We Were So Young

Foster Dade Explores the Cosmos by Nash Jenkins

If you ask me to confirm or deny whether or not I finished this book sitting at my desk on a Wednesday afternoon, I will be forced to plead the fifth. You see, I can’t say for sure whether anyone I work with has stumbled upon this little universe of mine, though it’s completely possible given the fact that it’s listed on my LinkedIn profile.

On the alleged Wednesday afternoon in question, I found myself halfway through a successful, self-imposed week of keeping-my-phone-in-my-bag-not-on-my-desk. I was so wildly productive on Monday, then Tuesday and then Wednesday morning, that I decided it would do no harm to read for 20 minutes after lunch. Well, it’s possible that 20 minutes quickly turned into an hour and a half, and I was—sorry, may or may not have been—still sitting at my desk in the office, when I started writing this post for you.

Funnily enough, this book—Foster Dade Explores the Cosmos—was recommended to me by two different people named Maddie Morris. The first, I went to college with. We ran into each other at a party in the early spring when the book was about to come out. Knowing that I had gone to boarding school, she recommended I read it. I can’t recall exactly, but she knew or knew of the author because they went to the same boarding school. I think.

The second Maddie Morris is my oldest friend in the world. She texted me and my sister, Kathryn, on a Thursday in July:

“You guys should read Foster Dade Explores the Cosmos”
“It’s gotten seriously in my head”
“Like I can picture high school so much”
“I just randomly started crying in the car thinking about the main character”
“Adolescence is so tough”
“Lol”
“Anyway”

If that wasn’t enough, which it was, the book in question was recommended to me again a month later by not one, not two, but three members of the Huffines family—a trusted book recommending cohort, also at least partly connected to me through my dear old high school. This overly long introduction to the review you’re hopefully here for is included because (1) I like to give credit where credit is due, and (2) it illustrates quite well the webs of connection and mutual understanding that exist between people with the unique experience of having attended boarding school (really any of one them) in the mid-Atlantic or Northeastern United States.

For me, it was those webs of connection, and the almost frighteningly accurate representation of them by Nash Jenkins that made Foster Dade Explores the Cosmos so compelling, so nostalgic, so heartbreaking and so satisfying. He does a startlingly good job rendering the contours that these boarding schools share. As such, it is certainly true that for anyone who attended one, these contours—the brick buildings, the lacrosse fields, the lingo the students, the teachers, the dorm heads, the administrators, the politics, scandals and rituals—all of it will be familiar to the point of potential discomfort. At least it was for me, and if you know me at all, you know all I ask for from a good book is pleasant discomfort.

Through his narrator, Nash Jenkins postures a lot about what makes boarding school so unique. The way that there are legends to be found in every corner and crevice. All you have to do is find a lose ceiling tile and stick your head up through it, or push open the mysterious door that security neglects to lock on the one night you decide to try the handle. It’s probably just a broom closet, but at least you can hook up in there on cold rainy nights. What makes it all shimmer?

According to our narrator, “There is an untraceable magic to the boarding school ethos, to those hermetic little kingdoms illuminated by the sparkling mythological tendencies of adolescence.”

Though he says that the magic is untraceable, he also names the source—the mythological tendencies of adolescence, or in simpler terms (Jenkins’s language does frequently veer quite far from the simple), a teenager’s unique capacity for turning anything at all into a really. big. deal. I’ve written about this before, but the beauty of being a teenager lies in the simultaneous permanence and impermanence of every single little thing that happens. For each event and feeling, it is impossible to know if it will end up being more one or the other until years have passed, and so it is the solemn duty of a teenager to feel and behave as though each one will end up weighing heavy on the permanent side of the scale.

The boarding school environment simply nurtures those tendencies a little extra. A normal teenager goes home to parents who will tell them they’re blowing things out of proportion. A boarding school teenager goes back to a dorm room with their six closest friends who will, like good friends, light the fire under the fully inflated metaphorical hot air balloon of emotion. That was my overly long way of saying that the teenage experience portrayed in Foster Dade will be recognizable to anyone who was a teenager, including the day school ones. For them, it just may feel like a dramatization of the adolescent experience. The others—the ones who lived it—will know its no dramatization at all.

As hinted at by the title, this is the story of Foster Dade, as told many years later by a younger student who did not overlap with him, but who knew his story, though legend is probably the better word. Foster Date arrived at Kennedy as a new sophomore in the fall of 2008. Already somewhat troubled upon arrival, he struggles to find his place. His feelings of isolation and acute anxiety about his social standing lead to panic attacks. His psychiatrist Dr. Apple (a terrifying figure) diagnoses him with depression, anxiety and ADHD.

