Prague

Expats and Ennui

Eastern Europe has enjoyed considerable literary attention from young writers this year. First there was the Ukraine and its Holocaust-haunted farmlands in Jonathan Safran Foer's Everything is Illuminated. Then Gary Shteyngart gave us the city of Prava (a looking-glass Prague) in The Russian Debutante's Handbook. Now we get Budapest circa 1990 in Arthur Phillips's sharply observed debut, Prague.

All three novels feature lost, searching or fumbling young Americans, familiar to anyone who backpacked to Eastern Europe after college to "find" themselves in a scene cooler and cheaper than Paris. These were the free market ambassadors of the '90s, bringing America to an older landscape that still bore the scars of war. The previous generation of writers, Roth, Bellow, and Updike, have each memorably described Americans in Eastern Europe before, but these new guys, especially Phillips, the most sophisticated of the three, capture a uniquely contemporary self-consciousness, the simultaneous longing for substance and the post-everything irony of the young.

And Prague breathes irony from its title page. The setting is Budapest, not Prague, a shortcoming keenly felt by our cast of young American expats, who consider their city less promising than its more beautiful and popular neighbor. Nevertheless they make do pursuing their nascent careers (teaching, venture capital, embassy work, research, journalism), cheap wine, and sex. Such lives involve dangerous stereotypes, and our characters know it, particularly our "hero," John Price, who struggles throughout the novel to figure out what he should take seriously. Watching his object of adoration ride away in a cab one night, he leans up against a lamp post, lights a cigarette and catches himself in a "moment sticky with clichés." Laughing and self-aware, John nevertheless gazes at her cab as it blends with traffic, "stunned that it can blend at all, that it isn't marked with some kind of phosphorescence." The durability of sincerity in the face of irony colors Prague with a soft light. Though his story has a tendency to meander (and some characters disappear rather abruptly), Phillips remains throughout a witty and acute observer of the mid-twenties search for meaning.

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