In search of Old World cool

The story moves fluidly, sometimes even dreamily, through John's experience in a culture that's swirling with nostalgia, deception, perseverance, and promise. With no particular skills to offer, he gets a job as a newspaper columnist from an insanely erratic editor with multiple accents. His assignment is to mingle with the natives and the expats and write commentary that's "punchy, snide, modern."

John is not naturally any of these things, but he can do a wicked imitation, a skill that drags him through a year of moral discovery, almost all of it negative.

His dedication to chastity, romance, and loyalty can't possibly survive in this atmosphere, and the emotional flailing he endures leaves him clutching old values he can't fulfill – or relinquish. His brother returns his affection with disdain, Emily ignores his entreaties, an avant-garde artist he sleeps with exploits their intimacy for her paintings, and he finds himself serving as a reluctant liar in Charles's scheme to defraud a noble old publisher.

(One of the novel's four sections jumps out of sequence to trace this publishing house through 200 years of Hungarian history. Structurally, it's an interruption that makes no sense, but like everything else in this clever novel, Phillips carries it off brilliantly.)

What afflicts all these characters to a greater or lesser degree is crippling self-consciousness, a nostalgia reflex that treats every current experience as the material for some future memory. Real life, meanwhile, remains always frustratingly out of reach.

These poor postmodern people are trapped in the refractions of their criticism. When John leaves a club after another unsatisfying date with Emily, for instance, he leans against the lamppost and smokes, but immediately he realizes it's "a moment sticky with clichés." Then he sees "the silliness of seeing the silliness of it, and feels the pleasantly dry, infinitely regressing amusement he can feel at his own expense."

Only the ancient jazz singer John befriends possesses the kind of authenticity he craves, but his slick friends deconstruct all her romantic tales. Trapped in this prism of critical analysis, these people will never suffer an "unexamined life," but their laser irony burns every potentially fulfilling moment to ash.

Phillips holds a precarious balance in "Prague," satirizing the rituals of modern culture while cradling John's desperate search for a worthy life. This is one of the most sophisticated and profound novels I've read in years, a witty, humane tale of a generation stumbling in a dim glow that could be dawn or twilight.

• Ron Charles is the Monitor's book editor. Send e-mail comments tocharlesr@csmonitor.com.

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