Being an author requires some maturity and a thick skin

Arthur Phillips, grow up! Arthur Phillips, for those of you as yet unacquainted with the neophyte novelist, is the author of Prague, a novel set in post-Communist Budapest.



Arthur Phillips, grow up! Arthur Phillips, for those of you as yet unacquainted with the neophyte novelist, is the author of Prague, a novel set in post-Communist Budapest.


The novel has received rave reviews in the American press, in such august publications as the New Yorker, which is a notable achievement for any first-time writer.


Phillips? book is called Prague, supposedly because all of us who decamped here after the collapse of the Soviet Bloc secretly wanted to be in Prague.


Now this may be a smart bit of marketing acumen, that has got lots of people talking about the book, but it is also nonsensical. There have long been regular trains, planes and buses linking the two cities, so anyone who wanted to be in the Czech capital is quite free to go there. Perhaps Arthur Phillips should have.


I have been to Prague many times. Certainly the city does boast beautiful architecture, but personally, I have never been particularly captivated by the Czechs. Friends have worked there recount that the national traits (a generalization, I admit) seem to be a combination of Germanic rigidity and obeisance to authority, combined with a general Slavic lackadaisicalness.


Perhaps diet is influenced by character. Fuelled on powerful red wine and spicy paprika-laden food, Hungarians work out how things can be made to happen. Czechs, raised on a diet of beer and dumplings, will ponderously explain to you why they cannot. There is perhaps some truth in the old joke about the pre-1938 state of Czechoslovakia, a nation described as "so neutral, it does not even interfere in its own affairs". (Although just a couple of years ago the good citizens of the town of Usti nad Labem proved quite efficient at building a wall to section off the Gypsy quarter.)


Anyway, I digress. Mr Phillips has got himself in a lather over the review of his book by my colleague Lucy Mallows. Lucy, it seems, did not much like Prague and poor Arthur has dispatched a furious missive in reply, which was published in last week?s The Budapest Sun. It is very long and detailed, which is often a sign of obsession. But at least it is not written in green ink or capital letters. Or if it was, it has been edited. Angry Arthur rails at Lucy for a lengthy litany of alleged sins, including dishonesty, misquotation, misspellings and general heresy for failing to hail Arthur as the great hope of post-Communist Eastern European literature.


As a published author myself I find all this rather distasteful. Arthur, if you write a book with your name on it, and send it out into the wide world, there will - horror of horrors - be readers that don?t like it. Reviewers write reviews, based on their opinions. Be a man, and take the criticism like one. Be glad that you are noticed, and don?t write ranting petty letters about spelling mistakes.


Prague is not without merit. Its main one is that while many of us spent hours talking about how we were going to write the great zeitgeist work of post-1989, Phillips went away and did it. And got it published, with a reported six figure advance, by a major American publisher. No wonder he looks smug, if a bit nervous, on his jacket photograph.


The book certainly captures something of that time, when a new world full of possibilities beckoned in this part of Europe, and few of us understood the pain and complications that underpinned it.


But Prague?s main weakness is profoundly weak characterization. A cast of 20-something Americans suffering from a pre-mid-life crisis does not engage the reader. I found myself unmoved by the fate of most of them, although the older Hungarians were more nuanced. Perhaps Phillips? young Americans, like the author himself, just need to exhibit more maturity.

05.09.2002