limited and its description of India and meditation a bit glib.-Kate Gray, Shrewsbury P.L., MA (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A melancholy young man stuck in the wilderness years of his mid-20s is forced to confront a buried secret when a childhood friend disappears. At first, it would appear that Dolnick (You Know Who You Are, 2010, etc.) is simply going to roll out the same coming-of-age story that characterized his first two novels--and for the first hundred pages or so, he pretty much does. And then the novel loses its mind, but we'll get to that part. Adam Sanecki is a giant mope who feels old at the ripe age of 26. He tutors obnoxious children with as little interest as possible, trolls Facebook to stalk his wispy ex-girlfriend and sleeps with one of his student's mothers out of what seems sheer boredom. In between all this navel-gazing, we get a rather sweet story of Adam's childhood friendship with Thomas Pell, a brilliant, awkward classmate at their exclusive prep school. They share a secret language and that unguarded bond that so often springs up between adolescents. Then Something Bad happens that marks both boys for life. Adam carries his secret by burying it, while Thomas starts to mentally unravel almost immediately. Then things get really weird. At the behest of Thomas' terrified parents, Adam travels to New Delhi, India, where a mentally ill Thomas has gone to ground. This takes up two-thirds of the book; the whole setup seems rather preposterous. Adam meets an enigmatic spiritual leader who says Thomas must "purify." Later, Thomas and Adam are forced to take responsibility for the trespass from their youth. A final reunion between the lifelong friends in a cave rings hollow, as does Adam's admission of guilt. Insincere characterizations and a weak central conflict detract from the novel. See instead Alex Garland's The Beach.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Review by New York Times Review
Review by Booklist Review
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Review by Library Journal Review
Review by Kirkus Book Review
