MixedThe New York Times Book ReviewNot much happens ... Think On the Genealogy of Morality meets The Breakfast Club ... There is humor here. Iyer’s teenagers are recognizable, painfully so ... Iyer, who has a gift for capturing the cadence of the young, charts the overlap between the philosophers he reveres and the juveniles he teaches ... like any well-meaning professor, can belabor its point. The novel idles for long stretches, and there’s too much space between memorable sentences ... Characters blur together; only one, Paula, a jaded lesbian who falls in and out of love, stands out. The Nietzsche character remains a cipher until the end ... Scholarly readers — or those with access to the Wikipedia page for Continental philosophy — will find that in-jokes abound ... Iyer’s talent is best deployed in scenes that plumb the poignancy of finishing high school and leaving home...a near-perfect evocation of childhood’s elegiac end. And it proves Iyer’s literary talents can occasionally match his philosophical ones.
