Description

YOU CAN T BUY LOVE.
In David McConnell s The Beads, members of a wealthy New York family begin to unravel after having wasted their incredible fortune over more than a century. The patriarch gets lost in a maze of his own neuroses. The mother luxuriates in a life of idle pleasure. The neglected son, Darius, nurses an obsession with his ultra-normal best friend, Barry. As if that weren t enough, a teacher whom the boys share obliviously commits a shocking crime.Years later, Darius has traded responsibility for an escape to Europe, where he gets a much-needed lesson in decency from a kind German aristocrat. Meanwhile, Barry stumbles into a father son relationship with a philandering lawyer who may actually be his biological father.
Once shielded from the real world by privilege, McConnell s fragile characters tally what they owe others and what they dream they re owed themselves as time passes indifferently for everyone, beat by beat like the telling of a rosary. Set against a backdrop of late nineties Manhattan, The Beads boldly pierces the armor of old money and tries to locate love, if it even exists amid the tangled affectations of a great city.