Even after 18 books--including the memoir Open Heart--and several awards, Jay Neugeboren remains relatively unknown. Hopefully, The Other Side of the World, a novel about two young men with difficult fathers and a girlfriend in common, will bring him to a wider audience. Narrator Charlie Eisner is confused and frustrated when his friend Nick Falzetti marries Trish and then leaves her to make his fortune in Singapore. Nick--Tom Sawyer to Charlie's Huck Finn--convinces Charlie to join him, and sets him up in a job brokering palm oil from plantations carved from the clear-cut rain forests of Borneo. Charlie's life is good until he travels to Borneo for himself and sees the destruction Nick's company brings to the world's densest collection of endangered flora and fauna. When Nick dies from a precipitous fall from his balcony after a night of drunken revelry, Charlie goes home to express condolences to Nick's parents and to Trish.
Neugeboren's tale is just getting started, however. Charlie's father, Max, a retired literature professor, has long dominated his son with his sarcasm, jokes, literary allusions and countless women--among them Seana O'Sullivan, a former student who now writes edgy, sexy novels. When she impulsively insists on traveling with Charlie to see Nick's family in Maine, she stimulates him into a self-awakening trip. Neugeboren turns this stereotypical story of an unmoored young man into a successful novel of literary asides, broken families, exotic travel and Auden's "vague, quasi-mystical experience called 'falling in love.' " --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.