Certainly an interesting read that looks at the slow deterioration of a rich family from NY. The shifting perspectives and multiple POVs served well to flesh out the story, however something to do with the writing style didn't mesh well with me as a reader. Perhaps, others will enjoy it more than I did. I also expected the story to focus a little bit more on the relationship between Darius and Barry (based on description). I also do not think the author dealt particularly well with a sexual assault scene near the beginning of the novel.

There was senseless use of the f slur in the third chapter, and I just really cannot vibe with that. The premise seems interesting enough, but the language was too much for me.

Mental illness, sexual misconduct, and suburban anomie are the themes of David McConnell’s latest novel, which follows the lives of a group of intergenerational characters through the 1980s and 90s. Each character is connected, directly or indirectly, to incidents that occurred at an elite New Jersey middle school for boys in the early 1980s.

McConnell has created quite a sweeping saga, with many of the players getting a tight third person point-of-view hand-off, often within a single scene. But the nexus of the story is Darius Van Nest, who is introduced at twelve years old, the adopted son of a wealthy and shockingly dysfunctional couple, Oliver and Sohaila. Both parents are consumed by their inner worlds and ambivalently disposed to most everyone surrounding them, including Darius. For Oliver, there are hints of a paranoid schizoaffective personality as he rants about anti-semitic conspiracy theories and hoards strange objects like political leaflets and the titular collection of beads. Sohaila, a Persian emigré, embraces the vacuous life of a pampered housewife, cheerfully detached from any problems near to home and with vaguely materialistic ambitions. The author’s characterization is beyond quirky and sets the tone that this is not going to be a happy story.

Darius himself is odd, as one would expect him to be. He is at turns bedeviled by a sense of self-importance and drawn to morbid things, including the suicide of a minor artist who previously owned his parents’ home. Despite his strange and grandiose personality, he manages to develop an intense friendship with a classmate, Barry, who is a much more conventional middle school boy, at least outwardly.

Yet Barry is struggling to find his place in the world as well, with parents who are checked-out like the Van Nests, for different reasons. They’re middle class folks aspiring to the stature of their wealthy neighbors, and not doing the deftest job at it. Barry’s mother Bea dyes his hair blond, presumably to acquire a more WASPy look, though the effect is embarrassingly déclassé. Barry’s father is an alcoholic. While Darius is confused by his developing gayness, Barry is eager to explore his burgeoning heterosexuality. When a pretty, young school teacher Jane Brzostovsky offers a flirtation, Barry is easy pickings. He enters a secret, sexual relationship with Jane that narrowly averts a scandal.

Jane is a central point-of-view character, which affords her some dimension, though it may be a tough portrayal for some readers. Beneath her caustic appraisal of the parents and students of Lawrence Academy, including Darius, for whom she reserves her harshest treatment, one can glimpse her own preoccupation with her failings. She eschewed her Jewish, socialist middle class New York family to gain a sense of independence and ended up in the service of well-off families who are oblivious to their privilege. Amid a cast of self-interested characters who are almost universally hard to like, it’s possible to accept Jane as just another flawed person, struggling against the torrential tide of first-world angst and the search for purpose, though some of her castmates in the drama are children. McConnell is unwaveringly provocative in his approach to each of his subjects, which I found stimulating and often begrudgingly truthful. But I anticipate that the depiction of Jane and Barry’s relationship will face criticism from many readers in that she’s never held accountable for sexually exploiting a twelve-year-old.

I always feel that an author has accomplished something noteworthy when their characters make you feel something, even when it’s unpleasant and sets off arguments in one’s head, which is absolutely the case with The Beads. For the first half of the book, the characters are cruel and unable to overcome their personal troubles, yet their unredeemable nature somehow engrosses the reader and pushes the story forward. It’s a credit to McConnell’s craft. He brings you inside each character, and you likely will not like what you see, but you can’t look away from it.

The second half of the novel skips ahead ten to fifteen years with Darius living an unfettered and directionless life, supported by his family’s money. As he navigates the world as a young gay man, with thwarted attempts to find emotional connection, he’s shed in a slightly more sympathetic light, and new, less hostile characters such as a generous German love interest, Rolf, enter the picture. Barry returns after a decade of bouncing around the West Coast, and Oliver has abdicated his home to Sohaila and her churlish Romanian boyfriend Stanley. He’s now living as a recluse in a loft apartment in downtown NYC while his mental health rapidly deteriorates. The drama turns to who might benefit financially from his downfall, if indeed his rumored hidden fortune exists, though mainly the story remains a quiet study of people wrestling with themselves amid the pressure of society to if not achieve the social and financial success that’s expected of their position, to at least be “normal.”

