A Philosophy of Ruin

In Mancusi’s solid debut, young philosophy professor Oscar Boatwright has spent his entire life thinking about the meaning of life and dedicates his profession to teaching others how to grapple with questions outside of their comfort zone. Yet when his mother dies unexpectedly and his father tells him about the self-help guru to whom she owed thousands of dollars, Oscar finds that maybe even philosophy can’t give him the answers he craves. The day after a drunken one-night stand he barely remembers, he sees the woman, Dawn, sitting in his classroom and realizes she’s a student in his class. Oscar and Dawn begin an affair, complicated less by their age difference than by a business proposal that Dawn offers, for Oscar to become a drug dealer. The rest of the novel follows Oscar as he travels across the country to the Mexican border on Dawn’s errand, running into more dangerous problems than either of them had foreseen. While Dawn is flat enough of a character to drag down the scenes she’s in, Oscar’s struggles with his family’s pain and his own desperation are tenderly written, and his frenetic spiral into illicit affairs is both moving and humorous. Mancusi’s novel successfully depicts the long, mutating shadow of grief and depression. (June)