Down the Shore

March 31, 2014
This smoothly written coming-of-age debut by former GQ editor Parish is filled with dynamic but flawed young characters. Acquiring a fat bank account and pursuing hedonistic excess are 18-year-old Tom Alison’s main goals in life. He is a graduating high school senior, but his arrest for smalltime dope dealing spurs Columbia University to yank its admission offer. Tom helps his spunky single mother, Diane, run her Princeton, N.J., catering service while waiting to attend St. Andrews University in Scotland and befriends schoolmate Clare Savage, the son of a financier fleeing prosecution for insider trading. Clare decides to follow Tom to St. Andrews, where they have a mutual friend studying fashion design, but before leaving, the two take a side trip to Long Beach Island to visit Tom’s best friend, another drug dealer. Once enrolled at St. Andrews as an economics major, Tom, true to form, takes up a hard-partying lifestyle fueled by cocaine binges. When Clare’s father, Michael, shows up, Tom sees his big chance to make a connection with the disgraced but still-powerful figure. Readers may not find these characters either sympathetic or particularly interesting, but Parish shows promise as a storyteller, moving the plot along at a good clip.

April 15, 2014
The partying is intense in this first novel, a look at America's bright young things under a cloud or two. The kids from Lawrenceville, a private New Jersey boarding school, are getting hammered at a birthday party in a Manhattan bar. One girl has passed out. Two guys, Tom and Clare, both seniors, volunteer to take her home. Tom Alison, the narrator, was the school's pot dealer until he was busted; now he's on probation. Clare Savage was one of Tom's clients. His father, Michael, has been much in the news: A money manager targeted by the Feds for insider trading, he's fled the country. Columbia has withdrawn its offer to Tom, and Clare is stuck on the waitlist for Yale, so they have thwarted ambitions in common. Tom's single mom, who has a lucrative catering business in Princeton, invites Clare to stay with them. The other new person in Tom's life is Kelsey, who designs clothes in St. Andrews, Scotland, where Tom is headed (small world); he and Clare will lie low at the university there. St. Andrews is a party campus. The town is all pubs. The first one Tom enters, oh joy, reveals Prince William (the year is 2003). He's kicking back with his mate Jules, Kelsey's new/old boyfriend; Jules owns a castle, a good catch for a Jersey girl. Drugs are everywhere. Will may be prince, but cocaine is king. The action recalls another debut, Less Than Zero, but Bret Easton Ellis' novel was permeated by nihilism; it had a worldview. Parish just skips blithely from one binge to the next, no direction in mind. He flies in the fugitive financier for a banal meeting with Tom, then sends the boys home for Christmas, scaring up some drama around Tom's best friend, Casey, a major coke dealer, before whisking the whole gang back to Scotland for some poorly staged mayhem at Kelsey's big-bucks fashion show. No plot, no character development, so Parish's fluid narrative skills are wasted.

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May 1, 2014

This globe-trotting, cocaine- and alcohol-saturated debut novel about wealth, excess, debauchery, and the dream of living the good life features Tom Allison, the son of a single, working-class mother from New Jersey who attends college at St. Andrews University in Scotland after running afoul of the law back home. Like many young people his age, Tom is interested in becoming an investment banker, and here he receives an unsentimental education about both old and new wealth. This knowledge comes in the form of his new friend, Clare; the son of a rich but recently disgraced financier; and his school, St. Andrews, which turns out to be a playground for children of old money and privilege (Prince William even makes a few appearances). There are some weaknesses here, mostly in terms of plotting and character development, but there is also much to like, with a well-drawn protagonist and some fine moments at the end of the novel where the dark underbelly of wealth is exposed. VERDICT Ambitious but uneven; recommended for fans of coming-of-age novels.--Patrick Sullivan, Manchester Community Coll., CT

Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

June 1, 2014
A wandering plotline about endless pre-college partying characterizes Parish's spirited but erratic debut novel. A senior and onetime pot dealer at a New Jersey boarding school, Tom Alison has since been busted and put on probation, his acceptance to Columbia consequently rescinded. Tom is now trying to lay low to reshape his image. Still, he can't resist invitations to underage-friendly bars and the myriad East Coast parties hosted by his affluent friends, especially once he meets Kelsey, a clothing designer from the same Scottish college town he's heading to in the fall. Joining Tom is his directionless pal, Clare, whose fathera money manager on the lamhas made headlines for insider trading. Together, the friends resume their carousing across the pond, where they party with a young Prince William and are ultimately consumed by drugs, alcohol, and a longing for home. Parish's literary promise shines when Tom's perceptive narration spotlights the fragile line between one's teen and adult years, thus depicting a youth desperately seeking manhood. If only there were more such moments in the many crowded party scenes.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)