PREP--SCHOOL NOVELIST.(Nick McDonell)

Nick McDonell is a Harvard-bound eighteen-year-old with sandy-blond hair, blue eyes, a heavy brow, and a satirical first novel. It is called "Twelve," and its subject is underage depravity in the 10021 Zip Code. Thirty thousand copies of the novel will be printed by Grove/Atlantic and released this summer, with a blurb by Hunter S. Thompson. (It has also been sold to publishers in Europe, Australia, and Japan.) A member of his family's thirteenth consecutive all-male generation and the president of the student body at Riverdale, Nick does what is expected of him: backflips, Latin homework, his best to impress girls, the 110-metre hurdles ("I'm the fastest white kid in the city"), the triple jump, no illegal substances, his roommate questionnaire for Harvard ("Hours: 6 A.M. to 4 A.M."), and fearsome stunts involving a Razor scooter and the steps of the Metropolitan Museum. He also sometimes does not do what is expected of him, or what has lately been requested of him: take off his shirt for Details, although whether he has entertained the idea is a matter of some debate between him and his friends Mookie and Margo.

NICK: I was not considering it.

MARGO: Yes, you were.

NICK: No, I wasn't. That would destroy my credibility forever.

MARGO: No, it wouldn't. It would make you a sex symbol.

MOOKIE: And maybe that's the price you have to pay.

As a new tenth grader at Riverdale, Nick was known as the kid who raised his hand in history class to say things like "Wasn't William II's belligerent militarism indicative of the general sense of anger among the Prussian people?" "Indicative," Mookie says, is Nick's favorite word, but Nick (who is not a thesaurus user) likes to sample from all linguistic registers. This year, in assembly, he welcomed Riverdale's freshman class with a big "Boo yah"--a sort of rowdier version of "Right on."