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Summary
Summary
ONE OF THE YEAR'S BEST BOOKS
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" Necessary Errors is a very good novel, an enviably good one, and to read it is to relive all the anxieties and illusions and grand projects of one's own youth."--James Wood, The New Yorker
The exquisite debut novel by the author of Overthrow that brilliantly captures the lives and romances of young expatriates in newly democratic Prague
It's October 1990. Jacob Putnam is young and full of ideas. He's arrived a year too late to witness Czechoslovakia's revolution, but he still hopes to find its spirit, somehow. He discovers a country at a crossroads between communism and capitalism, and a picturesque city overflowing with a vibrant, searching sense of possibility. As the men and women Jacob meets begin to fall in love with one another, no one turns out to be quite the same as the idea Jacob has of them--including Jacob himself.
Necessary Errors is the long-awaited first novel from literary critic and journalist Caleb Crain. Shimmering and expansive, Crain's prose richly captures the turbulent feelings and discoveries of youth as it stretches toward adulthood--the chance encounters that grow into lasting, unforgettable experiences and the surprises of our first ventures into a foreign world--and the treasure of living in Prague during an era of historic change.
Author Notes
Caleb Crain has worked in television, film, and the theater. He lives in Manhattan.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Crain reinvents the novel of the innocent abroad in his well-wrought debut. Fresh off the failure of his first relationship since coming out (at least to himself), Jacob relocates from Massachusetts to Prague, where he discovers a loose-knit community of expatriates, many of whom, like Jacob, teach English to Czechs. It's 1990, and Prague-perhaps like Jacob and his friends-is poised on the brink of changes it does not yet fully understand. Jacob, an aspiring writer, is both sensitive and observant, a witness to his friends' romantic entanglements as well as the victim of heartbreak himself. The novel is full of the kinds of conversations shared by intelligent, earnest young people everywhere; the parallels between their idealism and uncertainty and those of their adopted country are handled with great skill. "Being here is what you're doing, when you're here," Jacob observes to a friend; this freedom from responsibility and traditional aspirations is what both attracts Jacob and makes him uneasy. The unhurried pace and lack of conventional plot seem deliberate; instead, it's Jacob's ongoing redefining of "exile" and his discovery of self in an unfamiliar community that provide meaning and richness. (Aug.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
In this novel set in Prague one year after the 1989 Velvet Revolution, young Harvard graduate and budding writer Jacob Putnam navigates the chaotic and exhilarating landscape of a city in transition. Living among a group of colorful expatriates while teaching English, he longs to identify the spirit of the revolution, but it seems forever out of his grasp. Having recently come out as a gay man in the U.S., Jacob at first feels uncomfortable with revealing his sexuality to his new friends and lives a secretive and lonely life. However, his eventual turn toward openness and pride mirrors the transformation of the city itself, as its citizens slowly adjust to their newfound freedom and growth in opportunity. In his first published novel, literary critic and journalist Crain creates a compelling and heartfelt story that captures both the boundless enthusiasm and naivete of youth. In addition, the detailed descriptions of Prague and Czech culture, in general, are sure to please those interested in this fascinating period in Eastern European history.--Price, Kerri Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
IN the mid-90s, I told a woman I met at a party that I was moving to Prague. "Oh, everyone moves to Prague," she said, distinctly unimpressed. "But I'm moving to Prague to write a novel," I said. "Oh, everyone moves to Prague to write a novel," she replied. When I arrived in the city a few weeks later, I discovered she wasn't that far off. In the immediate aftermath of its nonviolent Velvet Revolution, during which the Czech Republic transitioned from Communism to democracy, Prague was filled with young American adventurers like myself who'd come with plans of making various forms of art, though mostly what we did was hang out. We'd been seduced by the promise of cheap rents, cheap food, cheap beer, and perhaps a famous Levi's ad in which a raffish young American in Prague trades a pair of jeans for a car. This is the world that the noted literary critic Caleb Crain brings vividly to life with his gently meandering debut novel, "Necessary Errors." In painstaking detail, the book documents the daily existence of a circle of English-speaking expatriates in early-90s Prague. There's a good deal of teaching English, beer drinking, hooking up with men and women of varying nationalities, and engaging in the kinds of conversations on Life, Literature and Love common to most college dorm rooms. The good-natured fun eventually comes to an end when the book's protagonist, Jacob Putnam, is admitted to grad school. Crain wonderfully evokes the novel's setting in a few deft strokes. He's a master of the thumbnail character sketch, populating his novel with memorable supporting characters like Jacob's genial