With shades of Peter Cameron’s domestic dramas and Joan Didion’s unsentimental stories about the inner battles of affluent people, The Beads is an excellent read for literary fiction fans and a challenging but gripping story overall.

Reviewed for Out in Print

I think the prose is much stronger than the storytelling - McConnell’s writing is always engaging and he paints such thorny characters navigating such troublesome situations so well. Ultimately though this didn’t resonate with me as much as I wanted it to - still a strong and wryly funny novel that makes me want to check out his other work.

Thank you to the publisher for the ARC!

The story follows a young man, Darius Van Nest, and the variety of people surrounding him at various points in his life. He comes from a wealthy but decaying family and floats through time with a vivid personality and gripping internality, but no real focus.

This was set to be my favourite book I've read so far this year. The prose is exquisite. There were lines that were so beautifully wrought and well-observed they stopped me in my tracks. I loved the characters, Darius in particular. I found him riveting and sympathetic and became invested in his well-being. Every character in the book was sketched with complexity and believability, over-flowing with human quirks. I was never bored, I never found the narrative slow.

I particularly loved how with pov changes elements of the story would be told in the background. We'd learn something about Darius from a completely different character twice removed from him. The writer gives his readers a lot of benefit if the doubt for paying attention and being able to follow along, which I appreciated. It was, for the most part, a wonderful experience and I even bought another of the writer's books, looking forward to reading it once I was done with The Beads.

As the story progressed, however, I realised that one element wasn't going to dealt with in a way I could accept, though. Early in the story we're introduced to a school teacher, Jane, in her 30s who rapes one of her twelve-year-old students. It's irrelevant that the boy, Barry, went along with it. He was 12. She was a full grown adult. It was rape. And then she coerces him into leaving school and his family, in order to protect herself from discovery. As I continued reading, and followed both characters through the years, I expected... something. I didn't need anything dramatic or formulaic, but the fact that there were virtually no consequences at all, left me feeling disappointed and uncomfortable. Sure, it's realistic, but this is fiction and Barry claiming "It didn't fuck me up" twice made it seem like the narrative voice claiming that what had happened to him was inconsequential. I'm giving David McConnell the benefit of the doubt and assuming we're meant to gather threads and come to our own conclusions: Barry had been harmed in ways he didn't fully realise or couldn't admit to himself. The point was the fact that character who eventually did find out what Jane had done barely reacted. No one did anything. But I feel like I'm grasping at straws. Worst of all, despite several chapters narrated from within Jane's pov, we're never given a clue as to what is missing in her that would lead her to commit such a horrible violation. The lack of condemnation of her overshadowed my experience of the book. I'm sure things like this do happen in real life, I'm sure some people don't suffer life-long consequences from being molested as a child, but we don't need fiction about those kinds of stories. Or I personally don't.

I would have had a lot more to say if I hadn't been so completely let down by that element of the novel. It was wonderful, otherwise. I just think that story element was handled terribly.

An Unravelling..
The unravelling of a wealthy New York family is central to this keenly observed tale set against a Manhattan backdrop of the 1990’s. Carefully considered and tautly written, characters are rounded, credible even in often appalling ways and polished and the plot wholly character driven.

The beginning of the story, or the younger years of Darius and Barry's lives was intriguing; however, it did seem to become disjointed and boring the further it progressed. And based on the description, I expected more of the story between Darius and Barry, then I felt was included. I think the cover is clever though and is actually mentioned in the story.

Many thanks to NetGalley and ITNA for providing me with an eARC in exchange for an honest review.

The Beads tells the story of Darius Van Nest, his wealthy and decadent family, and several related characters over several decades. Set in the 1990s, the novel explores the motivations, perspectives, follies, and foibles of a diverse cast through an episodic chapter structure. The novel does not shy away from darker themes or topics and characters are often morally dubious. This is a world in which bad things happen to people and people do bad things to one another. And yet, David McConnell humanises characters, even dark ones, in a way to show that they, too, have motivations, hopes, fears, and internal lives. We may not always like them but there is enough written about the characters to understand them.

