An Underachiever's Diary
Benjamin Anastas's filigreed novella is grounded in a very slim conceit. Of two brothers born into a trendy Cambridge, Massachusetts, household, one twin is set for success, the other for chronic failure. Although ill-fated William actually beat Clive into the world by seven minutes, it's straight downhill from there. The first chapter is filled with hilarious scenes of equal opportunity gone wrong, our narrator balancing each of Clive's triumphs with his own pratfalls. Even their hair is woefully unequal. At three the younger sports a Beatles mop par excellence, while William is the eternal victim: "My mother, no artist with the scissors, had run into some trouble with a cowlick on my top, and I looked more like a lesbian, or David Bowie in his glitter years."Unfortunately, as the boys hit puberty and William exiles himself to boarding school ("the Boys' Prison"), the book goes awry. The underachiever's later misadventures are no less acutely rendered, but with his foil at more of a distance, William's sorrows and sarcasms lose some of their strength. Despite its brevity,An Underachiever's Diaryshould not be read in one sitting but savored slowly (or even dipped into in very small doses) for its balanced prose and arch self-deprecation.--This text refers to theHardcoveredition.