Prairie Son by Dennis M. Clausen (1999. Mid-list Press. ISBN 0922811393)

Ever wonder what it would be like to be utterly and totally alone in the world? Lloyd Clausen, the roustabout, laboring, job-changing father of the author of this terrific diary-turned-memoir-turned-novel lived that life during much of the 20th century. Set on the southwestern prairie of Minnesota (near Morris, though the closest town in the story is Alberta (pop. 142)), the author asked his father, as the old man was dying from cancer, to jot down stories of his youth and upbringing. Given that Lloyd Clausen had been adopted from an orphanage, was raised by what Dennis perceived to be a loving and devoted mother (his paternal grandmother), the intent of the exercise was to create a traditional family history. But when Dennis found yellow legal pads filled with his father’s scribbling after Lloyd’s passing, the author knew he had the makings of something far more intriguing and gut-wrenching than a lovingly portrayed narrative.

What took place after 1922 in the Clausen home was physical abuse and an utter and complete lack of love: That’s the environment that young Lloyd was dropped into by the Stevens County Human Services folks when the Clausens adopted the boy as an infant. Early in the story, we are provided a clear vision of what hell would look like for a scared, unloved, unwanted orphan. Lloyd’s (and the author’s) view of Lloyd’s parents softens a bit over time, not so much because the Clausens actually change due to the intervention of morality but more because outsiders, who learn of Lloyd’s plight (and his parents’ behavior towards him), step in to lend the boy love and, at times, protection. These characters range from illiterate farmers who protect Lloyd from a vengeful local minister to the neighborhood bully, who seeing himself in the down and out face of Lloyd Clausen, takes Lloyd’s part against a mob of nasty town boys.

The scene involving the reverend seeking Lloyd’s expulsion from the country schoolhouse is a memorable one:

“I was standing in the middle of the road,” he began in a halting and nervous tone of voice, “when Lloyd threw a rock at me…” Marcus continued to look in my direction for several seconds, staring directly into my eyes. Then he looked back at the school board. “No,” he said, “that’s not the way it happened at all. Lloyd and I were playing a game. It was my idea…”

“It was not your idea!” Reverend Reese shouted. He started to stand again, but several members of the school board glared at him, and he sat down.

“It was my idea,” Marcus repeated…”I threw a rock at Lloyd’s shoes. He threw one back at my shoes. We did this several times. Then one of the rocks hit something in the road, flew up, and hit me above the eye. It was an accident…”

“He’s trying to protect his friend!” Reverend Reese yelled…

“Reverend Reese,” the chairman said firmly, “I really think you had better sit down.” Then he glanced at the other school board members, all of whom nodded in his direction. “I don’t think we need to hear from anyone else regarding this matter.”

The members of the school board huddled together briefly at the front of the room. They returned to the table. “Lloyd,” the chairman said warmly, “the members of the school board apologize that you were suspended…You are innocent of the charges…”

Then he turned to Reverend Reese and said, “As for you, Reverend Reese, if the school board ever again hears that you have tried to blame this incident on Lloyd, we will go to your church council, and we will tell them the whole story. You tell people the truth about what happened to your son, or you will be looking for a new parish.”

The point of this scene is twofold: It establishes that there were role models in young Lloyd’s life who stepped in to assist him in times of trouble. But it also establishes the gritty truth about his father’s lovelessness: Lloyd’s father never said a word to the school board or the reverend in defense of his son. Why? Because as we learn, the boy who grew up to be Lloyd Clausen was adopted not as a son but as a hired hand; a boy to grow into a man and work the family farm as a colt grows into a stallion to pull a plow. The bitterness and bleakness of this awful reality is tempered by folks like the school board and Delores, Lloyd’s cousin (also adopted but treated as a natural child by her parents) who show Lloyd love and kindness along his journey to adulthood.

My only criticism of the book is that it is a bit disjointed. The format, short vignettes that don’t always flow together in a cohesive narrative, often read more like excerpts from a diary than a sell-paced memoir. Still, the story has heart and is well written: So much so, I can guaranty you won’t want to put it down and that you will shed a tear or two at the book’s conclusion.