McConnell is a gifted writer, to be sure, and he demonstrates great rhetorical flourish. Sometimes, this can demand sustained attention but readers are rewarded for this effort. He brings the wide cast of characters alive through dialogue and internal monologues and expertly creates very real settings (New Jersey, New York, Mexico, Paris). Even though I did enjoy the writing, it can be demanding and I struggle to remember any particularly memorable or pithy turns of phrase.

This is not a story about good things happening to good people who do good things. I can't really say that this is the kind of novel which is life-affirming or inspirational. If you're looking for a character study of decadence and decline (written with great care), this is the book for you.

Maybe I have an unpopular opinion here, but I've struggled with this book.
I didn't care for any of the cast of characters, including the protagonist, or their drama.
I'll admit I was curious about the murder, but small scenes and dialogues were going on that just pulled me out of the story frequently.
Probably because I wasn't truly enjoying the narrative or the characters, I also felt this book to be way too long.
I now realise I'm not the right audience for this book, and it's okay.
I'm sure other readers will enjoy it much more than I did.

I requested and received an eARC of The Beads by David McConnell via NetGalley. To be honest, I wasn’t quite sure what to expect of this book. The blurb seemed interesting, so I was certainly excited to give McConnell’s story a whirl. The novel follows Darius Van Nest, an oddball youngster from a wealthy family consisting of a neurotic, conspiracy-theorist father and an aloof but beautiful immigrant mother. His quirks set him apart from his peers, but Darius forges a friendship with Barry, who seems to evoke the very essence of normalcy (despite the truth of his hair color!) Moving forward through time and financial circumstance, we join Darius and Barry years later as the eccentricities of their upbringing temper their adult lives.

McConnell’s writing style made this a truly interesting experience. He’s very careful in the way he crafts his characters and the world they inhabit and this effort pays off. Some passages often have a lyrical or meditative quality as the narrative lingers in the minutia of the characters' lives, small observations and details unfolding into greater drama. His morally gray cast is absolutely captivating. They’re not likable by any means, but impossible not to be fascinated by. The story itself weaves together this cast in a very intentional and surprising way that displays a great level of consideration.

While I enjoyed this reading experience, and perhaps this may make me sound like a bit of a moralist, I think there certainly could have been stricter narrative judgment. The book handles several dark themes with a glibness that feels at home in the text. It exposes trauma but doesn’t poke at it, and it left me feeling rather weary. The story seems to have a lot to say about assumptions, the way we project our own shortcomings and blind spots onto others, and hypocrisy. I found myself returning again and again to the simplest of questions: why? I really look forward to seeing what others make of McConnell’s work.

meh. this was mostly just really irritating. i didn’t gel with the main character or his motivations at all. also, the cover is a little off-putting as well? i don’t know how to explain it, but eugh.

The Beads has so much beautiful writing and a sprawling cast of fascinating characters set against the world of financial privilege in 1990's New York City. Fans of McConnell's other books will recognize the poetry and precision of his prose (even when he writes nonfiction). The Beads is a layered and languorous novel with strong dialogue and a superb ending.

Content warning for CSA, rape, emotional abuse.
The Beads begins with Darius and the Van Nest family, but extends to a wide cast of characters whose lives intersect throughout the decades and you get to see their relationships change and evolve. I enjoyed the shifting perspectives and new information that came to light as situations unfold from the perspective of multiple characters. The book tackles many difficult topics and examines the darkness up close. These aren't likable characters and their flaws are all laid bare. The writing style wasn't for me, but I can see some liking it. There are also long dialogues from the characters, that show how they see the world and the prejudices that inform their views, which contributed to the character-building, but I found them to drag on far too long. There is a definite conclusion for the Van Nests, but I also wish we saw something concrete with other characters and I wasn't satisfied with the ending.

A very interesting and good read! It shows morally grey characters and the scenes are carefully recorded one after another.

The Beads by David McConnell is a captivating exploration of a wealthy New York family's slow decline. As their fortune dwindles, the patriarch is consumed by neuroses, the mother indulges in idle pleasures, and their son, Darius, becomes obsessed with his best friend, Barry. The story spans decades, revealing their complex relationships and the shocking crime committed by their shared teacher.

McConnell's writing is exquisite, with brilliant, original details that bring late nineties' Manhattan to life. The novel delves into the eccentric sexual arrangements and the emotional debts of its characters, offering a poignant and humorous look at the fragility of old money. The Beads is a triumph, showcasing McConnell's ability to craft a compelling, multi-generational saga.