Mea Culpa, Kiddo

Ulf Andersen / Getty Images Seven years ago, my feud with 17-year-old wunderkind Nick McDonell was all over the tabloids. But with his new book, An Expensive Education, I’ve made peace with the lit world’s It Boy.

Nick McDonell apologizes for postponing our appointment—by three and a half hours—due to an unheard alarm clock.

“It’s understandable,” I say, having already apologized to him for significantly worse offenses. “Revenge is a dish best served cold.”

In 2002, Nick’s novel Twelve —now in production as a Joel Schumacher film starring Kiefer Sutherland, Emma Roberts, and 50 Cent — hit bookstores amid a torrent of publicity and A-list blurbs that praised the 17-year-old author as a literary spokesman for our generation. I went crazy with envy (being an adolescent writer without a book deal at the time) and condemned Twelve in the New York Press as “self-serving swill from a rich kid with connections.” (Nick’s father Terry, the editor of Sports Illustrated, is friends with Morgan Entrekin, the chief of Grove Press, which published Twelve and Nick’s two subsequent novels.)

Nick refused to counter my outbursts: “I care zero—I also have no interest in shit talking,” he wrote me in an email.

The media took notice: My screed appeared in New York magazine and on various gossip blogs. Over the next few years I continued to wage a self-righteous war against this act of nepotism. Meanwhile, Nick refused to counter my outbursts: “I care zero—I also have no interest in shit talking,” he wrote me in an email.

An Expensive Education. By Nick McDonell. Atlantic Books. 304 pages. $24. Recently Nick and I crossed paths at a publishing event. I offered a mea culpa for my juvenile behavior, he graciously accepted, and we agreed to sit down for an interview upon the release of his new novel, An Expensive Education, which follows a Harvard alumnus who inadvertently facilitates the massacre of an African village while working for the CIA. (“There is a connection between the intelligence community and these elite American institutions—Harvard, Ivy League—and it’s bad news for countries we are involved in,” says Nick, who went to Harvard himself. “This manifests itself in horrifying ways in foreign policy.”)

Our two-hour conversation, while amiable, was painfully awkward at times, but not for the obvious reason — Nick was a class act about placing our water under the bridge. The discomfort came from my sheer inability to figure him out. Shyness in writers is normal—most of us prefer the written word to the spoken—but Nick resists vocalizing self-reflection; he emphatically wants the work to speak for itself. “It’s a spy novel,” Nick says dismissively of An Expensive Education, as if his book were a mindless, mass-market Bourne clone. “It’s a thriller. I want it to be entertainment.”

Pressed to go deeper, to convey a message, to make some kind of impact, he reluctantly concurs.

“That’s true,” he says, but does not elaborate. “I would have to think about that. I don’t know exactly… I don’t mean to be flip… I feel like you keep looking for something more… I don’t know what to tell you.”

At another point in the interview, however, Nick sounds like a completely different person: “I’m interested in illuminating the enormous disparity between vast poverty and the tiny upper class. … This vast inequity is unfair by definition, and I am interested in illuminating that and, where possible, changing that. When the revolution comes, there may be some trouble—”

“When the revolution comes?” I ask. “Which revolution are you talking about?”

“Any of them,” he says with a straight face.

“So there is a message?”

“I was making a joke,” Nick backpedals. “I think it’s a spy novel.”