Prague
by Arthur Phillips
Random House

In the opening scene of "Prague," five players take turns making four seemingly sincere statements to the others in a game called Sincerity. Three of the statements must be untruths; the fourth must be true. It's an engaging setup, a prologued motif about the guarded search for honesty in a jaded and cynical setting.

The story takes place in Budapest in 1990 and focuses on a group of circumstantial friends tenuously linked a by a common language. Scott Price, the most immediately recognizable character, teaches conversational English to "the local savages." He's a clever, condescending malcontent hiding from his future at home. As standard a character in a novel about expatriates as Scott may be, he eventually is exposed as a far more complex individual with real reasons for avoiding his future, which is inextricably linked with his painful, abusive past.

The novel attempts to deal with both nostalgia for home and the loaded experience of a Lost Generation-informed expatriate community. While the book's inhabitants cast a critical eye on the romantic mythology of an expatriate's relationship to a city, each character also develops a strong sentimental bond with "Pest," as they refer to the city they come to, which manifests itself as a desire to control exclusively the city's exotic charms. "Who are these people?" Scott asks, when confronting the summer's first wave of tourists. "These are not us."

Eventually the draw of Budapest fizzles for both the reader and the novel's characters. We're told that "Prague is so far beyond," which is overheard in a nightclub crowded with "foreign devils." Prague is posited as "the big attraction"; the place where, ostensibly, the dreams not realized in Budapest may be found. The city of Prague, for this group, is a conflicting other space of romantic possibility, while ultimately merely another serial tourist destination.

In the middle of this cynicism is John Price, the younger brother of Scott, a journalist at the English-language paper in Budapest. The game of Sincerity sets up John's introduction to the group, his first interaction with the characters with whom he will spend most of his time. He is soon positioned as the mildly heroic protagonist set to transcend the funk of his peers.

Early in the story he sheds blood for jealously mistaking a local woman in the arms of her boyfriend for the woman he's in love with, and he's later berated during an interview in which he provokes a group of U.S. Marines ("So are you guys all into Rambo") by arguing the "total futile insanity" of the first World War. "There is no 'grand scheme of things,'" one of the marines explains to him. "The present has no right to judge the past. Or to act in order to win the future's approval."

John's conversion to a more sensible reading of nostalgia stops short of his friends' absolute dismissal of sentiment for a given time or place. He eventually realizes that nostalgia for an unattainable setting is equal parts fact, myth and the emotional response of the individual. A longing for the past, be it one's own or one read about in books, is necessarily informed by one's current position.

— Cory O'Malley (comalley@hotmail.com)