Book Review: Readings

Prague

Random House, 373pp., $24.95 Near the top of page five in Arthur Phillips' first novel, Prague, the author is suddenly seized at the throat by the irresistible urge to lay his cards on the table. Or at least to make it seem as if that's what he's doing. Prague is set sternly in 1990, "immediately following 1989-90's hissing, flapping deflation of Communism," and features four Americans and one Canadian in their own self-consciously Lost Generation eager to be in Budapest and to forget where they came from, even the cheery, sun-scrubbed woman from Nebraska. But back to the author's deck of cards: "Five young expatriates hunch around an undersized cafe table: a moment of total insignificance and not without a powerful whiff of cliché." The most exciting contemporary fiction seems to require that the author comment on the action at hand, not just narrate it. The nervy little game we play in modern publishing, with its sometimes mind-boggling advances and inscrutably intense pressure on first novelists, is such a Houdini-like spectacle: We all want to know whether the author can pull it off (one person I would not want to be right now is Charles Frazier). Phillips names his monsters ("insignificance," "cliché"), then hits a kind of literary grand slam by proclaiming, one sentence later, that this insignificance and cliché, "this meaningless, overdrawn moment may (then or later) seem to be somehow the summation of both an era and your own youth ..." Now we watch him try to convince us.

The putative ringleader of these five expats is Charles Gábor. He's a Nineties kind of dandy, since he can toss out bon mots and be a venture capitalist, all at the same time! Mark Payton, as the author explains, is sitting to Gábor's right in the cafe as the book opens; he's a young academic star nearly crippled by his obsession with nostalgia. He's in a particularly lucrative place, given his line of work, though soon enough he'll be cavorting in a distinctly nonacademic fashion in his apartment to Twenties Charleston tunes blasting from his gramophone. Emily Oliver, the Nebraskan, is a special assistant to the U.S. ambassador and, according to Gábor, "she smells like corn on the cob." Scott Price is the cold-hearted older brother to John, a young man so wide-eyed with innocence that it would have been a miracle if he didn't soon start running the show, narratively speaking, in this deeply funny and wise debut. He's so innocent, in fact, that once he finds a job as a columnist in a local English-language newspaper, he manages to proclaim to the young Americans spilling into Hungary that "our souls have seen the abyss." Whatever. Always lurking beneath the surface in Prague is the palpable tension between American idealism and the trampled souls of people who actually have seen the abyss. Phillips' angle of attack is sly and revelatory; he throws together past and present in a seemingly haphazard collage that is all calculation and sublime payoff in one of 2002's most notable accomplishments.