Customer Reviews

Prague: A Novel

5 star:		(27)
4 star:		(28)
3 star:		(31)
2 star:		(35)
1 star:		(45)

 

 

I hadn't heard of Arthur Phillips before I began reading Prague, but by page 6, I felt I had read 50 other books by him. Alienated youth, joined by a sense of ennui in a habitat not their own...sound familiar? Then, by page 20 I realized that this was, indeed, something remarkably fresh. And incredibly well written.
Don't open this story looking for a party in Prague itself, for the city merely plays Emerald City to Budapest's Oz. The 5 main characters of Phillips books are forever looking toward Prague while chasing money, love, and in one interesting case family through Budapest in the early 1990's. There isn't a whole lot at first to like about Emily, Scott, his brother John, Mark and Charles - but as their adventures roll along the pages, it is humor that makes these characters endearing.
Phillips use of the English language is awe-inspiring. It's clear that he recognizes the kudos showered upon Michael Chabon for taking time to perfect language and idioms in his storytelling. I kept thinking of Chabon's "The Mysteries Of Pittsburgh" while reading this book, and if you are a fan, you will greatly enjoy Phillip's storytelling skills.
I've read this type story so many times over the years (Bright Lights, Big City, Less Than Zero, The Secret History are less worthy members of this literary club). When I finished Prague, I felt like I truly cared about not only the outcome, but the characters themselves. That's difficult to pull off in a novel about self-absorbed, capital-hungry Gen X'ers, but Phillips does a great job in achieving this.

Okay, I admit it...I'm mainly writing this review to drag the stars on Prague up. Simply put, it's a stunner...a tour de force that seems to capture a place and time (1990s Eastern Europe) as well as the sort of young Americans who gathered there. It was the best thing I read last year, and I've recommended it to everyone I know.

It seems ridiculous to me that many of the reviewers demand that the characters all be likeable. These characters are complex, and yes, some of them aren't that likeable. But this is an elegiac, bittersweet look at twenthysomething expats in a town going through a seismic change. The characters are going through big changes, too, and that isn't always when folks are at their student-council president best. But who wants to read about people like that anyway? (And don't get me started on folks who are bothered that this is about the realities of Budapest and dreams of Prague.)

Yep, some of these characters trample the locals and the system. Others, like the F. Scott Fitzgerald-ish John Price, find inspiration and some cause for hope. So these aren't all folks you want to pal around with? Go read a romance novel or something. I'm not clear that I was likeable in my 20s, so demanding that of characters seems a little feeble.

But why did I love this book? The way Phillips makes it about the city and about the experience, and not merely a character study. I was sitting reading this looking at gorgeous Montana lake, and his evocative passages about cafes and castles made me want to leave Glacier National Park and hop a flight to Budapest. I'm sorry, but I think that's damn fine writing. One and two-star, he's not.

In a starred review, Publishers Weekly praised Prague as one of the most dazzling debuts of the year. When I started Prague, I was floored by Phillip's exquisite writing and by the evocative atmosphere of Budapest (no, not Prague) he so expertly weaves into his book.

Gradually however, the novel's ugly characters take up so much real estate that it becomes increasingly difficult to ignore them. Mark, Charles, Emily, and John are a bunch of American expatriates who have descended on Hungary in the early `90's just after the wall was torn down. All four are young and are trying vaguely to figure out the meaning of life in the Eastern bloc city. The characters are horribly self-absorbed and mean. While many have explained their self-absorption as a byproduct of their being a member of Generation X, I submit that it is probably also a product of their expat status. For all their outwardly aggressive behavior, Budapest is a foreign city to these people evidenced in the comfort they find from a person just come from America, "they crowded around him eager for news from home".

After I finished "Prague", I was very impressed by how well Phillips has portrayed his characters. So realistically in fact, that I was shaken by the worry that such obnoxious characters might indeed exist in real life. Charles hungrily swallows up an aging Hungarian native's (Imre Horvath) press and chalks it up to the ups and downs of capitalism. When John Price actually tries to bring genuine emotion to the front, he quickly dismisses it by admitting "he was ashamed to feel his throat tighten. He rubbed his eyes until the tickling sensation passed. His absurdity seemed to have no limits anymore". I personally am not an extremely emotional person, but the characters' rigid one-dimensional lives left me with a vague sense of dreariness.

Many have compared Phillip's writing style to that of Michael Chabon's (of Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay fame). Like Chabon, Phillips has a mastery of the language that is a treat to read. The book dazzles you with gems like, "As she moved slightly to her music, she resembled an exotic species in an aquarium, a brightly colored swath of tattered material floating and swaying in her own private current". One of my two favorite parts of the book was a description of an old Hungarian restaurant that Imre Horvath takes his potential buyers to. The ordinariness of the restaurant means nothing to the newcomers, but nostalgia allows the restaurant to occupy a special place in Horvath's heart. My other favorite was the description of the Horvath press and its owners over many generations. After reading all that, I was only more upset at how casually the press finally got sucked up by capitalism, the act being an ultimate cliché. While Phillips admits to using clichés in the book, their use probably liberated him enough to paint his characters and settings so painstakingly well.

