Prague: A Novel (Paperback)

~ (Author) "THE DECEPTIVELY SIMPLY RULES OF THE GAME SINCERITY, AS played late one Friday afternoon in May 1990 on the terrace of the Cafe Gerbeaud in..." (more)
Key Phrases: New York, Mark Payton, Chain Bridge (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

In Prague, Arthur Phillips's sparkling, Kundera-flavored debut, five young Americans converge in Budapest in the early 1990s. Most are there by chance, like businessman Charles Gabor, whose parents were Hungarian. But one of them, John Price, has the more novelistic motivation of lost love. He is following his older brother, Scott, intent on achieving an intimacy that Scott, a language teacher and health enthusiast, is just as intently trying to escape. The romantic hero of this unsentimental novel, John Price lives like an expatriate of the 1920s. He longs for experience (and more or less stumbles into a writing job for an English language paper), but even more so for the great, obliterating love that takes the form of the perky assistant Emily Oliver. Mark Payton, a scholar of nostalgia whose insights are touched with mysticism, seems often to speak for the author, even in his barely repressed desire for John Price. For who would not love the good and unaffected, in the confusion, opportunism, and irony that characterize fin-de-siècle Europe? Phillips's five seekers are like mirrors that reflect Budapest at different angles, and that imperfectly--but wonderfully--point toward the unattainable city: the glittering, distant Prague. --Regina Marler

From Publishers Weekly

Everything about this dazzling first novel is utterly original, including the title: it's about a group of young American (and one Canadian) expatriates living in Budapest in 1990, just after the Communist empire has collapsed, and the point of "Prague" is that it's the place everyone would rather be, except they have all somehow settled for Budapest as second best to their idealized Central European city.The author's way of bringing his five central characters onstage is also devilishly clever. They are playing a game invented by Charles Gabor, the only one with a Hungarian background called Sincerity, in which scores are made by telling convincing lies and by seeing through the lies of others. This serves at once to introduce these characters and allows the author to play with their sense of themselves. There is sophisticated, devious Charles, working for a New York investment company seeking newly privatized Hungarian businesses to invest in; Mark, a Canadian intellectual obsessed with the elements of nostalgia (and finding Budapest a rich repository); John, who writes a mordant column on the clashes of the old world and the new for the English-language BudapesToday; John's older brother, Scott, who despises him; and Emily, an apparent innocent from Nebraska who works at the U.S. Embassy. At the heart of the story is Charles's attempt to take over a venerable Hungarian publishing company, whose history is brilliantly sketched and whose aged scion, Imre Horvath, is a quintessential Central European survivor. John nurses a hopeless passion for Emily, becomes involved with a bald-headed collage artist and listens, enchanted, to the tales of an elderly pianist in the group's favorite jazz club. Mark disappears, Scott decamps and the publishing caper ends in disillusionment.But what happens in this novel is not nearly so important as Phillips's wonderful grasp Budapest's look, style and ethos, and his sometimes sympathetic, often scathing view of the Western interlopers. His writing is swift, often poetic, unerringly exact with voices and subtle details of time, place and weather. This novel is so complete a distillation of its theme and characters that it leaves a reader wondering how on earth Phillips can follow it up.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 384 pages
• Publisher: Random House; 1st edition (June 18, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0375507876
• ISBN-13: 978-0375507878
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.3 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 2.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (156 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #923,672 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

109 of 122 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars ...or, The Mysteries of Budapest, June 18, 2002

By	Karl Miller "kemspeaks" (Phoenixville, PA United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.

22 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A bit too clever?, September 14, 2002

By	stackofbooks "stackofbooks" (Walpole, MA United States) - See all my reviews

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.

123 of 156 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars THIS defines my expat generation?, July 6, 2002

By	D. Frades "Porfirio Fandango" (Snowy Plover Bay, CA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.