The Essence of Nathan Biddle

I am conflicted about how to rate this one. I struggled with this book, and valiantly I might add. I had even considered a DNF but there were pros and cons to pushing forward and I’m honestly glad I did, but it was an arduous and challenging read. I found it cleverly amusing and wittily insightful for the most part but I also felt oddly annoyed and aggravated and it took considerable effort to push through the various characters’ cerebral postulating as well as the stratospheric level of vocabulary used. I typically read a book a day, yet this one took me three. The main character of Kit had an odd childhood and bizarre family who obviously had a surfeit of intelligence but didn’t know what to do with it. Kit was floundering and exasperating. He was also unfocused, lazy, obsessive, uncommitted, aimless, and besotted with a girl who clearly and repeatedly told him she wasn’t interested. His teenaged angst and general malaise had me appreciating the fact I no longer have to work with adolescents. Retirement is sweeeeet! The premise and storylines were oddly compelling while cast with a quirky collection of characters who, other than the lovely Sarah, were disturbingly repellent and truly ghastly creatures. I reveled in the humor of his descriptions and observations of others, but I was often felt bogged down in the prose. The author either has a treasure trove of unusual words circling his cranium or wrote with a thesaurus in his lap. I just know I am thankful I read on a Kindle with a built-in dictionary. I love words and while being far from mentally deficient I felt as such as I wore the battery down on my beloved device while frequently required to halt my perusal to look up the meanings of words like pluperfect, opacity, and lagniappe. Uncommon words I will most likely have to look up again if I ever run across them a second time. But my main source of discontent was the ending, there wasn’t one. I am still stamping my little foot in pique; I need a semblance of closure and don’t have it. However, when I looked back at my highlighted and favorite passages, which were significantly pared down in this review, I was awed by the author’s craft and am determined to respect his process.

The Essence Of Nathan Biddle is the first novel by American author J. William Lewis. Some six years after his cousin Nathan was murdered by his Uncle Nat under instructions from God, Kit Biddle is in a mess. His high-school academic performance has dropped to the extent that his teachers, his track coach and his mom are urging him to do better, to work harder, to get with the program. Within a matter of days, his adored girlfriend, Anna has dropped him; he learns that a close friend’s mother is having an affair; he stumbles on a Peeping Tom; he is mistaken for his cousin; a friend’s sister declares her years-long crush on him; and he almost accidentally saves a black man’s life, but later is given to doubt it was worth saving. But all he really wants to do is run, alone, and ponder the real meaning of life. And then he is seriously injured when he rolls a stolen truck, and is forced to spend a long time recuperating. As well as morphine-fuelled dreams, there are interactions with family, friends, and teachers, and a disturbing letter from his mentally-ill uncle. Weekly sessions with a psychiatrist gradually eke out the details of the life events that led up to Kit’s current travails and, eventually, the source of his identity crisis. In 1950’s Alabama, a traumatic event like Nathan’s murder didn’t automatically attract counselling: Martha Biddle and her son move away from their small town to avoid the notoriety, and don’t speak of what happened. Kit grows into a puzzled, wary and fretful teen, a poet and a runner. Patience is required for the first half of the novel as Kit’s convoluted thought processes can feel just a bit tedious. There is humour, though, in the conversations with his young Uncle Newt, with his friends, in Newt’s limericks, and in some of what Kit relates during his psych sessions. The inverse proportionality axioms that Kit and his friend Lichtman devise are particularly entertaining, even if some are politically incorrect in today’s world: “The Biddle-Lichtman theory of quantum yearning holds that the desirability of a thing is inversely proportional to its availability” and “a person’s tolerance for noise is inversely proportional to his intelligence quotient.” Also “The basic physical-attraction axiom (we called it the “special theory of physical attraction”) is that the attractiveness of a girl is inversely proportional to your attractiveness to her. And the second law (the “general theory”) is equally true and immutable: The number of girls you find attractive is inversely proportional to the number who find you attractive.” Lewis easily evokes the era and setting, as well as the late 1950’s Southern mindset, and his characters feel authentic. While there will be readers who are dissatisfied with the unresolved identity issue at the conclusion, this is an impressive literary debut that will appeal especially, but not exclusively, to readers of a certain vintage. This unbiased review is from an uncorrected proof copy provided by NetGalley and Greenleaf Book Group.

I received a free electronic ARC on May 10, 2021, of this excellent novel from Netgalley, J. William Lewis, and Greenleaf Book Group. Thank you all for sharing your hard work with me. I have read The Essence of Nathan Biddle of my own volition, and this review reflects my honest opinion of this work. Lewis brings us through this tale with a sense of sorrow and understanding for the lost Kit rather than pity, or condemnation. I am very pleased to recommend this novel to friends and family. J. William Lewis brings to us the ultimate coming-of-age tale of the 21st century. Kit, a prep-school senior, is painted large, with pressures and angst the children of the 20th century would have rarely even thought of, much less encountered. His only father-figure, his Uncle Nat, is a preacher who committed the ultimate crime, the mercy killing of his damaged offspring. Facing the adult decisions that have necessarily falling his way, Kit is overwhelmed and not focusing on what is possible rather than yearning for the known impossible.