THE OBJECT LESSON

Newcomer Orlando's overlong, ultimately unrewarding look into the dark past of the 1981 graduating class of an exclusive Manhattan prep school. It's five years since graduation, and Michael Cadenhead, working for an N.Y.C. newspaper, is sifting through his peaceful if boring life when Douglas Taft, a former classmate, is stabbed in an apparent burglary attempt. Mike is summoned to the hospital—and thus reunited with the rich Thorndike School pack. Then another former classmate dies under mysterious circumstances, and Mike begins to investigate it for his paper. Interviews of Douglas, and Douglas's gorgeous supermodel sister Annabelle, will lead him into the sordid Thorndike past and the revelation of the Big Secret around which the novel is formed. Mike's investigation focuses on graduation weekend five years previous and on that weekend's Anthesteria—an annual bacchanalian jet-set party and the setting in which the mysterious event occurs. As Mike suspects from the outset, the mystery—like the fast set's school life—revolves around Annabelle and the various young men whom her beauty provokes into obsession. Orlando skillfully places us inside this already well-explored brat pack world of super-rich New York kids, but in doing so he makes Douglas, Annabelle, and their friends speak at a breakneck speed, often in partial phrases or with references to unspecified events in their shared past, and with very little action along the way. His duplication of ``real-life'' dialogue is Orlando's strong point; even so, it makes for a lot to fight through to find out the Big Secret. Interesting for Orlando's skill at duplicating realistic dialogue, but a long-winded, difficult read that is just too late for the brat pack bus.