4 1/2 stars out of 5.

the Bones of Plenty by Lois Phillips Hudson (1962, 1984. Borealis Books. ISBN 0-87351-175-1)

One of the benefits of being asked to participate in Buffalo State University’s Rural Lit R.A.L.L.Y. blog discussion of bygone novels depicting America’s agrarian past is that, from time to time, you stumble onto something you’ve never read, never heard of, by an author you never even knew existed. As part of my affiliation with the Rural Lit blog site, the administrator of the blog sent me a used copy of the Bones of Plenty to read in preparation for an upcoming discussion. Similar in texture and tone to Minnesota author Herbert Krause’s epic tales about northwestern Minnesota (Wind Without Rain and The Thresher), Bones follows the successes and considerable failures of the tale’s red-headed protagonist, George Armstrong Custer (not the ill-fated general but a ND grain farmer named for the Indian fighter) during the Great Depression. It’s all here: the farm auctions where men from the surrounding community show up and bid so low, the sheriff escorting the banker gives up and leaves without completing the sale; the Jewish lender who, because he lost his neighbors’ life savings in speculative investments, vanishes under the cover of darkness; sickness, disease, and death; tragic farm accidents and dust storms that blot the sun.

At times poetic, Hudson allows George (and some lesser characters) to get a bit preachy, ranting for or against the men of power who control the strings of the populace’s existence to the point of distraction from the characters themselves. That’s the only real drawback to the writing and it is but a minor flaw. For the most part, Hudson, who was a professor at a number of colleges (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lois_P._Hudson for details) hits the nail squarely on its prairie influenced head. The female protagonists in the story, including Lucy (the eldest of George and Rachel Custer’s two daughters); Rachel Custer (George’s long suffering wife); and her mother, Ruth; are all extremely complex personalities as drawn by this author. So too are the men: George has a temper and is prone to corporal punishment of Lucy in brutal and rash ways and routinely cuts his wife to the quick; but somewhere behind his deep seated mistrust of society and the system he is bound to (he’s a tenant farmer on someone else’s land), George Custer loves his daughters and Rachel, a college educated woman who gave up teaching school for a life of hardship she never envisioned.

In looking for novels by Hudson (she’s the sort of writer you want to hear more from), I was disappointed: The only other book available on Amazon.com by this author is Reapers of the Dust which appears to be a collection of essays about Hudson’s childhood in North Dakota. While such real-life snippets of turmoil and angst might be someone else’s “cup of tea”, I was hoping for more fiction from this forgotten chronicler of the prairie. Sadly, this appears to be the only novel Lois Hudson finished before her death in 2010.

And that, given the quality of the prose in Bones is all of our loss.

4 and 1/2 stars out of 5. Readily available on amazon.com.

The Lincoln Lawyer by Michael Connelly (2005. Hachette Audio (audio version). ISBN 978-1-600247-2)

John Grisham’s latest efforts haven’t met with the same critical and fan success that his earlier works did. Grisham’s attempt at short fiction (Ford County Stories) was, as my review in the archives of this blog urges, poorly done compared to his other work. So picking up this legal thriller by yet another Grisham-wannabe for our ride back from Bozeman to Duluth after a recent ski trip, well, it was bound to be fraught with disappointment, right? I mean if the master of legal fiction is having trouble putting pen to paper, how can a newcomer to the genre like Connelly measure up. Am I right?

Turns out, The Lincoln Lawyer, with the exception of a minor plot implausibility or two, is a satisfying listen as an audio book. Calling biker clients to protect your ex-wife and daughter in the face of a serial killer (who is also, unfortunately, your client) when the ex is a DA rather than calling the police makes little sense. But that’s one of only a few minor diversions from a well constructed reality in this tale.

