Description
A first novel of startling scope and ambition, Prague depicts an intentionally lost Lost Generation as it follows five American expats who come to Budapest in the early 1990s to seek their fortune financial, romantic, and spiritual in an exotic city newly opened to the West.Book MagazinePrague is one of the best first novels I've read in several years. It is also one of the most challenging, for Arthur Phillips reworks the nineteenth-century international novel, the setting-saturated, character-centered, slow-moving form practiced by Henry James. Readers used to the action-oriented plots that drive much of the contemporary fiction about Americans abroad will need to adjust to the more complex and more subtle intertwining of stories that Phillips presents. Like the old and beautiful city for which the novel is named, Prague requires and rewards leisurely exploration. Prague opens in Budapest in May 1990. Five North Americans in their mid- to late twenties sit in a cafe and play Sincerity, a game in which each participant makes five statements others have to judge as true or false. What the characters state about themselves and how they respond to their friends set up an immediately interesting dynamic that Phillips complicates and then extends by bringing other people into the initial group. "Somehow this one game of Sincerity becomes the distilled recollection of a much longer series of events," Phillips writes. "It persistently rises to the surface of your memory that afternoon when you fell in love with a person or a place or a mood, when you savored the power of fooling everyone, when you discovered some great truth about the world." Charles Gabor, master of Sincerity and insincerity, is a Hungarian-American venture capitalist bottom-feeding in the newly open economy. Mark Payton, who recently earned a doctorate in cultural studies, is passionately committed to his scholarly analysis of nostalgia in different cultures. Emily Oliver, alow-level employee at the American Embassy, says she's incapable of lying. Scott Price, a California health faddist teaching English, is a master of irony. His younger brother John, a recent arrival who becomes a columnist for the English-language newspaper, is Phillips' focal character, a person who oscillates between sincerity and insincerity. In this novel about the search for authenticity, all five of the main characters have secret desires that move them and the book forward. Charles plots the takeover of a small Hungarian publisher for himself, not for his firm. Mark pursues other men. The wholesome Nebraska-bred Emily has a lesbian liaison. And always-flippant Scott turns out to be seriously engaged with a Hungarian woman. John Price is more complicated. Although he moons over Emily, he has sex with several other women, including his brother's girlfriend. John follows Mark's lead in studying old Budapest, yet helps Charles plot against the hoary publisher who symbolizes the city's history. Toward the end, the business takeover provides some conventional suspense; but the characters' changing responses to one another and to a closely observed setting are the author's primary interests and, in turn, become the reader's. Phillips has said he suffers from "hyperglycemic nostalgia," and Prague longs for the "seriousness" a key word in the book of nineteenth-century fiction. Phillips narrates the story omnisciently and persistently, usually choosing indirect discourse over dialogue. The effect is authorial high seriousness, but with a touch of haughty superiority. The characters don't seem to satisfy their creator, not even the "authentic" Hungarians, not the aged publisher Imre Horvath, not the elderly jazz pianist Nadja. Their history as victims of both Nazis and communists gives them an initial appeal that Phillips diminishes as they become self-promoting windbags, perhaps to impress the outsiders. If Budapest can't measure up to Prague (a place the characters never go), and if Phillips' characters can't measure up to his ideal of authentic living, I can say as a part-time resident of a Balkan country that Phillips gets just right the eccentricities of an expatriate community. Living at the edge of familiar European culture makes his characters intensely conscious of themselves and their friends. Most enjoy being "exotic" without doing anything to earn that label. English teacher Scott knows no Hungarian and takes pleasure from living outside of language. Several characters suffer from the dread "Visiting Family Syndrome" that takes them away from their friends. Those in the country for six months resent recent arrivals, and anyone with an apartment mocks tourists. In one of the novel's great comic moments, Charles, Mark and John give a student travel writer a mass of specious information about "authentic" Budapest destinations. Phillips also finds inventive ways of presenting Hungarian history that contrasts with the shallow pasts of his North American characters. The 200-year-old publishing firm, which did business with a succession of governments, represents Hungarian political life. Buildings that the characters live in or move among still have bullet marks from the 1956 "revolution," and the old pianist Nadja tells stories of Hungarians who were frequently forced into exile. Phillips' characters keep saying Budapest is no Prague, but Phillips makes the city as fascinating to readers as Prague is to his characters. At 380 densely printed pages, Prague is unusually long for a first novel by an unknown writer. To do full justice to its numerous characters, it needed to be longer yet. The Americans compare themselves to the Lost Generation of Americans in Paris in the '20s, but Phillips is too serious a writer to engage in this kind of shortcut, group characterization. Although Phillips knows as a resident alien, as a novelist that authenticity is earned, he or his editor didn't allow Prague the space to fully become what it initially promised to be. But Phillips promises to be a strong new American voice, and Prague is the largest-minded first novel since Mark Z. Danielewski's audacious House of Leaves in 2000.
