Lately, everyone’s been going on about how they wish they could hate Nick McDonell, Harvard ’07, whose third novel, An Expensive Education, came out earlier this month. They want to hate him, interestingly enough, for the exact reasons they want to hate the Ivy League: rich, connected, intelligent, internationally famous, good-looking, well endow—um, you get the picture.

Just like wait-listed Harvard hopefuls who secretly despise their already accepted classmates, many of McDonell’s latest interviewers haven’t quite been able to mask their sheer loathing for the lot they’ve been cast. Oh no, of course they’re not bitter. Not when the New York Times journalist deems McDonell’s background “insufferable” and calls him out on having (wait for it!) used family connections for summer internships.  I know! Surely you too are shocked.

Here’s the back story on McDonell: Published his first novel at eighteen, and started his freshman year at Harvard as an internationally bestselling novelist. The critics lavished praise, the interviewers booed jealously, and no one could shut their faceholes about the gasp! nepotism of the whole affair. McDonell’s father, the editor of Sports Illustrated, is friends with Morgan Entrekin, chief of Grove Press, who went on to publish all three of Nick’s books.

Fast forward to 2009. McDonell’s first book, Twelve, about a bunch of bored, drugged up rich Manhattan kids and a tragic house party, is in production as a Joel Schumacher film starring Chace Crawford, Emma Roberts, Kiefer Sutherland, and 50 Cent.  Harvard is a distant memory, his second book, about 9/11, debuted a couple years back with a whisper, and he’s been reporting for Time and Harper’s from all over Africa and the Middle East.

You’d think the press might have swallowed their jealously by now, but no. The Daily Beast’s recent interview is a mostly masturbatory treatise on why its understandable to hate McDonell, and The New York Times’s piece muses, right up front, that “you can find yourself half-hoping that [McDonell] might be dinged by a pedicab — not seriously, but enough to give him a limp, say, or an embarrassing facial tic.”

Okay, seriously? The Times journalist is wishing a goddamn facial tic on this kid?! Can we please, please get over it?

Because here’s the truth: An Expensive Education is a fantastic novel. It follows three interconnected characters. Harvard Professor Susan Lowell, who has just won a Pulitzer prize for her book about Somalian rebel leader Hatashil; Mike Teak, a recent Harvard grad turned spy who comes to realize the chilling truth about a massacre he witnesses during a mission; and David Ayan, a Somalian-born Harvard undergrad being courted by the Porcellian Club.  The connection between the three characters isn’t instantly obvious, but McDonell deftly weaves hints at a sinister government plot throughout tales of campus parties, relationships gone wrong, and a version of the Porc that makes Yale’s secret societies seem positively adorable.

An Expensive Education is a novel that’s both instantly familiar and totally foreign: When talking about Harvard final clubs, a character explains,

So there’s the Porc, the most secret, secret blue-bloody weirdness. Make you jack off into Jeronimo’s skull like Skull and Bones. Or you could join the Fly and pop your collar and blow coke like you have to swim to Gatsby’s green light. Or you could pop your collar with the A.D. and play lacrosse and funnel beer till you vomit all over the working class…it’s all just flip-cup played on mahogany” (Education 13).

And, in essence, the plot itself is flip-cup played on mahogany—McDonell writes of a silly game made dangerous by money, power and connections. He writes of Harvard in a way that only a recent graduate can, and he writes well.  If you’re looking for a fast, engaging read for the train or plane ride back to campus, this is it.

And for the record, I don’t wish McDonell would get hit by a freaking pedicab (cough, looking at you, Times reporter) or suspect that “his lackadaisical modesty is a mask for grander ambitions that he declines, out of decorum, to acknowledge” (cough, the Beast). Because the truth is, we’ve all met a dozen kids like McDonell in our lecture halls, at campus bars, and in the crowded library during reading week. The Ivy League is full up with kids whose last names say more than they do, or whose Facebook status messages sound like some shit out of Gatsby. With published authors, even. And with the rare kid who, like McDonell, has the talent and the connections.

So these interviewers are jealous: they thought it would be them, but in the end, instead of admission, they were granted an open-to-the-public tour of a privileged little world instead, and they can’t effing deal with it graciously.