Prague
by Arthur Phillips
Random House, $24.99
In his posthumously published memoirs of life in 1920s Paris, Hemingway wrote, “You’re an expatriate. You’ve lost touch with the soil. You get precious. Fake European standards have ruined you. You drink yourself to death. You become obsessed by sex. You spend all your time talking, not working. You are an expatriate, see? You hang around cafes.” This fabled, artistic existence has been romanticized to the nth degree, spurring young Americans to the hinterlands with dreams of espresso-drenched novels and lust-fueled paintings. Decades have passed since the days of Papa’s Paris, but the nostalgic value of the expat life still holds sway, or so says Arthur Phillips in his debut novel, Prague. Instead of Paree, however, Phillips sends his moveable feast to Budapest immediately following the fall of the Berlin Wall and successfully turns out a subtly incisive work.
Four Americans and one Canadian make up the quintet, or as Phillips writes, “Five young expatriates hunch around an undersized caf? table: a moment of total insignificance and not without a whiff of clich?.” He is quite aware of the hackneyed nature of the expatriate novel, evoking Hemingway and Fitzgerald by placing his characters in cafes, salons, and artist studios. That self-consciousness seeps into his characters, causing them to reflect on their all-too-obvious attempts to commune with another place and time. The desire to witness history in the making, to watch the transition from control to market economy, from oppression to freedom, saddles these men and women with a constant awareness of the transience of time. An acknowledgement of the value of these memories while simultaneously lamenting their passing leaves Prague’s protagonists with nothing but emptiness inside.
This is the emptiness that haunts youth, following it around with the ever-lingering reminder that things cannot last. Prague’s denizens long for the moment that has just passed, so caught up in capturing “life” that it breezes right by them. Phillips’ novel is tinted with these shades of sad gray, as the past and present sit side by side, but remain frustratingly separate. The author is comfortable with what has gone before, often laying down what has happened and what is happening in alternating paragraphs. Furthermore, he is at professorial ease when explaining the history of Hungarian Communism, structuring one part of this narrative in question-and-answer form.
Phillips’s clarity of prose is enhanced by his ability to crystallize moments in time, allowing the reader to step into his character’s shoes and both love life for being full of opportunity and hate it for having to end. We see memories forming as they occur in their smallest details; the glare of the setting sun off the tiny crystals in a stone bridge or a hurried glimpse across a room at the person one is in love with. These instants quickly fade into sepia, dulled and drained of their luster.
Yet for all of its romanticizing, Prague is decidedly unsentimental. Nostalgia is useless, says Phillips, for regardless of our desire to experience the past, progress always wins. The forward motion of time kills every passing minute and forces us to begrudgingly move ahead. A deluded longing for a past that never existed nags at the edges of the false lives and desires of this modern-day Lost Generation. It is often said that youth is folly, but ages have passed since that sentiment was expressed in such a confidently melancholic manner.—Gilbert Cruz
The Graves Are Not Yet Full: Race, Tribe, and Power in the Heart of Africa
by Bill Berkeley
Basic Books, $27.50
There exists many a study of colonial wrongdoings, local life and literary history on the region, ? la Adam Hochschild or Chinua Achebe. Unfortunately, very few books expose evenhandedly, much less articulately, the political turmoil that has characterized Africa during the decades since de-colonization.
Enter New York Times writer Bill Berkeley, a veteran of war correspondence and investigative documentary in areas of interracial instability. His most recent work, The Graves Are Not Yet Full: Race, Tribe and Power in the Heart of Africa is the culmination of two decades of immersion in the killing fields of Central Africa. With an unflinching commitment to hard reporting and a realist’s eye, Berkeley emphasizes the voices of local individuals while interspersing his own commentary, drawn from a vast array of regional history and critical theory.
Perhaps more importantly, the text is beautifully and engagingly written, alternating between stunning portraits of individuals, placed against the backdrop of a surreal network of structural and physical violence, and incisive political and theoretical analysis that cuts to the heart of the ethnic conflict debate. Berkeley blends narrative, documentary and historiography into a compelling counter-hypothesis to the oft-accepted wisdom that Africa is plagued by “age-old tribal rivalries.” Berkeley posits instead that not only colonial, but cynical, post-colonial behavior on the part of the United States is directly responsible for the violence that we so effetely attempt to halt.
Berkeley uses six case studies of “tribal” warfare (Sudan, Liberia, Congo, South Africa, Rwanda, Uganda) as lenses through which to view the U.S. foreign policy conundrum in Central Africa, while condensing each conflict into lush vignettes. The result is a text that is erudite and informative while simultaneously accessible to a broader audience?particularly those of us who know that something happened in Rwanda in 1994 , but not exactly what. In this respect, The Graves Are Not Yet Full is indispensable to any American who seeks to be well-informed about the ongoing struggles in Central Africa, the peace processes that are currently underway and the violence for which the United States is accountable.—Ian Bourland
Twelve
by Nick McDonell
Grove Press, $23
At 244 pages and 98 chapters, Nick McDonell’s Twelve averages at about two-and-a-half sheets per section. This paucity of physical prose mirrors both the young age of its author (17) and the depth and substance of his debut tome (very little). Let me admit my bias right off the bat, for McDonell is a young, wealthy, attractive and well-connected prep-school kid, and I am not. Never having met him, I read his book and know I would not enjoy his company, not least of all because it is widely known that a large reason for his novel’s publication is a family friendship with the publishing house editor.
That said, this book did not deserve publication and McDonell is not the emerging voice of his generation as has been claimed so hyperbolically. Twelve is derivative, hardly original and at times ridiculous. For those of you who refuse my advice and proceed with reading this book, I can only point you to the credibility- destroying, blood-drenched climax.
Twelve tells the tale of a Christmas break in New York City, when boarding school kids return home and bad things happen. White Mike is an angelic drug dealer who has never smoked or drunk and generally is hurting over the death of his mother. Living on the Upper East Side, he peddles ganja for no apparent financial reason and is the nicest of boys. We know he is deep because he sits in silence for long periods of time. He and his friends are obviously empty as they walk the streets of Manhattan with nothing to do but smoke and screw. Such ground has been trod before and the novel too easily evokes Catcher in the Rye and the work of Bret Easton Ellis.
Overzealous in his desire to write authentic “street talk,” McDonell is more blatantly concerned with writing cool rather than writing true. Consequently, he produces such gems as the following: “Nana is talking mad smack ? Hunter is a pretty beef kid. It is a kind of flowing beefness.” This type of writing permeates the entire book as it tries to appeal to older readers who, ever eager to tap into the voice of the youth, can easily afford the steep hardback price. The age bracket for which the book claims to speak, however, can only snicker at the stilted slang, for the beef seems to flow where the prose does not.
The novel’s pages are rife with pop culture references that seem almost obligatory in their placing, from Nelly to American Beauty. Indeed, McDonell seems to long to make a movie rather than write literature, as nary a page goes by without passages such as, “He removes the cloth and reveals an Uzi, black and oiled but worn down, looking, to Claude, like something straight out of the movies.” The very next page holds the following, “He watches his body, in overcoat and jeans, from afar as his view tracks out as if it were the final scene in a movie.” There is much more of this, I assure you.
All McDonell has accomplished is to claim the mantle of that young writer who has to pen the travails of rich and self-absorbed kids. He has nothing new to say about a place, a class, and a subject that has been delved into many times before and by better talents. In time, he too shall pass. —Gilbert Cruz
