cover image GODS OF ABERDEEN

GODS OF ABERDEEN

Micah Nathan, . . Simon & Schuster, $24 (384pp) ISBN 978-0-7432-5082-5

In Nathan's somewhat derivative debut (think Donna Tartt's The Secret History , with a little magic thrown in), Eric Dunne, a 16-year-old wunderkind, orphan and autodidact Latin prodigy, escapes New Jersey thanks to a scholarship to Aberdeen College, where his quest for knowledge inevitably comes at a very high price. On the ivied New England campus, Eric dabbles in awkward sexual fumblings and psychedelic drugs, but specializes in the occult, with fatal results. Apprenticed to fossilized academics including head librarian Cornelius Graves and star medievalist William Cade, he also teams up with fellow research assistants Art Fitch, Howie Spacks and Dan Higgins in search of the philosopher's stone, which supposedly holds the key to immortality. Eric and his rumpled, preppy cohorts quote Chaucer at each other, identify with Charlemagne and jet off to Prague in search of a lost alchemical tome. Eric's intellectual musings ("But it was doomed from the start, putting so much faith in knowledge, not realizing that knowledge by itself can be dangerous") share space with awkward exposition and purple description, but Nathan perfectly captures the angst and pretension of adolescents taking themselves very seriously. Agent, Marly Rusoff. (June)