Foster Dade Explores the Cosmos

Prep meets The Secret History in Nash Jenkins’s Foster Dade Explores the Cosmos, a searing debut novel about a tragic scandal at an American prep school, told in the form of a literary investigation through a distinctly millennial lens. “Juicy . . . Jenkins [is a] huge new literary talent.” —Curtis Sittenfeld, The Guardian “If Holden Caulfield had been dropped into the Obama era, he might be Foster Dade.” —The National Book Review When Foster Dade arrives at Kennedy, an elite boarding school in New Jersey, the year is 2008. Barack Obama begins his first term as president; Vampire Weekend and Passion Pit bump from the newly debuted iPhone; teenagers share confidences and rumors over BlackBerry Messenger and iChat; and the internet as we know it is slowly emerging from its cocoon. So, too, is Foster emerging—a transfer student and anxious young man, Foster is stumbling through adolescence in the wake of his parents’ scandalous divorce. But Foster soon finds himself in the company of