Customer Reviews

City of Strangers: A Novel

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When good books go bad...this book started out really great. Paul Metzger is having some relationship issues: he's estranged from his half-brother, his father (a former Nazi) is about to die, and he's still trying to get over his ex-wife. An editor is trying to persuade him to write his father's life story. And then, when he arrives at his apartment building one night, he comes upon two thugs beating up a young Arabic boy and gets involved, winding up beaten up himself.

This is about where the book starts to go off track. Instead of solely focusing on the relationships, of Paul's struggle with his half-brother to come to terms with their father's impending death--and his legacy--the book turns to the aborted violence Paul gets unwittingly involved in. The last 50 or so pages of the book seemed as if they belonged somewhere else. A shame, really, because Mackenzie would have had a whopper of a story otherwise.

I'll try to be brief and concise, like Ian Mackenzie is in his incredibly compelling debut. I can barely recall reading a first novel of a contemporary author that stung me so pointedly by force of both its content AND its language. Take for example:

"He first considered death when he was eight or nine. His mother had already been dead for several years, but she existed in an atmosphere of the abstract, of he things he took on faith but couldn't see or touch - dinosaurs, his own heart, Russia."

Normally I find modern writers who fascinate me with their verbal athletics (Nicholson Baker) OR who compel me purely with their intriguing narrative (Robert Ludlum). Rare is the book or author that writes with such straightforward gusto and delicacy about the whole range of the human condition- sex, love, death, joy, anxiety, religion, fear- while still engaging us in a story that doesn't seem merely a pretext for his own mental masturbation. I'm thrilled to find a young, contemporary author who can dazzle in a modest manner, show his charm and style without banging us over the head with it, and pull the reader along in a classic yarn without making us feel manipulated.

I will stop because I feel that I've already gushed too much or written too self-indulgently, which are precisely the qualities that Ian Mackenzie avoids so gracefully. Read the first chapter, and you will be hooked. That's all. (Waiting for the movie now...)

I cannot say I really enjoyed this book although it was not as bad as I was expecting after reading the first few pages. Initially it seemed like MacKenzie was just trying too hard with phrases like "The exhausted, somnambulant city..." and "the cholesterol of automobiles" and was trying to use every long word he could find in the thesaurus. That did improve as the story went on although it still felt disjointed with so many different facets of Paul's life being covered. On one hand the story seems to focus on Paul's relationship with his father, brother and ex-wife and then it seems like MacKenzie felt the need to throw in a suspense story as well. I did not feel like the two meshed well to form a cohesive story.

I wish we had heard a little more from Paul's father on what his thoughts were about his previous devotion to Hitler. I think my favorite part of the book was the funeral in which his father's neighbors stands up to tell his story of how he knew Paul's father.