Arthur Phillips must have written his first novel Prague with a well-worn edition of The Sun Also Rises sitting next to his computer; for both books are studies of "Lost Generations." While Hemingway's characters are lost in the trenches of the Great War however, Phillips' rootless coterie merely proclaims itself to be lost.
As Mark, the Canadian, researches nostalgia, as John writes cocky ex-pat dispatches in BudapesToday, and as Emily guards her Nebraskan virtue, Hungary is picking up the debris from the demolition of the Iron Curtain. Comfortably cushioned by the dollar's might, the Americans' gripes and qualms pale in comparison to Imre's, whose generations-old family-run publishing company was ruined by the Communists. Or Nadja's, who creates for herself romances out of her ravaged past.
What makes these four Americans and one Canadian lost is that the Budapest they really yearn for isn't even in Hungary -- it's Prague. The seemingly misplaced title of the book is thus explained by Phillips in an interview, "the novel is named not for a city, but for an emotional disorder." Had these ex-pats been in Prague, they probably would have preferred Budapest. They yearn for the imaginary, looking to other places for sex, money, of history. Phillips' bitter irony is that all around these drifters are victims of Communism, like Imre and Nadja, who wish for national identity and a sense of history; the concrete, not the fiction. Phillips weaves these complex stories together nicely, creating a very real sense of the muddled aftermath of post-Communism Eastern Europe. Phillips understands Budapest so well because he spent two years there. Like his characters, he too fooled around in that city -- as a jazz musician, a failed businessman and part-time real-estate developer. And like Hemingway, he writes what he knows.
Both Phillps' and Hemingway's plots revolve around caf‚s, cocktails, and copulation, yet they approach their stories from different stylistic directions. Hemingway revels in loaded laconism while Phillips indulges in frequent similes and metaphors. Phillips' florid language beautifully captures a surreal Budapest in the same way the characters' imaginations mould a Budapest that never existed. But such thick description verges on the ridiculous; like a carefully carved marble statue whose pedestal cannot support its weight, it comes crashing down into big chunks of artistic aspiration that hint at what could have been something brilliant.
But this linguistic tedium is only occasional and Mr. Phillips, on the whole, is a masterful writer. His Budapest is exotic, fascinating and beautiful, making one wonder if maybe Prague would be a little dull after all.
- Rebecca Dalzell