Micky Haller, the Irish American lawyer protagonist in this story is a very troubled man: He realizes, early on in the plot, that he blew it with a former client, a Hispanic named Hector, who is now doing life for something he didn’t do. Oh sure, Micky tries to rationalize away Hector’s fate by arguing (with himself) that the man was slated for the needle-that his work as a criminal defense lawyer saved the man from Death Row. But the nagging notion that Haller failed to recognize a truly innocent man, and now has confused sociopathic behavior with innocence in yet another client, haunts the lawyer.

The title is a clever twist being that Haller insists on being driven from scene to scene in the book by his hip-hop living African American driver in a Lincoln Town Car. He has a fleet of them, four to be exact, hence the title of the book. The dialogue is gritty and a bit tough for the ears of say, anyone under the age of twelve, but appropriate to the story. The characters, for the most part (the mother of the killer is a bit overdone and cartoonish as is her lawyer) are believable. Not better than say, The Verdict or The Firm, and certainly no To Kill a Mockingbird, The Lincoln Lawyer  is a compelling, well written piece of genre fiction.

4 stars out of 4.

The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold (2009. Hachette Audio Books (audio version). ISBN 978-1-60024-842-9)

Oh to have this talent. This is one of those books that, though deeply troubling in terms of its subject matter (the rape and murder of a 14 year old girl), is so beautifully constructed as to read (or sound) like a five hundred page poem. Most of you have likely seen the movie (starring Mark Wallberg as the grieving father and Stanly Tucci as the killer) or read the book in print. So why waste space here, on my blog, reviewing a book that nearly everyone knows something about?

First, as I started this review by saying, and as the title indicates, this is a magnificent work of great literary clarity and beauty. It is quite simply one of the best books of its time. The plot of the book, the dead girl, Susie Salmon (“like the fish”, she reminds us) looking down at the world she left behind from “her” heaven could have been maudlin and silly had some lesser writer thunk it up. Not so in the hands of Alice Sebold. The author is clearly a talented storyteller but also, and more important to a novel of this length and psychological depth, an excellent wordsmith. Her depictions of Mr. Harvey, the killer, and the Salmon family, including the feisty and determined younger sister (and potential victim) Lindsey Salmon, are all spot on. You will come to know each member of the Salmon family as intimately as your own kin. You will come to love and want to embrace the omnipresent Susie even though she is no longer with us. What could have been a card trick, a literary slight of hand had someone else attempted this tale becomes an American masterpiece.

Second, the audio version is read by Ms. Seboe, the author, and she acquits herself well in this effort. I’m not sure anyone would want me to read at them from my work, even if it were as polished and well crafted as this book, for nearly eleven hours. But Seboe’s voice has the perfect inflection and pitch to make this read a memorable one.

Finally, though I have read the book, watched the movie, and now listened to the novel as our Pacifica navigated through Montana on the way to Bozeman, I have to say that having my memory of Seboe’s hauntingly striking tale of love and loss reinforced by the audio version wasn’t overkill: It was sheer entertainment. I was not disappointed in hearing Susie Salmon’s tragic story one last time, from the author’s mouth. This is one of those rare flights of literary fancy that the author, in penning the book, got right and did not have the quality of her effort diminished by the movie or audio versions of her work.

5 stars out of 5. A stunningly gorgeous story.

One for the Money by Janet Evanovich (1996. Simon and Schuster (Audio version). ISBN 978-0-7435-5208-0)

The first Stephanie Plum crime novel brings the young out-of-work Jersey girl into the limelight as a skip tracing bail bondswoman whose first client turns out to be an ex-cop on the lam. I’m an Evanovich virgin so I didn’t know quite what to expect from the author. And, as a spoiler alert, my taste tends to literary novels rather than genre fiction, Still, with the entire width of North Dakota facing my wife, our youngest son, and me on a recent ski trip to Montana, I had my better half pop the discs into the changer of my Pacifica as we roared onto the Great Plains. We weren’t disappointed.

Evanovich uses all the tools of a traditional literary writer, including finely wrought characterizations of Plum, Morelli, and a menacing boxer turned psychopath, to create a believable and palpable sense of urgency and anxiety. We care about Stephanie Plum, want her to succeed, despite her numerous rookie mistakes. There are enough twists and turns to keep the action moving and enough surprises to make the book memorable. All in all, my first foray into Evanovich’s world of crime and criminals was a satisfying visit.

