Innocents Abroad

By Lev Grossman Sunday, June 09, 2002
    • If you were going to chuck it all and strike out for an exotic foreign destination — no plans, no forwarding address, no regrets — Eastern Europe wouldn't necessarily be the first destination on your list. Picture the travel brochure. Weird alphabets! Crumbling infrastructure! All the boiled cabbage you can eat! Perhaps they had never heard of Paris.

    And yet when the Iron Curtain went down in 1991, hordes of American slackers poured into East bloc cities like Prague, Cracow and Budapest, quaint, cobblestoned capitals where a recent college grad could sit in a cafe all day, smoke bad cigarettes, drink bad wine, bask in the low, low exchange rates and attempt to write the Great American Novel. In 1991 the inaugural issue of the English-language weekly Prague Post proclaimed, "We are living in the Left Bank of the '90s." So where are those novels, and how great are they? A decade later — blame it on those long Slavic siestas — the Hemingways of the East bloc are finally here.


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    The heroes of these books aren't the cynical, world-weary salonistas of The Sun Also Rises. They're innocents abroad, naive Candides hungry for an education, spiritual or otherwise. Take the character named Gurney, protagonist of John Beckman's The Winter Zoo. Gurney abandons his pregnant girlfriend in an Iowa delivery room and flees to Cracow to join his cousin Jane. Jane turns out to be a Mephistophelean temptress of the first order, and she schools Gurney in the pleasures of the flesh, turning his stay in Cracow into an all-hours, all-you-can-eat buffet of food, booze, art and piquantly incestuous sex. What makes the novel work is that Beckman's Cracow has two faces, comic and tragic. The city enables their excesses, but at the book's most chilling moments it finds ways to remind them of the consequences of that excess in a way that an American city never could. When Gurney peeks below that cute cobblestoned surface, he finds the ravages of communism, and beneath them, the horrors of the Holocaust.

    If the innocents of The Winter Zoo are looking for pleasure, Vladimir Girshkin, the hero of Gary Shteyngart's first novel, The Russian Debutante's Handbook, is after money. Girshkin isn't so much an expatriate but a repatriate — born in Leningrad and raised in New York City. Girshkin does a favor for a New York-based Russian mafioso, who pays him back by sending him to the East European city of Prava — read Prague — to run a pyramid scheme aimed at slumming young expats, the "pretty castoffs of well-to-do America, cruising along on their five-year plan of alcoholic self-discovery." They're easy marks, and easy targets for satire too. In less skillful hands, The Russian Debutante's Handbook could have turned into a fish-in-barrel exercise. But Shteyngart takes care to make his alter ego, Girshkin, look as ridiculous as his victims, and the result is a satisfying skewering all round, as funny and wicked as Waugh.

    Mark Phillips went to Budapest in search of money too, but by his own admission he didn't make much of it. He did produce Prague, a novel about five assorted young expatriates: a gay grad student, an idealistic young embassy staffer and so on — think The Budapest Breakfast Club. They form a loose, chatty little clique and stumble from bar to bar, job to job and bed to bed, often with the obliging locals. Their story lines go nowhere — a love affair fails to materialize, two angry brothers never make their peace — but the book almost stays aloft on Phillips' astonishing verbal verve. He has the gift of the perfect snarky one-liner (of a woman's too-pretty outfit: "She looked like she was auditioning for a douche ad"), but too much of the conversation has a quality of freshman dorm. There's a lot of talk about Nostalgia and Longing and Living in the Moment. One thing about innocents: they rarely say much that's original.

    The punch line of Prague is that the characters never get there — they're stuck in the backwater of Budapest. Prague is the symbol of everything they feel they're missing, the place where "life waited ... waited with some goal, achievable yet elegant and thrilling." The irony is, 10 years later, even Prague isn't Prague anymore. These days, the economy is looking up, the tourists have arrived, and you can't get a decent table. Whatever these writers were looking for there, it's long gone — these books are like lost postcards, smudged and crumpled, their point of origin already vanished. Where did Hemingway go after Paris? Havana. Well, at least the food is better there than Budapest.