Theories of Teenage Comparative Advantage

In high school, though, everyone suddenly seemed to realize that Sam Hellerman probably wasn’t going to grow any taller, and had kind of weird hair and a funny walk, and really didn’t have anything to offer that couldn’t be acquired much more cheaply and efficiently from someone else.  The market, which had once rewarded him slightly for being the same height as the average eighth grader, had now determined that his services were needed elsewhere, and so he ended up at the bottom of the totem pole and at my house every now and then palming Vicodins and swallowing them with some bourbon from Carol’s entertaining area.

That is from the witty King Dork, one of the hippest novels of the year.

Elsewhere in the new fiction department, I stayed up late to finish the much-heralded The Keep, by Jennifer Egan.  Imagine a shorter and more coherent version of John Fowles’s The Magus, but with periodic satirical pokes at eighteenth century gothic novels.  Here is a concordance of reviews, courtesy of Bookslut.

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