4 stars out of 4.

I Curse the River of Time by Per Petterson ( 2008. Translated 2010. Picador. ISBN 978-0-312-42953-9)

I got into Petterson’s prose ( I like how that phrase flows off the tongue) due to my pal, Dave Michelson’s insistence that I read Out Stealing Horses, Petterson’s best known novel. I fell for the Nordic vibe of Petterson’s writing style, a style that, in some subtle ways, reminds me of Icelandic legendary author, Harold Laxness. Though Petterson’s work tends to be more limited in terms of scope than say, Laxness’s iconic masterpiece, Independent People, there are similarities between the writers in terms of style and the Nordic poetry their writing evokes.

I Curse the River of Time is, however, to my mind, the least satisfying of the three Petterson novels I have read. This is not to say that the book was troubling, or short changed my expectations, in the same way American author Larry McMurty’s latest effort, When the Light Goes (see review below) did. Unlike McMurty, who, getting on in life, stumbled and fell (in a literary sense) writing When the Light Goes, into the common trap of aging male fiction writers who seem hell-bent to write about the sexual prowess of their male characters in the hope of reclaiming the author’s own youth, Petterson’s fall from literary grace is more subtle. I had particular difficulty sorting through scenes in the book that transitioned from the past to the past-past, as the protagonist related bits and pieces of a life lived as a Norwegian boy, young man, and middle-aged adult, in both Norway and Denmark. Beneath the story lies the contemporary whisper of the protagonist’s impending divorce, a circumstance that compels the first-person narrator to visit his aging mother who is dying of stomach cancer. Trouble is, at an earlier point in the narrative, she apparently also was diagnosed with stomach cancer, when her sons were young, only to find out that the diagnosis was apparently in error. Was the doctor wrong or did the present-day illness, the same illness discussed earlier in the book, simply lie dormant and symptomless for decades? I had a hard time following the time bending narrative of this book.

On the plus side, the language of Petterson’s prose is very poignant and poetic, the sort of rhythmic writing that compels a reader forward even if there is slight confusion in the plot. The scenes between the narrator and a young girl he beds (age appropriately, it seems) and the narrator and his wife as they court are very tastefully done and convey a sense of  longing and moral fiber in the narrator that seems to fall off and vanish in later scenes. A lesser work from a strong writer that, in the end, is satisfying enough to recommend as a good read.

4 star out of 4.

When the Light Goes by Larry McMurtry (2007. Simon and Schuster. ISBN 978-1-4165-3427-3) brings back the Duane Moore character from The Last Picture Show (see my review below) and Duane’s Depressed (which I haven’t read). When last I knew, Duane was off to fight the Korean War mainly because he’d run out of options to make a living and better himself in Thalia, Texas: a dusty, dirty, windy spit of a town located not far from the Oklahoma-Texas border. Turns out that Duane has made millions in the oil industry after returning to Thalia, settling down, getting married and having four kids. His wife of many years, Karla, is dead and gone, the result of a car accident. Duane, after sixty-plus years of hard living, has heart problems; both romantic and physical. Turns out, despite his aging, decaying body, he’s still something of a catch: Both his forty-something bisexual psychiatrist and the seemingly coy California girl his eldest son has hired to work in the oil company office want Duane in bed. What to do? Duane has had a heart attack and must tread lightly when it comes to physical activity, including the horizontal bop.That’s pretty much what this book is from page 1 to 195. I’ll give the author this: It’s a quick read but that’s due to the brevity of the tale, not because it’s a page turner.

