Beattie's discursive, unfocused novel (following The Accomplished Guest) chronicles the coming-of-age of Ben, an intelligent teenager who, as the book opens, is studying at an elite New Hampshire boarding school called Bailey Academy. In the months before and after 9/11, he pines for his alluring fellow student LouLou Sils, copes with his fragmented family, and joins the group that congregates around enigmatic philosophy teacher Pierre LaVerdere. After graduation from Bailey and then Cornell, Ben eddies through a series of unsatisfactory jobs, fleeting sexual encounters, and a relationship with a troubled young woman named Arly. After he moves to a small town in 2011, LouLou, LaVerdere, and his family reveal themselves in new and challenging ways. Beattie's depiction of the aimless and largely unremarkable Ben is overshadowed by the detail lavished on scores of vivid minor characters who pass briefly through his life. LaVerdere, whose interactions with Ben frame the novel, is also unsatisfying: pretentiously cerebral and verbose, he feels implausible as either a defining influence in his students' lives or the dramatically problematic man who emerges at the novel's close. As always, Beattie offers sharp psychological insights and well-crafted prose, but the novel lacks the power and emotional depth of her best work. Agent: Lynn Nesbit, Janklow & Nesbit Associates. (Apr.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Beattie (The Accomplished Guest, 2017) anchors her latest psychologically forensic novel to a New Hampshire prep school where troubled overachievers are enthralled by teacher Pierre LaVerdere, a charismatic master of irony and dissemblance who will haunt them. Ben, a student with family issues, narrates, and his cynicism, passivity, and existential viewpoint make him a millennial Holden Caulfield whom we accompany into perplexing adulthood. Bewitched by sexually adventurous and brazenly manipulative women, as well as by a neglectful friend, and bereft of conviction and ambition, post-college Ben flees New York City for a small, shabby upstate town about to be transformed by a boutique-generating tide of rich Manhattan refugees. Ben's attempts at friendship and romance fail; he is shaken by a request from a former classmate and lover, now in a lesbian relationship, and stricken when the diabolical LaVerdere resurfaces with a dire claim. Gimlet-eyed Beattie has created a stunningly unnerving and provocative tale spiked with keen cultural allusions and drollery. This jarring dissection of privilege and anxiety, gender expectations, lust, ludicrous predicaments, defensive selfishness, moral confusion, and numbing loneliness projects a matrix of angst somewhat countered by the solace and sustenance found in a quiet life far from the grasping, hurried, hostile world.HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Beattie's literary reign continues apace, thanks to her stealthily eviscerating insights and disquieting wit.--Donna Seaman Copyright 2010 Booklist

A New England boarding school for "really bright kids who've screwed up" proves a poor preparation for adult life.Beattie (The Accomplished Guest, 2017, etc.) expertly captures the overheated atmosphere at Bailey Academy, where charismatic teacher Pierre LaVerdere selects a small group of students he considers capable of being trained to converse on his elevated intellectual level. Although protagonist Ben is one of "LaVerdere's Leading Lights," we see him from the novel's earliest pages carefully looking for clues to what appropriate/expected behavior might be. Few solid values are evident to Ben and his classmates even before 9/11 reinforces their perception that nothing can be counted on in an uncertain world. They scatter to various elite colleges, and Ben graduates from Cornell with as little idea of what his interests and goals are as he had at Bailey. Beattie sketches the next 10 years of his life in an episodic narrative of jobs taken and discarded as randomly as lovers. (The only one who sticks for a while is Arly: drug-taking, emotionally abusive, brutally promiscuous, and a prime candidate for "Worst Girlfriend Ever.") Ben's only real commitment seems to be to the Hudson Valley town he moves to in 2011, gradually gentrified into an affluent exurb. Friends from Bailey turn up but are either evasive (former BFF Jasper) or exploitive (too-cool-for-school LouLou). For a long time, the novel seems as aimless as Ben, but slowly, with her characteristic cool precision, Beattie reveals a man who, for an array of complex reasons linked to Bailey and his childhood, has drawn from life the conclusion that "everybody leaves everybody." When LaVerdere reappears with unwelcome revelations about the ways he is entangled in his former student's past and present, Ben's rage has multiple targets. A final scene with a fellow survivor of other people's emotional wars suggests the faintest chance for a more rewarding connection, then declares it impossible "for every obvious reason."Obvious is one thing Beattie never is. Her elegantly sculpted tale is both wrenchingly sad and ultimately enigmatic: as usual. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.