Annabeth Whitaker and Jack Albright—two of the most shimmering members of the popular group in his class—alternate between paying attention to Foster and ignoring him completely. With Annabeth, this dynamic results in an agonizing but sustaining crush. With Jack it results in increased insecurity and desolation. That is until Jack discovers Foster’s Adderall prescription. The bulk of the novel covers the events that transpire between that discovery and Foster Dade’s expulsion, which is not a spoiler because it’s mentioned in the Preface.

I am wary of spoilers here, even more than extra. In fact, I hesitated to even summarize at all because I think the way that Jenkins reveals his salient plot points is so perfect. Best for you to read it as written with no prior interference from me. I only figured that I needed to give you something more concrete than my own absorbed reflections on boarding school, so there you have it. Nothing more out of me on the plot!

What I will tell you more about, however, is our peripheral narrator. That younger student who heard the legend of Foster Dade—or at least some version of it—sitting around in an upperclassman’s dorm room after lights out. That is how the stories get passed down. Our narrator tells us that Foster Dade got kicked out seven months prior to his own arrival as a new sophomore. To do the math, this places our narrator two classes below the graduating class that would have been Foster’s. Close enough for the story to still be on the tip of everyone’s tongue.

Our narrator doesn’t tell the tale from a teenage perspective though. He’s not still at school. He’s retelling it all ten years later using what he knew in high school only as a skeleton. The rest is fleshed out by years of research, first meticulous and then hectic and all consuming. There is material from conversations he had with old classmates (at least the ones who didn’t ignore his emails or tell him to fuck off). There are public records, legal documents, student files and transcripts of Facebook Messenger chats. Since Foster was a writer himself, there are essays and years worth of Blogspot posts—Foster’s own digital journal—still largely accessible through the depths of the internet even after they were permanently deleted.

This structural choice by Jenkins, to include this “primary source” material serves a very important purpose. Well two very important purposes. First, this is a long and meticulously detailed book. Not to mention the fact that you know how it ends from the third or fourth page. Moments that might have become slow or uninteresting were saved by narrative interjections à la, “This was all before Foster wrote the essay that would light everything on fire” (me paraphrasing). Reminders that you may know how it end, but you don’t know why, and you’re going to want to stick around to find out.

The other dynamic created by the “primary source” material is that it shows just how faithful to truth our narrator is trying to be. He’s armed with accounts and artifacts that will allow him to piece together the tale as honestly as possible. Don’t you believe him? Look how hard he’s tried! He even notes that honesty is not the same thing as accuracy! He himself knows that his project is ethically questionable from a journalistic perspective, but he’s well and truly doing the best he can.

It is his self-censoring and frequent qualifications that make it almost possible to believe that in the moments when he’s not reminding us of the potential for narrative distortion, he must be telling the truth, must really know what he’s talking about. Which, of course, he frequently must not. Just in case we’ve forgotten how all good novels work, we are reminded that something doesn’t need to be factual to be true.

So, Jenkins artfully portrays the whole cast of boarding school characters and their interactions with each other. To oversimplify to the highest degree, there are the lacrosse boys, the mean girls, the nicer mean girls, the weird day students, the fat but well-liked freshman boys, the underclassman girls that are sluts before they’ve even done anything, the eccentric English teachers, the dorm parents with three kids in their apartments on the second floor. Jenkins nails them all. I knew them all.

Flying under the radar though, is perhaps the most faithfully represented member of the boarding school set. He’s not in the story, he’s telling it—our narrator, of course, is a boarding school kid himself. He shares very little about his time at Kennedy, what happened to him there or where he fit in, but even without the context, he’s recognizable. He’s the boarding school graduate, who try as he might, cannot stop thinking about boarding school, who recognizes that fixating on high school is a bit silly but also knows that there’s something really true, and important, and formative there. Something that applies to the larger world in a way that’s not silly at all.

Most people who went to boarding school have a little bit of this character in them, Nash Jenkins and myself included. I’m not afraid to say that even before reading this novel, I thought about my high school years often, and with increasing psychologizing retrospection. Reading Foster Dade has me retrospecting even a little extra, but in all the moments of familiarity, of laughter, and sadness, and all the rest, the refrain that kept repeating itself in my mind was not new: They are so young. We were so young.

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