I’ve written similar reviews regarding books penned by other late-in-life male authors including John Irving and James Harrison. My chief objection to the more recent work of these writers is their irrational obsession with sex. Not story, not character, not setting; just sex. Now, I’m no prude. I’ve used sexual content and scenes in any number of my novels and short fiction. Not always, but when the story merits a romantic, sexual lilt, I have no problem writing scenes that involve disrobing and the act of procreation. That’s not what’s going on here folks: The fading light that McMurtry so desperately laments isn’t Duane Moore’s physical prowess or sexuality. It’s the disappearance, the vanishing of great characters and dialogue, both of which can be found in The Last Picture Show and Lonesome Dove. The story here is predictable and without purpose. We’re left to follow the aimless, pointless wanderings of an old guy trying to figure out which younger lass to bed. Duane’s attempts at self-reflection (like sex between strangers) seems empty and forced. McMurtry certainly could have written a protagonist who is without morals, without empathy, without direction, the sort of character who would fit the role of an indulgent, aging male far better than Duane Moore. But he didn’t take that risk. He didn’t ring that bell. The author, in a very real sense, played it safe and the result is an uninspired and unimaginative story.

In sum, I found very little to like about this story or its characters. I’d save the $14.00 cover price and buy one of James McMurtry’s CDs instead. James is the very gifted musical son of the author who writes fantastic Texas-inspired songs that feature lonesome lyrics and finely mastered guitar. Don’t get me wrong, Larry McMurtry remains a man who still commands my respect: His authorship of  Lonesome Dove brought the oft-ridiculed genre of the Western into literary limelight. But the author who penned that tale, like the Duane Moore who inhabited Thalia at the time of The Last Picture Show isn’t to be found in the pages of When the Light Goes.

3 stars out of 5.

The Last Picture Show by Larry McMurtry (1966 and 1994. Simon and Schuster. ISBN 978-0-684-85386-4)

The title to this review isn’t meant to belie the fact that The Last Picture Show is, to a great degree, an American classic along the lines of The Heart is a Lonely Hunter  or To Kill a Mockingbird or East of Eden. Yet, unlike those books, which take on broad, larger-than-one-man-or-woman’s-existence-issues, McMurty’s tale of teenaged angst and maturation, while written in prose that calls to mind Carson McCullers , is more in line with The Graduate  or Catcher in the Rye in terms of the scope of story. There are no great debates contained within the pages of this novel, no rants or rages or discussions about race, gender, income inequality, or politics. And yet, the read is satisfying. Why? Because, as McMurtry would later reinforce in his the colossus-in-print Western to beat all Westerns, Lonesome Dove, Larry McMurtry is a first rate storyteller and a creator of memorable characters. As in Lonesome Dove, McMurtry  clearly understands the motivations and inner dialogue of both male and female characters inhabiting his worlds. And, there is much about life to be learned from language such as the following:

Duane was too bleary and sick to do more than grunt. His hair was plastered to his temples with sweat. “You drive,” he said.

By some miracle Sonny managed to wind his way through Matamoros to the Rio Grande-in daylight the water in the river was green. The boys stood groggily under the customs shed for a few minutes, wondering why in the world they had been so foolish as to come all the way to Mexico. Thalia seemed an impossible distance away. 

“I don’t know if I can make it,” Sonny said. “How much money have we got?”

They found, to their dismay, that their money had somehow evaporated. They had four dollars between them. There was the money that Sam, and Genevieve had given them, hidden away in the seat springs, but they had not planned to use that.

“I guess we can pay them back in a week or two,” Sonny said. “We’ll have to use it.”

This scene follows two young men (Duane and Sonny) having blown their cash on booze and whores in Matamoros, Mexico on a whimsical trip apart from their dull and unexciting lives in Thalia, Texas; a trip that Duane and Sonny thought would define their entry into the adult world. But, as McMurtry paints the picture, the wonders of Matamoros did not live up to expectations or lead to life-changing revelations of soul or spirit. In the end, Thalia is Thalia even if you’ve been to Mexico.

I read this book because I, like most of my generation, had seen the movie (gotta love a young Cybil Shepard!) years ago and thought it to be, on its own merit, an American classic. When I found out that McMurtry had reprised the character of Duane in a new novel, When the Light Goes, I wanted to read the new book but felt an obligation to read the original before doing so. After spending three days racing through The Last Picture Show, I can’t wait to go back to Thalia no matter how desolate the place may be.

