In search of Old World cool

If the Age of Irony reached its comic peak with David Eggers and Jonathan Franzen, it's grown to full maturity in the debut work of a young man named Arthur Phillips. Yes, ironically, the apotheosis of coolness is a novel about Budapest called "Prague" by a Midwesterner who lives in Paris.

In a story of devastating emotional accuracy, striking intelligence, and irrepressible wit, Phillips follows five friends through Hungary in 1990. Here is a lost generation that knows it's a lost generation, a group of well-educated people who can sit at a European cafe and mock their imitation of the same dissipated scene from "The Sun Also Rises." Imagine Marcel Proust writing an episode of "Friends."

When the Soviet Union ended not with a bang but a whimper and the Berlin Wall collapsed, Eastern Europe seemed a golden field of opportunity and hipness – quite simply, the place to be.

"Budapest," the narrator notes, "just six months earlier an unlikely tourist attraction – began squeaking with new people eager to see History in the making, or to cash in on a market in turmoil, or to draw artistic inspiration from the untapped source of a cold-war-torn city, or merely to enjoy a rare and fleeting conjunction of place and era when being American, British, Canadian could be exotic."

Clearly, the advice of the moment is "Go East, young man – and woman." Phillips's novel joins a surprising number of books coming out this month that examine the expatriate experience: Ward Just's "The Weather in Berlin" takes a Hollywood film director back to his greatest success in East Germany; Gary Shteyngart's "The Russian Debutante's Handbook" follows the schemes of a young Russian trying to defraud a group of Americans in Prava; and Annie Ward's "The Making of June" plunges a naive Californian into the stark Balkans.

"Prague" focuses on a sensitive, principled young American named John, who's arrived in Budapest in a hopeless attempt to bond with his older brother, Scott.

The novel opens with one of its typically inventive moves: Some friends are playing an after-dinner game at the Café Gerbeaud in Budapest. Each player makes four statements, only one sincere. At the end, they earn points for correctly spotting others' candid remarks or tricking others into misidentifying their own lone truth.

In its pointlessness, its potential for abuse, and its elevation of insincerity to an art form, the game is a perfect metaphor for the treacherous arena these young people inhabit.

John quickly befriends every member of this North American enclave, except his older brother. He falls in love with Emily, a naive Nebraskan who works for the US ambassador and smells like corn on the cob. He hangs out with Mark, a depressed postdoc student who's doing research on the history of nostalgia. And he works as an undercover PR agent for Charles, a new investment banker who's determined to begin his career by extracting a few gems from the sludge of Hungary's economy.

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