A Philosophy of Ruin

April 8, 2019
In Mancusi’s solid debut, young philosophy professor Oscar Boatwright has spent his entire life thinking about the meaning of life and dedicates his profession to teaching others how to grapple with questions outside of their comfort zone. Yet when his mother dies unexpectedly and his father tells him about the self-help guru to whom she owed thousands of dollars, Oscar finds that maybe even philosophy can’t give him the answers he craves. The day after a drunken one-night stand he barely remembers, he sees the woman, Dawn, sitting in his classroom and realizes she’s a student in his class. Oscar and Dawn begin an affair, complicated less by their age difference than by a business proposal that Dawn offers, for Oscar to become a drug dealer. The rest of the novel follows Oscar as he travels across the country to the Mexican border on Dawn’s errand, running into more dangerous problems than either of them had foreseen. While Dawn is flat enough of a character to drag down the scenes she’s in, Oscar’s struggles with his family’s pain and his own desperation are tenderly written, and his frenetic spiral into illicit affairs is both moving and humorous. Mancusi’s novel successfully depicts the long, mutating shadow of grief and depression.

April 15, 2019
Mancusi's debut novel is a gripping thriller featuring an unlikely adventurer, 29-year-old adjunct professor of philosophy Oscar Boatwright. Oscar is shocked by the news that his mother, Delia, has unexpectedly died on the plane while returning from a trip to Hawaii with Oscar's father, Lee. Oscar's grief is compounded by rage when his devastated father informs him that their life savings are gone, having been spent on the services of lifestyle guru Paul St. Germaine, whom Delia discovered via a late-night infomercial. Stunned, Oscar spends an alcohol-soaked night with a young woman, Dawn, who, he is horrified to learn the next day, is one of his students. Determined to help his family out of their money troubles, Oscar fatalistically accepts an offer from Dawn, a nascent campus drug lord, to participate in a drug run up the California coast. Mancusi's writing is sophisticated, graceful, and deeply empathetic. Oscar's descent into grief and his dark, nihilistic impulses are vividly described, while the story rockets toward a conclusion that is both inevitable and crushing.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)

Starred review from April 15, 2019
California philosophy professor Oscar Boatwright has his notions of free will severely tested when he's seduced by a self-possessed student named Dawn who involves him in a dangerous drug-dealing scheme. It's not an auspicious time for Oscar. His mother died during a flight from Hawaii, where she was paying secret visits to a self-help guru who took all of her family savings, and left her husband, Oscar's father, high and dry. After Oscar drunkenly sleeps with Dawn, not knowing she's his student until he spots her in class the next Monday, he's worried the hookup will cost him his job. But after Dawn blackmails him into retrieving a backpack of drugs from Mexico, the professor (who is 29 but seems older) is most worried about staying alive. His fears are justified when he's captured by Mexican drug smugglers whose leader calmly tells him he has had women and children killed and Oscar is next. What would Schopenhauer say? Oscar, who believes the script for his life has already been written and he is merely acting it out, struggles "to think of some evidence...that the essence of existence was not suffering." Good luck with that: With the exception of his unlikely romance with Dawn, life is one wild misadventure after another for Oscar. That includes his hopeless pursuit of the shady self-help character, whose videos, he discovers, are not entirely without worth. For all its edgy, downbeat humor, the novel inspires a deep emotional investment in Oscar. The big existential questions that get asked are brilliantly framed by his antics. The payoff is, dare we say it, profound. Brooklyn writer Mancusi's revelatory novel is a drug tale with a difference--even the chase scenes are philosophical.

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