Blue Danube

Hemingway and Fitzgerald wrote about the Lost Generation of Americans who flocked to Paris after World War I, pursuing stimulation beyond the bland boundaries of Middle America. In “Prague,” Arthur Phillips focuses on a new “lost generation” seeking financial and personal fulfillment in post-communist Eastern Europe. His young English-speaking expatriates land not in picture-perfect “cash lavished” Prague but in Budapest, “this God-forsaken paprika-stained Austrian test-market,” also known, more flatteringly, as “Paris on the Danube.”

Phillips’ novel has scope, historical perspective and complexity, especially rare in many first novels. His characters, who beach in “plucky, unlucky Hungary” in 1990, just one year after the collapse of the Berlin Wall, are more strivers than drifters and more jaded and cynical than their earlier Parisan counterparts. They are members of the “triumphant generation” who won the Cold War. They dream of glistening, beckoning Prague but remain in Budapest, where they are “the occupying army, benevolent, offering our vanquished erstwhile foe an open hand and a fresh start, smart investment opportunities, top-notch language instruction, and a whole generation of neo-retro-hippies, bad artists, and club kids.” They do this against Phillips’ vividly evoked backdrop of a bullet-pocked country with a century’s worth of hardships that are essentially unfathomable to most Americans.

In a novel filled with clever riffs, one of the most deft is Phillips’ opening number. He introduces his five main characters with a game they play in local cafes and bars. In four rounds, players take turns attempting to mislead one another with sincere-sounding personal assertions. Of the four statements each player makes, only one may be true. Phillips manages to convey volumes about his characters through their dissemblings. “Sincerity” is the brainchild of the group’s pivotal member, Charles (ne Karoly) Gabor, the son of Hungarians who fled Budapest in 1956 for Ohio. Ruthless, bilingual Charles has returned to Hungary with his MBA to snake out investment deals. “Sincerity” is a con game, and Charles is a master. At the other end of the spectrum, Emily Oliver, an embassy assistant, is an upbeat, self-disciplined Nebraskan who, it seems, cannot lie. (Of course, it turns out she’s the real pro.) Mark Payton is a gay Canadian postdoc researching a history of nostalgia based on his dissertation. He becomes increasingly unhinged by his immersion in the past and his efforts to reconcile past, present and future.

Rounding out the group are Scott Price and his younger brother John, who, to Scott’s horror, has followed him to Budapest. John hopes to establish a rapport with his unfriendly sibling, but Scott is bitter over what he perceives as their parent’s preference for John. Scott is a formerly obese, now buff health nut who teaches English and ends up marrying one of his students. His opening gambit, patently false to all who know him: “I’m really glad John tracked me down here in Budapest.” Phillips repeatedly frustrates our expectations for a grand epiphany, revealing the root of the brothers’ animosity, preferring a more subtle leakage of information. This is an author who doesn’t feel compelled to cross every T.

Despite Scott’s rebuff, John settles into a dingy sublet on one of Pest’s many re-renamed streets. He lands a job at an English-language paper, BudapesToday, writing an edgy, opinionated column about Budapest’s fin de siecle scene, which allows Phillips to soapbox in a different voice. John also quickly breaks the chastity vow he imposed upon himself after his parents’ adultery-damaged marriage and his reading convinced him that “[s]ex turns men into idiots and should be avoided.” One of Phillips’ funnier set pieces is John’s adolescent journal of lessons gleaned from literature. An entry at age 15 reads, “It’s better to die, even to die slowly, than to get married (‘War and Peace’).” While yearning hopelessly for Emily, John falls into multiple couplings, including one with a viciously ambitious collage artist and “fratultery” with his brother’s girlfriend, soon to be wife.

Phillips, a Harvard graduate, five-time “Jeopardy!” champion and former jazz musician, born in Minneapolis, flexes his brainy biceps without flaunting them unduly. However, he’s not above some compulsively clever wordplay. One sentence juxtaposes “weekly coifed” with “weakly coughed,” another “Rambo” with “Rimbaud.” His portrait of Hungary, triple loser of World War II, is heartbreaking. He cuts restlessly between stories, often paragraph by paragraph--as if trying to capture Robert Altman’s overlapping simultaneity and Bertolt Brecht’s alienation technique on the page--but the result is often self-consciously cinematic and choppy. Whit Stillman’s movie “Barcelona” and Milan Kundera’s novels are more direct influences.

Readers may at first wonder where Phillips is going with a long digression on the fictional Horvath Press. With his Horvath family saga, Phillips encapsulates Hungary’s tragic history from 1808 through the 20th century, climaxing with a mock MBA case study exam that asks students to map a solvent future for the politically beleaguered company, a masterpiece of caustic satire that resonates with another plot line: Charles, the hotshot MBA, conniving to privatize and sell the Horvath business.

In relaying the hardships suffered by his Hungarian characters, Phillips provides a pointed contrast to his disaffected Americans. Phillips, who lived in Budapest from 1990 to 1992 and now lives in Paris, shows an expatriate’s ability to see his fellow Americans from a critical distance. The result is a substantive book that braves the cliches of expat ennui to consider such issues as sincerity, scruples and the vicissitudes of history.

*

From ‘Prague’

Who won the Cold War? We did. Our generation. Our sacrifices broke the Communist behemoth. Yes, granted, okay: Our parents lived through the flickering black-and-white footage days of the Cuban missile crisis and Vietnam. But those of us born under Johnson, Nixon and Ford--we are the triumphant generation. We faced Armageddon from birth; we never knew any other way but mutually assured destruction, and we never blinked. We came of age staring down Brezhnev, Andropov, Chernenko, Ustinov. We were inured to their stony silences, wrinkly faces, and short reigns. When Gorbachev peered out from his Kremlin bunker, what did he see? He saw us entering college, pretty much willing to make do with slightly smaller student loans in order to fund Star Wars, doing what had to be done, voting for Reagan.