PRAGUE by Arthur Phillips

In 1990 Budapest—not Prague—a group of half a dozen twenty-somethings congregate at bars and jazz clubs.  All are expats, trying to make their mark.  John, a journalist for a local English-language newspaper, is the main character and has followed his brother, Scott, to Budapest, much to Scott’s dismay.  John has a thing for Emily, a girl Friday at the American embassy.  Mark is writing his dissertation on nostalgia and spends an entire day riding the mountainside cable car just to savor the view.  (He then imagines that he appears in a corner of all the tourist photos taken on the funicular that day.)  Charles, who interested me the most, evaluates local businesses for a private equity firm and decides to invest personally in a small publishing business after his firm passes on it.  (The almost 200-year history of this family-owned business gobbles up a pretty long chunk of the novel and serves as a device for the author to share some Hungarian history as well.)   In one of my favorite scenes, Charles is meeting with one of the press’s staffers, who extols the virtues of the small publishing company’s owner, while Charles contemplates pickup lines for later in the evening.  The interleaving of these two trains of thought is clever and hilarious, and I would have appreciated more moments like this.  The pace of the book is not supersonic and left me with a few dangling unanswered questions, although perhaps I just wasn’t astute enough to figure out what happened to a couple of characters who exited Hungary.