5 stars out of 5. Not Lonesome Dove but then, what book is?

(Note: A Review of When the Light Goes will be forthcoming. I can only read so fast!)

Up North by Sam Cook (1986 and 2003. University of Minnesota Press. ISBN0-8166-4267-2)

Everyone needs a toilet book. At least I do. Something to divert one’s attention from the business at hand, so to speak. OK, that’s not strictly true. There are folks whose constitutions require only brief forays into the lavatory: I’m not one of them. Too much information? Sorry. Not relevant to a book review? Oh, but that’s where you’re wrong, dear reader.

Recently, when I’d finished the latest copy of Conservation Volunteer (that great little magazine put out by the Minnesota DNR) my literature of choice for the potty, I searched my bookshelf for something suitable for…contemplation. The stories have to be short, to the point, uplifting, and well written for a book to serve such a function. Sam Cook’s Up North is just such a collection. To be fair, it would also be great bedside material or sitting in the deer stand material or toss in your Duluth Pack and take along the trail material as well. In fact, that last application, where this thin volume is pulled out of a canvas satchel after a long day of paddling and portaging in the wilderness, opened before a roaring campfire, and read aloud, might be the most appropriate suggestion of the lot. Like a well-seasoned woman, you know, the kind with girl-next-door looks and keen intelligence who’s comfortable in a canoe, at the symphony ball, or giving birth, Up North seems to fit in wherever you decide to read it.

Not every story in this collection is great literature or reminds one of John Muir or Sig Olson or Aldo Leopold or Jack London (or any of our other great nature/outdoor/conservation writers). But there are some tales squeezed into the 180 pages of this seasonal work (the stories are arranged “Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter” as their topics dictate) that reach such heights. My favorite? The story of octogenarian brook trout fisherman Enok Olson. Just give a listen to this description of a day on the water with Enok in “The Trout Fisherman”:

Soon we could hear the stream, and finally, after sliding part way on our rear ends and climbing through some cedars, we were there.

At one of our pauses on the way down, Olson said, “We may not get any fish, but I know you’re gonna marvel when you see the river.” He was right This wasn’t just a stream. It was a canyon. Sheer walls of sedimentary rock rose from the water’s edge, some 40 feet high. Where there were no walls, the valley rose at a pitch like the one we had just slid down.

The water was low, almost as low as Olson ever remembered seeing it. In the shallows it was the color of weak tea, but coffee brown in the pools below the ledges and along those sheer walls.

Olson couldn’t wait to get a worm on his hook and get it in the water. He wasn’t asking for much. “If I get one fish, I’m happy,” he said. “If I get two fish, I’m really happy.”

He pulled his hip boots up, put his walking stick in front of him, and waded into the stream. It’s hard to imagine what it must be like to be stream fishing at 89 when you’re eyes won’t see all you want them to see and your wading legs aren’t as steady as they once were.

“They’d Rather Have Cash” takes readers inside L.L. “Newt” Newton’s fur buying operation in Grand Rapids, Minnesota, perhaps giving us a glimpse of what it was like to trade furs back in the heyday of the voyageurs. Cook’s descriptive and narrative powers are on fine display in that tale, drawing us into a world that most of us will likely never traverse. Some of the shorter pieces, like “Stocking Feet” whet our appetite. Cook teases us with the beginnings of a duck hunting story: We awaken with the protagonist, can smell the morning coffee, feel the crispness of the early morning air as we load our gear, but we don’t follow the story into the duck blind itself. That’s not a bad thing. It points out, as many of these essays do, how important the smells and sounds and tastes that accompany great trips or hunts are to our memory.

Sam Cook has been an icon in the Duluth writing community for decades. It’s a testament to his story telling ability that, when I pick up the latest Sunday edition of The Duluth News Tribune, his work is the first that I read. Here’s hoping he keeps writing great stories of the world outside our doors for years to come.

4 and 1/2 stars out of 5. Take this book along with you and read it aloud around the campfire on your next outing!

