As a insanely successful black man from the slums, Alexander Marcus is the ideal archetype for a double-blind experiment in improving the lives of underprivileged children. At preschools around the country, a thousand children accept a scholarship and receive his values, mantras, and habits of thought. It's soon clear that that the program was a success: their work ethics, inventiveness, and confidence far outweighs their peers', and they are all on track to operating at their highest potential. But Marcus's best friends secretly murdered him for a violent perversion. Did the now-adolescents inherit the perversion too?

Flawed but fascinating, this book delves into my favorite themes of power, intelligence, race, poverty, education, sex, and more. It seems to say, "people are a product of their circumstances", and, "change the circumstance, and you can save lives". The big theme, though, is "poor kids are going to be squashed -- even when things look promising, even when there is only fear plus circumstantial evidence to squash them, they are going to be squashed -- and if it won't happen by criminal violence for petty reasons, big institutions like Congress will take over." It's a big topic deftly handled and set up in tiny details throughout the novel (like the only canonical sociopath not being originally invited to the preschool), and there's also substantial support for thinking that these kids -- like the powerful people they're shaping up to be -- might in fact destroy when it's in their best interests. This book is exemplary in its exploration of deep ideas through context, which is near-priceless for me.

The book, though, is unfortunately imperfect, requiring suspension of disbelief and forgiveness of lousy handling of certain situations. Most strikingly given all the nuance with which Barnes handles the poor characters, he writes only painful stereotypes when it comes to other social minorities. As one example among many, my initial appreciation of him incorporating a gay powergym turned to offense when it became clear he had introduced that scene simply as a plot device to punish a meth gang with a brutal fight ending in rape(!). That, and similar scenes that try to humanize prostitutes but draw only on stereotypes, work badly for me on a few levels.

So in the end, while I'd like to be proclaiming this book from the hilltops because it was a pageturner while also having excellently handled depth, I'm much more ambivalent than I would have preferred to be. Go in knowing that you're trading anything resembling general social justice/privilege for an entertaining tale that spends its substantial nuance on questions of race and money, and it might work even better for you than for me. ( )

http://www.sfreader.com/read_review.asp?ID=348 ( )

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