Noughties
-
- £1.99
-
- £1.99
Publisher Description
Eliot Lamb has dreaded this moment for the past three years of his life: the final night of university. Gathered with his mates in the King's Arms, he begins the ultimate descent - Pub, Bar, Club. Staring into the foam of his first pint, he knows that before the night reaches its climactic conclusion on the sweaty dance-floor of Filth, he must solve the dilemma of his knotty love-life, risk his closest friendship, face up to a tragic secret, and deal with the fact that he hasn't a clue what to do with the rest of his life. And with the entire literary canon running wild in his imagination and a series of ominous text messages lighting up his mobile phone, things aren't going to be easy.
Noughties is an inventive and lyrical comic novel about the highs and lows of modern university life. Eliot may know a lot about Renaissance poetry, the post-modern novel, French literary theory, and how to get hammered at a highly competitive rate, but he is fast realising that adulthood beckons, and it's going to be asking a lot more of him than that.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In British author Masters's precocious debut novel, English lit student Eliot Lamb is on the verge of graduating from Oxford. During a night of raucous drinking a last hurrah for Eliot and his friends, "the Noughties" our narrator is caught between his long-term girlfriend Lucy and his brilliant mate Ella. Nostalgic for his first love, Eliot stifles his attraction to Ella because of their own fraught history and the jealousy of his best friend Jack. As the group stumbles from pub to bar to club, and Eliot reflects on his three years of study, tension builds among the sex-obsessed friends as secrets from the near-past emerge. The melodramatic plot includes love triangles, abortion, attempted suicide, and seedy sex, with plenty of text-message jargon to convey the aimlessness of 21st-century youth. But anti-hero Eliot, whose literary background becomes an excuse for hyper-stylized linguistic hijinks and erudite allusions, is an unpleasant host to the party and lacks the energy of, say, The Rachel Papers' Charles Highway. One too many dream sequences and rather too much ponderous talk about the state of contemporary identity allow the novel to founder in its pretentions, despite moments of wit and genuine pathos about university days.