Prague by Arthur Phillips (2003. Random House. ISBN 0-375-7577-8)

Too harsh, you say? I don’t think so, kind readers. The book blurb from The New York Times  (the determinator (to coin a new Bushism) of good taste for American fiction readers) reads:

Ingenious…Phillips presents his characters with a wry generosity and haunting poignancy to rival his wonderfully subversive wit…”

Well, after slogging through 367 pages of Phillips’s prose, I am a bit confused: I never found much evidence of “haunting poignancy” in this novel. Oh, there were fits and starts of a story (several stories in fact) in the form of some intriguing character sketches. One actress in this aborted play set in early 1990 Budapest, Nicky the bi-sexual, cropped hair, photographer and painter, is particularly well crafted and comes off as a complete, if flawed, human being. The primary protagonist, John (a journalist working at a tabloid in the Hungarian capital) is less fully developed, though Phillips does spend a great amount of paper and ink creating a tale of ugly sibling rivalry between John and his brother Scott, a conflict that finally disipates into thin air like smog from Budapestian traffic. That’s the pattern that is repeated time and time again throughout this novel: Characters are introduced through great chunks of narrative and dialogue that seemingly ramble on for pages, only to have those actors vaporize without any resolution of their respective roles in the overall plot.

Now it may be that I am too dunderheaded to appreciate challenging, new-era prose for the genius that it is. I am a fairly straight forward sort of a guy who responds best to novels told in classic fashion. So take this criticism with a grain of salt if you relish the odd, the brinksmanship of say, Ulysses. I’m just not that interested in stories that don’t take me to a conclusion where sense is made; where the inner and outer turmoil of fictional characters comes to a point of resolution. That’s my main criticism of this book: The writing is, overall, nicely done (with the exception of the dialogue, which tends to denigrate into speechifying) but the story is so disjointed and unrelentingly inconsequential, I found myself wanting more and getting less. For example, about half-way through the tale, Phillips introduces us to Imre Horvath, an old man and the last of a publishing dynasty that has printed Hungarian literature for over a century. Much of the second section of the book deals with Horvath’s attempts to obtain the rights to the Hungarian portion of his family’s former empire as the Communists leave power and free enterprise returns to Budapest. Charles, another main character (part of the cadre of expatriates integral to the overall story as they move through the city and plot as a group, as a band of merrymakers) ends up working with Horvath in the old man’s efforts to reunite the company. Phillips gives us, through Horvath’s piece of the overarching “pie” that sometimes resembles a plot and sometimes resembles a series of vignettes, a reason to become intrigued. But the effort doesn’t satisfy because, just as soon as we are captured by the old man’s story, we’re off again chasing the cherished Emily (the somewhat infantile and unfeeling object of John’s romantic love); or watching Mark, a gay Canadian of means implode; or sitting in the corner of John’s bedroom voyeuristically watching as he deflowers a Hungarian speed skater.

I’ll admit to it: I was looking for another Per Petterson novel after reading Out Stealing Horses and stumbled upon this book in the “P’” section at our local Barnes and Noble. I’d never heard of Arthur Phillips or the book but given I have a desire to someday go to Prague and act like a typical boorish American tourist, and given that the cover is extremely captivating, I picked up a copy (along with Petterson’s To Siberia which was a far better read. You can find a review of To Siberia and Out Stealing Horses below). To my mind, Prague doesn’t live up to its cover blurbs or its cover.

One final note. The title of this review comes from the fact that the story is set in Budapest, not Prague. The inside joke amongst the characters, if you will, is that they all long to live in Prague, which, during the early 1990s, was seen as the cultural equal to 1920s Paris by American men and women of creative bent. I wanted Prague and got Budapest. That, in and of itself, isn’t all bad and I’ll give Phillips an “A” for clever deception. But I really did want to be find myself immersed in a story set in Prague, with characters and a plot that made me desire to visit there immediately. I felt no such visceral longing for Budapest as a result of reading this book. I won’t say that my time spent in Hungary was completely wasted but I will say the tour guide could have been more succinct and direct in the construction of his truth.

3 and 1/2 stars out of 4.