Disappointment with Prague

I bought Prague: A Novel quite a while ago, and it's been on my bedside table for a long time. Despite what you might assume, Prague is not about Prague, but about Budapest--more specifically, a group of expats living in Budapest. As I am/was writing a novel about expats living in Budapest (write what you know!), I didn't want to read this book for fear I would love it and give up on mine in despair, or that I would somehow subconsciously steal from it as I continued my own book.

However, my Great American Novel (would it truly be American if it is about Hungary?) has been collecting dust for about a year, and although I'm about 10 good-sized chapters in, the first chapter doesn't match the rest, and I need to do research about the American Air Force base outside of Szeged... and .... I decided that reading Prague couldn't hurt me now.

After the first couple chapters my high expectations were only rising. I loved the characters and the descriptions of a city I know so well. In fact, one character works at the US Embassy, and I was using a business card from that same Embassy as a bookmark. However, as the plot progressed I got more and more ...well...disgusted. This could have been a beautiful story of 20-somethings creating their identities in a society recreating itself after 40 years of communism, a failed revolution, being caught on the wrong side of two World Wars, and Trianon (aka Treaty of Versailles) which stripped the country of something like 60% of the land and 40% of the population (my numbers might be off) they had at their Hapsburgian peak. This story didn't need gratuitous sex and nastiness to describe the degenerate nature of certain characters, but apparently the author couldn't get creative and went for the easy path.

Oh well. Arthur Phillips, the author, can WRITE, and I was impressed with his novel, but I couldn't recommend it broadly. If you are interested in post-communist Europe, or the social phenomena of nostalgia, dreams, and expectations...then you would want to read this book. It has some great things to say about people never being satisfied and needing to rewrite the past in order to justify their current failings. But otherwise it's not really worth the slog.

Maybe I will write my book after all. I like the first chapter...