Read Prague for the atmosphere and the wonderful writing, but steel yourself to meet characters you will love to hate.

What do you mean, "ennui"? We went to "Eastern" Europe for adventure, enlightenment, shocking new experiences and fun! It was the best time of our lives -- those who stuck around learned a new language, made life-long friends, discovered appalling and comical customs and had a blast! There's nothing anti-intellectual about that -- I could have brooded at home just as efficiently. I wondered when the "new Hemingway" flatulence would finally bubble to the top. Well, Phillips is actually a very good writer with a way with words, but not much more.

As always, ignore the gassy cover blurb cliches -- this is no Hemingway/Fitzgerald/define-a-generation/"finally!" novel.
It describes expat life in Central Europe, as I and many other found it in the early 90s, mostly in poignant single phrases and episodes, and in lots of quotable scenes. But we're already familiar with the situation and expect a decent story, so disregard the setting and let's read the book.

Unfortunately, Phillips violates two extremely important rules of a good novel: 1) Show, don't tell, and 2) If nothing happens after page 1 (20? 50? 100?) why should anyone keep reading?

The author writes with an unnerving, almost pathological (Jeopardy champ?)obsession with surface detail. He makes Joseph Conrad's Marlow look forgetful and reticent by comparison. Once you recognize this, you begin to skim past whole paragraphs or pages of catalogued information for the next actual instance of activity. But because that rarely comes, I think few will readers will actually read to the end.

There are some gripping, square-on accurate scenes, but they are so spaced out. The author is probably an excellent short-story writer who has overreached himself. If he put out this same book as 10 or 12 short stories, I'd be raving! He's got the situation so precisely in his photographic-memory crosshairs.

But every character and scene is noosed up so tightly in trivial detail -- as though the reader would be tested later, or as though we're unable to infer or assume anything without overbearing guidance -- that the book becomes claustrophobic. But the detailed descriptions lend nothing to the story -- they say only, "look at how accurate this is." So the oppressively omniscient and looming narrator becomes like a dinner guest telling a drawn-out yarn for hours as his captive guests doze off. Even Conrad's Marlow paused now and then, for chrissakes; Phillips just describes and describes until his photo-memory, self-satisfied presence becomes downright irritating.

Phillips (or his editors) seem never to have read chapters aloud to test the rhythm or tone, or to see if eyes glazed over. I read aloud just one page endlessly describing the concrete facade of a building to my (Czech) wife until she screamed, "Stop! Enough already!" Not the response you'd normally expect for an engaging book.

Once you realize that the plot is just a thin, prolonged theme with zero suspense -- young people overseas discovering themselves, and just barely -- the book becomes an endurance test. The uninspiring, self-defeating notion that Prague is more exciting than Budapest was apparently worked up later to justify the title and cover photo, and to appeal to potential expat buyers. That's it? That's the theme that's supposed to get us through 367 pages?

I'm still waiting for a good book that describes the reality of those expat days -- the whimsical, random, fun-loving, (definitely not "ennui"'d) times. Given what's been published so far, you'd think the American presence behind the liberated East Bloc was composed of braniacs and neurotic sticks-in-the-mud, rather than fools, folks, libertines and nerds out for kicks and to check out a new frontier. No one I knew back then took that Prague Post/Newsweek hype about "Paris of the 20's of the 90's" seriously, but so far no one has successfully challenged the hype -- certainly not Phillips. For God's sake -- we weren't writers, we just had cheap tickets and a sense of adventure (or massive delusions, for some few). A blistering and blissful experience that was just as eye-opening as that had by Phillips' pottering characters. Once the critics have finished scribbling blather about the "Generation X" thing in Eastern Europe, this book will unfortunately lose its relevance, inspiring no one, and will drop into its appropriate pigeon hole, even though Arthur Phillips may have done the best so far at "describing" what was going on.

I suppose if expat writers were less compelled to write "The Novel," and instead turned out scads of down-to-earth potboilers about the fun we had, we'd have something to choose from -- to enjoy or discard -- and we'd then have an actual genre to enjoy, instead of an occasional overhyped "voice-of-a-generation"-type tome that can't possibly meet expectations.

With the critics whipping themselves into ecstatic frenzies of frothy praise over this book, I figured "what the "heck" , it can't be all bad."

I couldn't have been more wrong.

Apparently, being a postmodern, post-ironic, post-gen X'er isn't enough for Mr. Phillips. He has to show us all that he is utterly post-having-anything-to-say. Phillips radiates the kind of smug satisfaction that makes me mourn the living tree that this book once was.

And he goes on to let the reader know, through the thinnest-of-veiled self-portraits, that he is aware of this smugness, that he mocks it, that he is both bigger and lesser than this smugness, that he tears down its pretension and then goes on to tear down the pretension of pretending he can tear down its pretension, in an endless spiral that goes on until I want to gouge my eyes out rather than read another word this smug "person" has written. If tripe like this is the new cutting edge of American Literature, we are all in deep, deep, doo-doo.

