The Tangerine Tango Equation: Or How I Discovered Sex, Deception, and a New Theory of Physics in Three Short Months (Contemporary Fiction Series) - Hardcover

Targan's second novel (after Kingdoms, 1980)--about the freshman year of a boy-genius faced with exploitation--takes aim at easy targets in prose that is sometimes flat, while the aim is true and, at its best, zany. Narrator Nick Burden, only 16, is a superboy with an intelligence no IQ test can measure. His sweet parents deposit him in a dorm room at a New England college, and he's drenched with sharply etched stereotypes: roommate Mike Tremain is a budding entrepreneur with money-making schemes; Tod Culver is the scientist with a lab that is always lit ``just like in the first second after the Big Bang''; William Appleton is the wild-eyed English prof; and Sara Vogan is the student reporter hot for fame. Nick meets them all and ``begins to imagine the universe God would imagine and create.'' He also discovers art, especially Bruegel and Bosch (``And I could not do it quickly''). Exposition in place, then, Targan shifts into high gear: a bigwig professor tries to recruit Nick for Princeton; Sara sleeps with him; Mike hawks personal appearances (as well as the Nick Burden Tutoring Service); and things turn sour--Culver steals his notes and presents the ``Tangerine Tango'' as his own; Appleton writes a booklength essay on a prodigy, stealing Nick's words; Sara sells glossies to the tabloids; and Mike, secretly selling cocaine, gets both of them arrested, leading to a dark night of the soul that Nick survives by dropping out (before penning ``this lingua franca of love''). A quest fable of the Holden Caulfield variety with some cleverly cosmic pseudo-science added in before the naive and sympathetic hero discovers life's secret: ``At last, having failed significantly, now I could begin.'' -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Nicky Burden, a 16-year-old physics whiz whose spectacular intellect cannot compensate for his naivete, undergoes rites of passage in this second novel by Targan ( Kingdom ). Sheltered and kept outside traditional schools because of his immeasurably high IQ, brilliant but gullible Nicky enrolls in college to pose experimentally as a "normal" student. He becomes a partner in what he thinks is a poster business conducted by his huckster roommate, never questioning the contents of the tubes he delivers to a sleazy guy at a bus stop; he falls in love with campus journalist Sara Logan, convinced that her desire for him extends beyond her quest for a major scoop; he unwittingly supplies his encouraging but self-serving professors with his best ideas. The first-person narration raises the tricky problem of how a teenage super-genius might think and speak, but it is a relief to find Nicky portrayed as an outwardly average young man rather than a standard plaid-shirt-and-taped-glasses nerd. This refreshing, idealistic novel encourages stubborn individuality and acknowledges the complementary merits of science and the arts.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.