Phillips, Arthur 1969–

views updated

Phillips, Arthur 1969–

PERSONAL: Born 1969, in Minneapolis, MN; married; children: two sons. Education: Graduated from Harvard University. Hobbies and other interests: Jazz music.

ADDRESSES: Home—New York, NY Agent—Marly Rusoff & Associates, Inc., P.O. Box 524, Bronxville, NY 10708.

CAREER: Writer. Worked variously as a child actor, jazz musician, speechwriter, and entrepreneur.

AWARDS, HONORS: Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction, Los Angeles Times, 2003, and New York Times Notable Book selection, both for Prague.

WRITINGS:

Prague (novel), Random House (New York, NY), 2002.

The Egyptologist, Random House (New York, NY), 2004.

Angelica: A Novel, Random House (New York, NY), 2007.

Author of introduction to The Diaries of Geza Csath; contributor of short story to Wild East: Stories from the Last Frontier.

SIDELIGHTS: Arthur Phillips's first novel, Prague, explores the world of twenty-something American expatriates living in Europe in the days following the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the twentieth-century Cold War. The novel takes place in 1990 and follows a group of five characters who are drawn to the fledgling democracy of Budapest, Hungary, where they hang out in cafés and soak up the post-communist milieu of decay and deprivation for their own amusement. The egocentrism and capitalist desires of these five contrast with the novel's Hungarian characters, most of them older survivors of war, chaos, and torture who are dismayed to find their homeland overrun with backpacking Westerners eager to stake a claim on capitalism's latest frontier. The five North Americans, chagrined to find nothing much going on in ancient and decaying Budapest, become convinced that their counterparts in Prague, Czechoslovakia, are witnessing a more exciting, more spectacular facet of this moment in history.

Readers meet Phillips's characters as they play a game they call "Sincerity," in which each person takes turns concocting lies and truths about themselves, daring the others to tell the difference. In reality, each remains oblivious to his or her true nature, which includes the vulture-like tendency to prey upon the dregs of Hungarian culture for artistic and intellectual sustenance. Laura Miller noted in a review for Salon.com that Prague describes "a particular historical wedge of humanity with a penetrating accuracy, a generation so gorged on images and conceits that everything it sees or does feels 'impossibly and automatically insincere.'"

Prague's protagonist is John Price, an eager reporter for the English-language newspaper Budapest Today whose critical view of women and his commitment to celibacy are both thwarted by the fetching Emily, a Nebraska native employed at the city's U.S. Embassy. While John idolizes his older brother, an English teacher and fitness fanatic named Scott whom he has followed to Budapest, Scott has nothing but contempt for John. The brothers' relationship is further tested when John commits "fratultery" by sleeping with Scott's fiancée. Meanwhile, Charles Gabór, a young Hungarian-American armed with a newly-minted MBA and an inflated sense of self-importance, schemes to buy out Budapest's prestigious family-owned Horvath Press while Mark Payton, a gay Canadian Ph.D. student researching the history of nostalgia, becomes weighed down by the philosophical questions his presence in Budapest engenders.

The Hungarian perspective is represented by Nadja, an elderly pianist who entrances John with tales of daring escapes and rescues spanning one regime after another, and Imre Horvath, patriarch of the Horvath Press, who sees Charles as something less than a gallant protector of his company. Miller noted the similarity between Charles and Imre, "two men of similar talents and temperaments [who are] rendered very different as a result of having been born at different times in different nations."

Phillips's novel derives its title from his characters' desire to be in the beautiful city of Prague rather than in Budapest, a city one fictional resident describes as a "paprika-stained Austrian test market." Prague, then, becomes a symbol of longing, of wanting to be somewhere else. Phillips explained in an essay posted on his Web site that to John, "a young man who aspires to Life, but only leads a life, Prague glows—the place where Real Life carouses, a party where you were expected an hour ago." Phillips continued: "In Prague, the present limps to a sorry third-place finish, far behind the potential glories of the future and the fairytale splendor of the past. That the actual city of Prague resembles the lovely, ghostly setting of a dimly recalled and yearningly significant fairytale is no mean coincidence."

Phillips's fiction debut was well received by critics, who compared his work to that of literary artists ranging from nineteenth-century novelist Henry James to filmmaker Whit Stillman. Also noted by many reviewers was the influence of Milan Kundera, whose novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being served as a handbook for many American expatriates during the early 1990s. Edward Cone commented in Library Journal that "Phillips's exhilarating exploration of time, memory, and nostalgia brings to mind such giants as Proust and Joyce." Los Angeles Times Contributor Heller McAlpin found the novelist's narrative style reminiscent of "Robert Altman's overlapping simultaneity and Bertolt Brecht's alienation technique." A reviewer for Publishers Weekly dubbed Phillips's writing "swift, often poetic, unerringly exact with voices and subtle details of time, place and weather." McAlpin further compared Phillips to twentieth-century novelists Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, who wrote about the "Lost Generation" of Americans living in Paris between the two world wars, and commented that Prague "has scope, historical perspective and complexity, especially rare in many first novels." Janet Maslin noted in the New York Times that the novel tends to "tilt toward its most easily satirized fixtures at the expense of its more admirable ones" but added that "the beauty of Prague lies in Mr. Phillips's empathy for their lapses. In the end he presents them with a wry generosity and haunting poignancy to rival his wonderfully subversive wit."

The contrast of American naïveté with European reality is one of Phillips's main themes. His setting is a "vividly evoked backdrop of a bullet-pocked country with a century's worth of hardships that are essentially unfathomable to most Americans," explained McAlpin. In the essay posted on his Web site, Phillips explained that during his own tenure in Budapest he observed that "every last Hungarian had lived through scathing events that most of the invading young Westerners had only read about or seen on television. This often inspired an odd, mutual envy."

Another theme of the book is the characters' inability to comprehend that they, by their mere presence, are not the saviors or liberators of Eastern Europe. Adam Good-heart explained in the New York Times Book Review that "as Prague progresses, each of the five foreigners … becomes less and less attractive, and the satiric edge to Phillips's portrayal sharpens into something close to anger: at their solipsism, their savage cynicism, their detachment from their surroundings and from one another. For all their pretensions to something grander and more picturesque, they are nothing but tourists—not just in Hungary but in their own lives and in the world at large." McAlpin concluded that Prague is "a substantive book that braves the clichés of expat ennui to consider such issues as sincerity, scruples and the vicissitudes of history."

In his second novel, The Egyptologist, Phillips tells the story of Egyptologist Ralph Trilipush and his search for an ancient Egyptian monarch's tomb, which may or may not exist. Trilipush has previously published poems by the monarch that he claims to have discovered, but observers see the writings as being mere pornography and begin to suspect Trilipush's trustworthiness. Furthermore, Trilipush is under suspicion in connection with the death of a young Australian Egyptologist and is being investigated by an Australian detective. Trilipush and the detective narrate their own stories, but readers will likely question the truthfulness of each character. Kyle Smith, writing in People, referred to The Egyptologist as a "cracked, utterly engulfing detective tale." A Publishers Weekly contributor wrote: "Phillips is a master manipulator, able to assume a dozen convincingly different voices at will, and his book is vastly entertaining."