LATER DAYS
by Chip Jacobs
In Jacobs’ novel, two boys form a turbulent friendship at an elite prep school in late-1970s Southern California.
Luke Burnett has once again found himself in the crosshairs of school bully Lance Drexx when he’s unexpectedly rescued by Denny Drummond, a computer prodigy who befriends famed physicist Richard Feynman. As the two start high school at Stone Canyon Prep, an intense institution of learning for the scions of Southern California’s power players, they bond over their tumultuous home lives. Denny helps Luke succeed in his math and science classes, while Luke tutors him in the humanities. Over the years, they witness a science experiment gone awry that leads to two students being expelled, are flummoxed by the addition of female students to their previously all-male student body, and narrowly avoid trouble when a performance-enhancing scheme gone wrong sends members of the basketball team to the hospital. One night after graduation, Denny cracks under the stress from his family situation and commits an act that will reverberate through his adult life. Years later, he reaches out to Luke for one last favor. After all this time, what holds their friendship together? Jacobs’ novel excels at portraying the rarefied world of an elite prep school and depicting the wild, sometimes slightly implausible, hijinks that the students get up to. The language is frequently a stumbling block, however; the dense prose has a distancing effect, blunting the adolescent sense of immediacy that the author endeavors to capture. (“A sea of eyeballs from summer-sunned faces, mine included, rotated upward toward the rebuilt ceiling bankrolled by the female surge in enrollment.”) Denny is a difficult character, a computer science prodigy who torches his own future multiple times. He drops in and out of his friends’ lives, making them the targets of his mood swings, but Luke’s empathy for him, built on the knowledge of his secrets, will help to secure readers’ compassion.
A thoughtful exploration of boyhood, achievement, and friendship that’s sometimes weighed down by its seriousness.