Generation expat

>> Displaced souls convene
in Arthur Phillips’ Prague

by JULIET WATERS

Prague opens on a May afternoon in 1990, in a café in Budapest, where five twentysomething ex-pats are playing a game called Sincerity. It’s something like Dictionary, that game where players make up definitions for words and score points by either guessing the correct definition or fooling others with their bogus ones. But in Sincerity, players make up beliefs. Each player must submit one statement they truly believe, and three statements that sound like something he or she might believe, but doesn’t.

Beliefs may be confessional: “I was adopted…” says Scott Price, an English teacher from San Francisco, who’s sitting across from his brother John, “...or John was.” (John will choose this as Scott’s “sincere” belief. Scott will claim it isn’t.) Banal: “The world contains more nice people than mean people. I really believe that,” says Emily Oliver, a diplomat’s assistant from Nebraska, who may be a spy. Provocative: “I have to admit,” says Charles, a chronically ironic investment analyst whose parents were Hungarian refugees. “I was briefly jealous just there when Emily took such an interest in you, Scott.” Boring: “I guarantee there was never sullen service in this café when it was founded,” says Mark Payton, a chubby Toronto cultural critic, working on a book called The History of Nostalgia. And debatable: “Fifteen years from now,” says John Price, a columnist for Budapest Today and the closest thing to the novel’s hero, “people will talk about all the amazing American artists and thinkers who lived in Prague in the 1990s. That’s where real life is going on right now, not here.”

As Prague’s omniscient narrator explains, the game is fundamentally flawed. One never actually knows if players tell the truth at the end, or if they even know the truth (“one of the game’s most beautiful aspects”).
Arthur Phillips constructs his debut novel like an especially brilliant player of the game he’s invented. He opens with a charmingly bogus title-the entire novel is set in Budapest and no one ends up anywhere near Prague. He keeps it moving by constantly challenging the beliefs of his characters with the realities of a city that was destroyed many times over by war and despair. And he brings these two worlds together with a compelling subplot involving Gabor’s attempt to take over and sell a family-owned publishing house to a media mogul. Phillips may actually have put the one sincere statement in the mouth of a most unlikely character, a Marine lance corporal who deflates John’s condescension in a barroom debate.

“It’s way too easy for you to say World War I was a joke. You’re not Belgian. Your farm wasn’t overrun by Germans. Your sister wasn’t raped by them. Name any war you want. Every single war, somebody had a damn good reason at the time, and they don’t owe you an explanation for it. Here’s what I know, John, and you can print this and you can write one of your smart-ass columns around it, okay?… There is no ‘grand scheme of things.’ That’s just a bullshit disguise for cowards. The present has no right to judge the past. Or to act in order to win the future’s approval. They’re both irrelevant when the enemy’s at the door.”

It’s worth wondering, though, whether he would still believe this today, after his time in the Gulf War.

If I were to say that 15 years from now the world will remember Arthur Phillips as the Hemingway of Generation X, I might be right. The novel is smart and disciplined enough to keep it in circulation for a long time. But you might not score a point off me in Sincerity, because I still doubt it. Prague is told with wonderful attention to detail, wit, intelligence and genuine compassion for its characters. But it never takes itself seriously enough to aspire to literary greatness. That’s its fundamental flaw-though, arguably one of its most beautiful aspects.:

Prague by Arthur Phillips, Random House, hc, 367pp, $37.95