Mike sees a headline about a rabbi and Mayor Giuliani on a tabloid cover – perhaps a reference to the fact that illegitimate priests and corrupt politicians both reside in the same ring of Dante’s Hell. The office-workers who jumped from the burning towers would fit into Dante’s Wood of Suicides. And Mike – who becomes a liar when he claims that “I lost my family in the attack on New York City” – is himself a falsifier, condemned to Dante’s eighth circle.

If this drawn-out allusion to Dante is purposeful, it raises the discomforting and rather absurd suggestion that New Yorkers are themselves somehow guilty for 9/11. But even if the allusion to Dante is unintentional – as one would hope – then McDonell’s treatment of 9/11 is still both mystifying and maddening. The terrorist attacks are portrayed as a sort of reflection of Mike’s personal tragedies. His mother and father, who form a dysfunctional and unloving couple, have cast a shadow over his childhood, and the fall of the Twin Towers comes shortly after his parents’ death in a fiery blaze. Moreover, the Twin Towers collapse as Mike is losing the two pillars of his own life: his brother Lyle and his girlfriend Jane. It seems that McDonell is likening the events of 9/11 to Mike’s travails, which – though also tragic – are absolutely incomparable to the terrorist attacks.

When Mike transfers back to Harvard after the attacks, he is utterly out-of-touch with reality. Nearly every time he opens his mouth, he spews out lies (with one exception: he carries on a frank, two-way conversation with a fossilized vertebra at the Harvard Museum of Natural History.) His behavior grows increasingly pathological: at one point, he embarks on a bid to convince his fellow students not to buy newspapers from the homeless man in Harvard Square who sells Spare Change News.

Perhaps Mike deserves a special dispensation due to the personal tragedies he has faced, but as his behavior becomes increasingly bizarre and downright mean-spirited, he ceases to evoke any measure of sympathy.

In his first novel, “Twelve,” McDonell accomplished the impressive feat of making his readers care deeply about a protagonist who dealt hard drugs to high schoolers. But in “The Third Brother,” Mike has made it clear that he detests his fellow Harvard students. And by the end of the novel, the feeling is mutual.

—Staff writer Daniel J. Hemel can be reached at hemel@fas.harvard.edu.