'Prague' is not an easy book to characterize, but neither is the time or city that it attempts to re-create. The character descriptions, the non-linear writing sequence, the heavy reliance upon historical exposition (often at the expense of current events), should not necessarily be interpreted as poor editing or non-committal writing. Rather, they serve to re-create North American impressions of Hungary and the experience of living there, regardless of whether one relates to the characters or not.

I lived in Budapest in the early 90s, and the descriptions of the city and atmosphere are dead-on, down to the descriptions of the jazz club (which could have well been based upon the now-defunct Black & White Club in Pest), or the gritty, faded restaurants which served goose-liver and canned corn on pizzas. People who travelled to Budapest generally either loved it or disliked it almost immediately- the polarization of opinion was remarkable- and I am not surprised that reaction to this book may fall into a similar pattern.

I do disagree with media reviews that characterize the book as a GenX tribute, because personally I never related to the GenX tag and it was merely coincidental that the term emerged at the same time as the fall of communism. Rather, the characters were merely (and typically for expats) attempting to attribute more self-importance to their experiences.

Personally, I find this to be one of the most intelligent and original books that I have read in some time. It does not describe my own experiences in Budapest, nor did I even like most of the characters (that may be the book's one real similarity to 'The Great Gatsby'). But for painting a canvass of what was the uniquely and enchantingly morbid Hungary of the early 1990s, 'Prague' is a wonderful piece of work.

My criteria for books that really move me is whether I keep them for further enjoyment or pondering. This highly acclaimed book I had to let go.
The story begins with a mind game played by a number of participants - as if a game of cards - the author using this opening to introduce his characters. Following said opening, he offers the reader vignette after vignette, scattered moments of expatriate life in Budapest (and no, the book seems to simply drift toward Prague) even as it stumbles toward a storyline.
The problem I have with this sort of prose is the twitchy narrative style. Moving back and forth in time is certainly a valid tool of writing technique, but making sound bites of the jumps seems more akin to channel surfing during prime-time TV than to literature.
That being said, Phillips' descriptions of a Hungary just emerging from Communist control are exquisite, and the insights into locals as seen through his characters (via dialogue and rare extended narrative passages) are insightful, with a newness rarely seen in modern fiction.
My problems here are, I suppose, those of preference and taste. But I'm left to wonder whether the rave reviews occupying the book's first pages are the product of an haute mentality, i.e., if it's a difficult read and hard to follow, if it's boring, or if its characters leave you short of excited or elevated, you are just being plebeian to complain.
Intent on deriving some sense of meaning from such limitations, the author's obviously trying for it by way of viewing modern Europe through a multi-eyed expatriate lens. But I don't see this faux-romantic, booze-soaked, bed-hopping, business-as-plunder lifestyle, albeit de rigueur in earlier days and earlier books, as an in-depth reflection of the fragmented, postmodern Old World, except parenthetically.
Although Phillips' talent is clearly immense, there's room for growth here. I haven't seen his second book, but can only hope he's learned that crudity and obliqueness as substitutes for meaning and direction aren't the right way to leaven creativity into literary baguettes.

Prague comes in the form of four main chapters. The first one is passable: it's a reasonably clever, amusuing introduction to five characters not nearly as quirky or likeable as they could be, but they seem to be fairly good company. And of course, the promise of Prague looms throughout. The five drink and make merry and alterately scoff at and support each other in the backdrop of 1990, which Pillips reminds us ad nauseam as being a particuarly oppressive time.

The second chapter, however, digresses (and, yes, it's far too early for a digression in a story that hasn't even established what it's about yet) about a family-run publishing company that spans 100 years of Budapest. I know it's an allegroy/metaphor/etc., but it's a god-awful dreary one, and it undermines any appeal that the characters built up in the first place.

It falters at that point and never recovers.

We selected this book for my book group, which includes a diverse group of women and men. We were all very disappointed by this novel. We found it overwritten, boring, and pretentious. Also, there's no real story here; it seems more like a writing exercise than a novel. We read some great books in our group. Forget PRAGUE. Check out the following--all strong books with a central story, careful writing, and complex characterization--DISGRACE, by J. M. Coetzee; LIFE OF PI, by Yann Martel; MIDDLESEX, by Jeffrey Euginedes.

I finished this book and shortly after found an online reading group with the author. It was interesting to see his perspective and that of others, but I was left feeling as though I didn't read the same book as the one they were discussing. Several of the participants had "ex-pat" stories of their own and maybe it was my perspective that was lacking. I join another reviewer in suggesting the temptation to skip over paragraph after paragraph of seemingly endless and unnecessary detail to somehow wrestle a plot from the pages of this novel. At one point I felt like I might finally be on board, when the author decides to temporarily drop the story and begin a new thread. Overall, I felt that this novel was more work than fun for me, but I'm glad to hear that others liked it.