housemate, Honza; his stern landlord, Mr. Stehlik ; and a gay Czech friend named Ota who favors preppy polo shirts, sometimes adorned by "a lavender wool sweater, which he wore draped over his shoulders like a lady's mink." Crain also provides telling details of ex-pat life, like the joy of finding a store that sells cornflakes, or the constant difficulty of making plans to meet up with friends without the conveniences of landlines, let alone cellphones or electronic communication. Even better, he captures the slow pace of life of his innocents abroad, whose biggest adventure is choosing a bar for a drink. As Crain writes: "It was their being together that was exceptional, rather than anything any of them did or might do. It wasn't necessary for anyone outside their group to recognize it." The book's success in recreating the languid rhythms of its characters' social lives is also its biggest stumbling block. Though the author and characters are members of Generation X, the novel's fragmentary action feels more suited to a demographic accustomed to seeing life framed in disconnected status updates. We watch the characters teach improvised English lessons for grateful and somewhat naive Czech students, do laundry and grocery shopping, get sick and then get better, go on jaunts to Berlin and Krakow, search for English-language books and loiter endlessly at various watering holes. Affairs begin, break off and begin again with new partners. Yet for all this activity, the characters don't seem to learn much or change in any significant way. The book is rich in anecdote but impoverished in its overall purpose - or what is known in less literary circles as plot. A series of charming vignettes might have worked better in a shorter book, but the aimlessness becomes wearying over nearly 500 pages. More crucially, as a main character, Jacob isn't quite dynamic enough to hold the reader's attention. He is a courteous (perhaps to a fault), intelligent, white, middle-class, politically slightly left-of-center American who's mildly disaffected for reasons that are not immediately clear. He says he wants to be a writer but doesn't write very much, and doesn't seem to know what kind of writer he wants to be or why he wants to be one. His mother sends him magazines from America, but we know little otherwise about his family-a striking omission in a novel about a young man grappling with his sexual identity, a struggle that feels more theoretical than personal. In fact, when Jacob has sex, Crain's usual sharp focus becomes gauzy, and the formerly detailed language becomes the vague "rolling around" or polite "lovemaking." Young people of Jacob's age and situation are often unclear on who they are and what they believe. But it is to the detriment of "Necessary Errors" that these issues are also unclear to the reader and perhaps the author. In Other words, the book suffers from a case of the mimetic fallacy, in which the style matches the subject too well. Crain joins his character's youthful, confused perspective rather than transcending it. Many great expatriate novels - "The Sun Also Rises," say, or "The Berlin Stories" - feature lax plotting and an abundance of characters doing nothing much over cocktails. However, these novels accrue depth from their sense of personal tragedy or larger world forces impinging on the personal. In "The Sun Also Rises," the legacy of World War I has maimed the irascible hero Jake Barnes. In "The Berlin Stories," the slow but steady creep of fascism ends the liberating chaos of Weimar-era Berlin. In "Necessary Errors," those forces are not represented as one might expect by the sometimes painful transition from Communism to capitalism, which when it does appear is brilliantly evoked, for example through shortages of foodstuffs including potatoes and fresh fruit. Instead, the book's major theme is a young man's sometimes awkward transition from being in the closet to being out of it, a struggle that, while resonant for the young man in question, pales beside the much headier changes going on around him. Jacob's search for love and connection with another man is sweetly satisfying, but not as intriguing as the life experiences of the European characters whom the author so skillfully portrays - like Jacob's first boyfriend in Prague, the secretive Lubos, who dabbles in prostitution, or the cultured, cash-shy German expatriate Kaspar, a haunting portrait of romantic melancholy. DESPITE these caveats, "Necessary Errors" is often quite appealing thanks to Crain's lovely, sure-handed prose. Line by line, the book is chock-full of masterly word choices and images, like the "large purple flower of gas" in a white metal water heater or the streetlamps bathing the historic post office "with yellow rays that cut into blue shadows, flattening what they exposed, reversing day for night as well as inside for outside." On almost every page, the reader is rewarded with gems like these. "Necessary Errors" heralds the fiction debut of a writer with intelligence and an engaging prose style. The book also serves as a document of a unique cultural moment that has vanished. Today's visitors to Prague are more likely to find American fast-food franchises than they are Crain's confused young expatriates, most of whom seem to have returned home, gone to work and somewhat reluctantly grown up. 'It was their being together that was exceptional, rather than anything any of them did or might do.' Aaron Hamburger is the author of the story collection "The View From Stalin's Head" and the novel "Faithfor Beginners."
