The book follows five young expats in Budapest in the early 90s, right after the Velvet Revolution, and right before Czech shed Oslovakia. There's Mark, a Canadian grad student who devotes every minute of his existence to studying nostalgia. It's every bit as circular as you might think. There's Emily, a somewhat bland midwesterner indulging an Electra complex by working as an American embassy assistant to impress her civil servant father. There's Charles, a Hungarian-American who shifts between the cultures according to whichever one he disdains less at the moment. And then there are the Californian brothers, Scott and John--one of whom has a love-hate relationship with his brother, while the other has a hate-hate one. John, who follows Scott to Prague for foolishly optimistic bonding reasons, becomes the ostensible protagonist of the book 'cause he's young, and can talk earnestly about how the MTV generation coming of age in the late 80s is going to fix everything. The five are friends more or less due to proximity and shared American-ness, but become entangled despite always seeming annoyed with one another. They do share, however, the nagging feeling that everything would be more interesting if only they were living in Prague instead.The novel follows them (particularly John) as they move throughout Budapest, glib and hopelessly American despite their deepening interactions with the locals. It's kind of like a slightly downer L'Auberge Espagnole. Phillips does a good job of contrasting the promise of a new Hungarian culture (McDonalds! American t-shirts!) in 1990 with the gray, lingering vestiges of Communist-era thinking. The twentysomething characters become involved with old guard figures, like a septaugenarian lounge singer with crazy war stories to spare, and Horvath, the heir of a Hungarian publisher whose fortunes fluctuated with the country's.
Phillips devotes almost half of the book to the story of that press (the Horvath Kiado), and Horvath's eventual ruin at the hands of one of the young protagonists. I think this was a risky choice--I found the movement back and forth from the history to the present too jarring. The structure of the book was my biggest issue with it. Also, probably due to being a first-time novelist at the time, Phillips seemed unsure of what to do with the characters past a certain point, letting them devolve into soapy plots and odd endings.
I did like the overall Phillips style, though, and am willing to forgive a lot in a first novel.
Parts I liked especially:
"Whatever safety precautions Mark Payton had taken in graduate school while clinically investigating the toxins of nostalgia, they had been insufficient."
"Of course, vegetarian cooking was elusive, and the air quality left a lot to be desired, but the city was good-looking, and you could breathe fine if you stayed in shape, avoided hostility and fat, ate three garlic cloves each morning, absorbed plenty of antioxidants, avoided yeast bread within three hours of a scheduled elimination, lived up in the Buda hills, and avoided rigidity in your attitudes."
"As the band tuned up underneath the blue sky, white clouds, and long-gone heroes, the saxophonist introduced the first number, " 'Beatrice,' a lovely tune written by the saxman Sam Rivers for his wife."
Nadja listened in silence for seveal minutes. 'It is a pretty tune, no? And a time-honored tradition, I think: Write something pretty, name it for your wife or lover, and vow it will make her immortal. A familiar lie, yes? You men all do that, John Price."
"In business school, you know, the phrase had a distinct meaning. 'I'm going into publishing' meant something very specific. Like when you came out of an exam and someone asked you how you did and you knew you blew it, you just said, 'It looks like I'm going into publishing.' Or someone gets nailed with a professor's question on a case study, unprepared, and they fumble it, you can hear other students in the class singsonging: 'Looks like somoene's going into publishing!'"
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