The Beautiful Miscellaneous

April 23, 2007
F
ollowing a car crash, Nathan Nelson, 17, is recovering from a two-week-long coma in July 1987. His father, Samuel, a physics professor at a Wisconsin college, wanted a genius for a son. Nathan, who narrates, has always been uninspired at best, but finds that the accident has left him with heightened senses, and a prodigious memory. Cerebral Samuel, whom Nathan can’t help revering, rejoices. Even when sent to a school for the gifted, however, Nathan mostly watches TV and smokes cigarettes with girlfriend Teresa, whose talent is a kind of X-ray vision. Teresa soon uses this talent to spot a tragedy looming in Nathan’s immediate future, and his life afterward, for the reader, is all frustrating anticlimax. As the years pass, Nathan works at a dead-end library job, stalks townspeople and parties with former schoolmates. This narrative’s strengths are its abundant humor, occasional lyrical patches and portrayal of the quirky but reliable Whit Shupak, a retired astronaut and family friend. But Smith (The Mercury Visions of Louis Daguerre
) never allows the immature, lackadaisical Nathan to really develop or emerge from his father’s shadow.