November Criminals

Sam Munson is the author of The November Criminals and The War Against the Assholes. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, n+1, The Times Literary Supplement, The Wall Street Journal, The National, The Daily Beast, Commentary, Tablet, The New York Observer, The Utopian, and numerous other publications.

Addison Schacht, the conflicted hero of The November Criminals, is less interested in committing a crime than solving one. And though no one in the admissions office at the University of Chicago has asked Addison to discuss the murder of his high school classmate Kevin Broadus, he uses the application's essay assignment ('What is your best quality? What is your worst quality?') as a chance to get some things off his chest. The result is no tidy, eager-to-please essay but a book-length spiel - concerning, among other things, Virgil's Aeneid, Holocaust jokes, dope dealing, friends with benefits, classic cinema, adolescent ennui, Latin grammar and syntax, Jewish numerology, anti-Semitism, struggles with guilt, the hypocrisy of liberal politics, race relations in the United States, the philosophical downside of living in D.C. and, oh yeah, who killed Kevin Broadus. . . . The November Criminals is both a thoughtful coming-of-age story and an engaging teenage noir. Think of it as an existential murder mystery for the stoner pre- college set - Keanu Reeves's River's Edge, as written by Camus. . . . Munson is a writer with something to say; and if saying it slows the pace, well, given the brash voice of this audacious new writer, I wonder if he'd have it any other way.