August 20, 2012
In British author Masters's precocious debut novel, English lit student Eliot Lamb is on the verge of graduating from Oxford. During a night of raucous drinkingâa last hurrah for Eliot and his friends, "the Noughties"âour narrator is caught between his long-term girlfriend Lucy and his brilliant mate Ella. Nostalgic for his first love, Eliot stifles his attraction to Ella because of their own fraught history and the jealousy of his best friend Jack. As the group stumbles from pub to bar to club, and Eliot reflects on his three years of study, tension builds among the sex-obsessed friends as secrets from the near-past emerge. The melodramatic plot includes love triangles, abortion, attempted suicide, and seedy sex, with plenty of text-message jargon to convey the aimlessness of 21st-century youth. But anti-hero Eliot, whose literary background becomes an excuse for hyper-stylized linguistic hijinks and erudite allusions, is an unpleasant host to the party and lacks the energy of, say, The Rachel Papers' Charles Highway. One too many dream sequences and rather too much ponderous talk about the state of contemporary identity allow the novel to founder in its pretentions, despite moments of wit and genuine pathos about university days. Agent: Georgia Garrett, AP Watt.