The Beautiful Miscellaneous,Used

Product Description Dominic Smith's beautifully written new novel explores genius and loss, failure and redemption, in this portrait of a son trying to make peace with the crushing weight of his father's expectations. Nathan Nelson is above average in everything he does, but his father, a renowned quark physicist, will not give up his quest to uncover his son's latent gifts. Consequently, Nathan has spent his formative years in whizkid summer camps, learning college algebra and visiting the Stanford Linear Accelerator. By the time Nathan is seventeen, hopes for a lateblooming prodigy seem dashed, but a tragic accident and ensuing coma leave Nathan with an altered mind that allows him to memorize vast amounts of information. Nathan's father, looking for an application for the new talent, sends him to a research institute where, amid neurological misfits and savants, Nathan tries to find a purpose for the altered way he sees and hears the world. From Publishers Weekly Smith's novel of the painfully ordinary son of a brilliant scientist, and his sudden acquisition of marvelous powers of memory, is read by Garcia with a taste for melodrama. Garcia's melodramatic streak is understated, prodded less by emoting than by tone of voice and careful pauses. Each sentence ends with a slight downturn, as if inflated hopes have rapidly dwindled to nothingness. Garcia, a stage actor by training, treats Smith's novel as an extended monologue to be performed, summoning the moods and sensations of its prose via subtle shifts of emphasis. The result is a performancedriven audiobook, rendered in minimalist fashion.Copyright Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Review "Highly entertainingfascinatingSmith writes vividlyhe has a talent for descriptive imagery." New York Times About the Author DOMINIC SMITH grew up in Australia and now lives in Austin, Texas, where he received an M.F.A. from the James A. Michener Center for Writers. His fiction has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. From AudioFile In this eccentric comingofage story, Paul Michael Garcias task is to make Nathan Nelson, whose father cant accept the fact that his son is not extraordinary, feel like a real, sympathetic, ageappropriate boy. Nathans father is an almost brilliant physicist who lives in a very odd, very isolated mental universe. When at age 17 Nathan is nearly killed in a car crash, he develops a phenomenal memory plus synesthesia. His father sends him off to be studied at a research institute, which is filled with a cast of gifted oddballs whom Garcia expertly portrays. But overall Garcias performance is somewhat gray and uninflected, as if nothing that happens to Nathan strikes Garcia as exciting or funny. Its fine, but curiously flat. B.G. AudioFile 2007, Portland, MaineCopyright AudioFile, Portland, Maine