Nowhere Man
by Aleksandar Hemon
Doubleday

With curious synchronicity, there appeared in the past six months three novels that individually achieved critical acclaim, and together, presented a sort of phenomenon. Each told the story of a young man's coming of age while crossing porous post-Cold War borders. Each was an unexpected accomplishment of language and cultural insight. Each exuded palpable self-reference. What, one wondered, had brought all of this frothing Slavic identity colliding with our pungent American generation X?

If there is a gestation period for the melancholy escapades of the displaced East European male, Gary Shteyngart, Jonathan Safran Foer and Aleksandar Hemon have brought it to term.

Imagine a meeting of this young literary troika, the creators of Vladimir Girshkin, Alex Perchov and Jozef Pronek respectively: How would Hemon, a writer who achieved a mastery of English only in his 30s, respond to the 25-year-old Foer's conceit of deliberately mangling the language? Probably, like most critics, with praise.

And what would Hemon and Shteyngart have to say about their shared honor of being compared with Nabokov? In this fantasy, they nod over strong coffee, saving spoken words for the mortar of prose.

The most ticklish subject might be humor and its retrieval. Tragicomedy comes easy in the bloodline of Soviet Jews like Perchov and Girshkin. For a Bosnian whose ethnicity is "complicated," immediate and fresh carnage defies levity, even witnessed from the distance of exile.

Aleksandar Hemon first astonished critics two years ago with "The Question of Bruno," a poignantly lyrical collection that included the seeds of his new novel in a story called "Blind Jozef Pronek and the Dead Souls." "Nowhere Man" is the still unfinished saga of Hemon's quasi-autobiographical protagonist.

Told in a non-chronological succession of narrators, the novel opens with a chance encounter between Jozef Pronek, a sullen student in an ESL class in Chicago, and a former neighbor from his childhood in Sarajevo. We conclude that Pronek is bitter, his neighbor is conflicted and that both of them cherish memories of their former selves with the tactile sense of a smooth marble in a schoolboy's pocket.

A second voice takes us back to the Bosnian capital where Pronek and his friends embrace the Beatles, girls with suntans, pubescence and, most importantly, sevdah: "a feeling of pleasant soul pain, when you are at peace with your woeful life, which allows you to enjoy this very moment with abandon." We are grateful that he can do so, knowing what is in store for this blissful hometown.

From the petulant but heartwarming Jozef of Sarajevo, we are easily captivated by his next incarnation — an irrepressible exchange student who breaks the heart of the next narrator. And so it goes until we are suddenly back in the company of a melancholy transient — Pronek in America, aimless, misunderstood and faltering. Finally, with an explosion of despair we come full circle, as our hero lies disconsolate, comforted by a surreal alter-ego. We remember that when we first met him, he was reading aloud a passage about Siamese twins. In the hijinx of self-searching, Pronek is in good company with the heroes of Shteyngart's "The Russian Debutante's Handbook" and Foer's "Everything is Illuminated." But while Girshkin and Perchov's roots are messy and confusing, Pronek's are literally under siege. As characters, they are all familiar enough to be real, but only Jozef Pronek holds something back, the true sign of authenticity.

The juggled narration keeps Pronek slightly out of focus. He is ordinary, he is extraordinary, he is an object of recognition, desire and pity. If, in his Beatle absorption, he identifies with "Nowhere Man," he appears to his readers as Everywhere Man — present at all the insignificant moments of a collective story of displacement and quest. In the final segment of the novel, he resurfaces as the alias of a charlatan spy parading about the Orient in the early 20th century, an elusive chameleon whose haunting presence sparks fear and violence in our original narrator.

In this ultimate manifestation, Pronek is reminiscent of a character from "The Question of Bruno": the marvelous Alphonse Kauders who, in the course of time, derided Hitler, scolded Stalin, and whispered in the ear of Gavrilo Princip, "Shoot brother, what kind of Serb are you?" This is wondrous stuff, a sort of lewd Forrest Gump or sadistic Zelig leaving maxims in his bloody tracks. One of these serves a perfect epigraph for Jozef Pronek, Nowhere Man: "I am myself, everything else is stories."

Hemon's writing is beautiful. The cries of "Nabokov!" are not unwarranted, although the happiest outcome of the accolades may be in the author's own response: "If Nabokov managed to make love with the English language," he once noted, "I'm happy with heavy petting."

The sexuality is pleasant; in Hemon's writing the most mundane object is animated with motives, emotions, and come-ons. Sometimes his metaphors banish moderation, stopping narration entirely as readers wait entranced by the slow untangling of the telling. Again I think of Alphonse Kauders, who wooed young ladies with a show of placing an entire fist in his mouth. In the course of time he was moved to try two fists, breaking teeth as a result.

The desperations of warm-blooded men (in Kiev, in Chicago, in Sarajevo, in New York, in Lviv, in D.C.) — on this subject Hemon, Foer and Shteyngart speak in one voice.

— Elizabeth Kiem (eckiem@yahoo.com)