Confessions of a Lapsed Altar Boy

As he strolled across the empty parking lot of the Jesuit School for Boys in 1976, Nathan Hale Plunkett could not imagine the rejections he would suffer from his parents, Harvard, and all the women he would come to love. However, seconds later, as he lost consciousness during a botched kidnapping by a remnant of the Symbionese Liberation Army, he experienced the first of several epiphanies about these rejections. These epiphanies, disclosed in the manner of the Catholic sacrament of confession, reveal Nathan as an avatar of the baby boom generation through a humorous and at times absurdist narrative. Spread across the San Francisco Bay Area, Washington DC, and New York, these confessions revolve around Nathan's relationships with his parents, Howard and Marti Plunkett; his closest friends and classmates at Near Ivy University, Milo Sverdlov and Priscilla Cantrell; his first confessor, teacher, and friend Father X; his erstwhile kidnapper "Lizzie Borden"; his mentor and first lover Sylvia Pasternak; his second lover, the acclaimed poet Reed Auchincloss; Harvard competitor, archnemesis, and ally Michael Stewart; the entrepreneur and problem solver Rocket Nzemba; the rock star Billy XX Baxter; the great and ancient editor of histories Lochlainn O'Casey; and the ghost of the 20th century historian Arnold Toynbee. Among Nathan's confessions: the one about his father, the hippies, and the fake marijuana plant stuck in a traffic jam in Daly City; Father X's confession to Nathan while jogging in San Jose about becoming a priest in the 1960's to avoid being drafted and sent to fight in Vietnam; Howard's confessions to Nathan about why he refused to pay the kidnappers' ransom and why he disowned his only son; Priscilla's confession about the murder at a college party in Georgetown she co-hosted and the crime she helped to solve; Reed's confession to Nathan in her family's apartment at 740 Park Avenue about her infidelity; "Lizzie Borden's" confessions to Nathan as their relationship evolved from criminal to romantic; and Nathan's confession to Billy XX Baxter at the famed White Horse Tavern that he could not find a unifying principle for the history of the world he was writing. "Confessions" is intended for fans of "Mad Men" and Joan Didion, who reside in the intersection of the Venn diagram where readers of James Joyce's "Ulysses" meet readers of John Kennedy Toole's "A Confederacy of Dunces."