The Globe and Mail

With three novels now precociously under his belt, it's fair to say that Nick McDonell mainly sticks to writing about the worlds he has the privilege of knowing first hand. His bestselling debut novel, Twelve, made him a sensation at 17, earning raves for its depiction of violence and drugs among Manhattan's rich, fast-moving youth. McDonell followed that with The Third Brother; written while he was an undergrad at Harvard and during a journalism internship in Bangkok, it was described favourably by one reviewer as “a document of the nihilistic excess and imbalances among wasted (Western) youth in Thailand.”

Now, at 25, having completed Harvard and taken assignments from Harper's and Time in Sudan and Iraq, McDonell offers up An Expensive Education, a political thriller that strives for the pulp seriousness of Graham Greene or John le Carré.

Michael Teak is a 25-year-old Harvard graduate, language specialist and once-promising middle-distance runner, drafted into an unnamed U.S. intelligence agency by his godfather, a well-connected senior spook. A year into his East Africa posting, Teak is charged with delivering a package of cash and cell phones to Hatashil, a Somali rebel leader who, until now, the United States has been covertly supporting. But only moments after he makes the connection, in a remote village, an air strike levels the site and kills all its inhabitants; Teak narrowly escapes, the massacre's only witness.

Back in Cambridge, Harvard professor Susan Lowell learns that her sympathetic book about the rebel Hatashil has won the Pulitzer Prize for journalism, which she expects will cinch her bid for tenure. But as news-wire reports emerge that Hatashil may have been responsible for the village massacre, along with unsourced murmurs linking him to al-Qaeda, the Pulitzer committee decides to review its decision to award her the prize.

Also at Harvard is David Ayan, a Somali scholarship student of Lowell's, who had family in the targeted village; and David's wealthy white girlfriend, Jane, a staffer at the Crimson newspaper assigned to write an article that questions the veracity of Lowell's research.

For the genre, McDonell demonstrates an alarming lack of cynicism, or even ambiguity, about human nature

Explaining his motivation, McDonell recently told The New York Times that he “wanted to create a world that's the interface between the people who have real power and the world of college kids.” Indeed, when Teak learns at an early juncture in the novel that one of his Harvard contemporaries is working as an adviser in Iraq, seeing him “in a power of position in the Green Zone” makes him uneasy, “because he was really just a kid. Like me ...”

The interface between “people with real power” and “college kids” exists in the shadowy form of the Porcellian, a Skull and Bones-type fraternity that has a long history of serving as a feeder for the intelligence community; Teak was a member, as was his godfather, and the Porcellian is now courting David, the young, striving Somali whose lack of social capital in a bastion such as Harvard makes him a little too eager to be courted.

As the various players are sucked into the undertow of Hatashil's story and caught up in the shifting loyalties and aims of the intelligence community, McDonell writes with snap and verve, in chiselled, compact sentences that eschew too much description in favour of a slick pace. Narratively, at least, he succeeds in fusing the campus novel with political thriller, although we could do with less of the former and more of the latter. The campus characters are the least interesting, even if McDonell ensures each has their snug place in his novel's preordained puzzle.