Kirkus Review
Crain takes us into the lives of expats teaching English in Prague shortly after the Velvet Revolution of 1989. At the core of this group is Jacob Putnam, a 20-something gay man who wants to become a writer but who's temporarily keeping body and soul together by teaching. He's also exploring his sexuality, a journey that takes him to the T-Club, a gay bar he discovered through an "alternative" guide to Prague nightlife. There, he meets a man, and they have a brief affair that initiates Jacob into the gay subculture of that city. At his day job, Jacob warily befriends a small circle of fellow teachers but is frequently unable to determine how much he should reveal to them about his sexual orientation. Rafe and Annie are a cohabiting couple, though later in the novel, Annie runs away from Prague with Carl, a friend of Jacob's. Another teacher, Thom, is a Scot who makes jokes about gays while remaining ignorant of how much this hurts Jacob. Kaspar is one of the last die-hard socialists in Prague and likes to engage Jacob in conversations weighted with philosophical significance. This brave new world of post-repressive sexual freedom is supposed to be a place where, according to Jacob, "[n]o one is allowed to limit anyone's options," but this remains a Utopian ideal as long as relationships are real (and hence un-Utopian). Ultimately, Jacob takes up with Milo, who believes Jacob to be the author he wants to become, though ironically, Jacob decides he has to leave Prague--and Milo--to become the author Milo already thinks he is. Crain's world is drenched with the climate and colors--sometimes drab--of a post-revolutionary world of possibility and promise.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Crain (American Sympathy) continues his ascendant career with this fully realized debut novel, which delights and surprises with every paragraph. The setting is 1990 Prague, a year after Czechoslovakia's Velvet Revolution, in the aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall. The story follows Jacob, a gay American college graduate whose ambitions of becoming a writer are frustrated by his surroundings. "'I'm an American,' Jacob protested. 'There's no one I can blame for holding me back.'" The plot is compelling, but Crain's talent for nuance and dialog, particularly in the gay bar scenes, is an observational wonder. Through a historic lens, Crain details the beautiful East European capital city's transition from Communist to democratic rule. VERDICT Not an easy exercise in nostalgia, this novel is a pleasure to navigate with its large, likable cast. Fans of Ben Lerner's Leaving the Atocha Station will find themselves similarly enchanted here.--Travis Fristoe, Alachua Cty. Lib. Dist., Gainesville, FL (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
According to the pages on Eastern Europe that he had torn from a guide to gay life abroad purchased in Boston-burying the rest of the book at the bottom of a garbage bag full of food scraps soon after, so that no one would inadvertently come upon its advertisements for massage parlors and bath houses-there were two gay bars in Prague, and the one not described as "rough" was to be found in a street one block long near the foot of Wenceslas Square. After his last class on Friday, he made pancakes and ate them with a can of boruvky , which he had spotted in the window of a store near school, and which he thought were blueberries, since they looked and tasted like them. (They were bilberries, he discovered years later, when he had a better dictionary.) He showered, brushed the blue off his teeth, and slipped his Penguin Typee , a book he had brought with him from Boston intact, into the pocket of his raincoat. It was a long tram ride to the subway. The tram was nearly empty. Most residents of the outlying neighborhood where he lived stayed home on a Friday night. He looked out the window idly. The tram ran through a manufacturing district, and for a mile or so there was nothing to see but low, gray, concrete-covered walls and long vertical sheets of corrugated metal ineffectually undermined by weeds. Intermittently, a wall gave way to a fence, and then a gate, through whose iron bars one could see the tall front of a factory. STANDARDS AND QUALITY FOR EVERYONE EVERYWHERE, read a slogan over the door of one of the factories. Further on, the tram ran past a housing development-a group of dirty white concrete high-rises, called paneláky . Since he was alone in the car, Jacob slid open a window. It was a warm night. A breeze touched him haphazardly, like someone unfolding a shirt near his bare skin. Then the breeze whipped him gently in the face; he shut his eyes. When he opened them again he took out his paperback but paused on his bookmark, a postcard from a man he had fallen in love with back in America, unhappily. He knew the words on it by heart, of course: Daniel wrote that he had taken a job at a men's magazine, which he described ironically, and foresaw that Jacob would soon have a tall, dark, Slavic lover. In a black-and-white photo on the other side, a shirtless model with a ponytail sneered angrily at the camera and seemed to be in motion toward it; the picture was blurry. Jacob had tried to convince himself he liked the image, because Daniel must have liked it, or must have thought Jacob would, or should, like it. In the time they had spent together, much of what Daniel had shared with him had taken the form of lessons. Jacob had been a poor pupil. Politics had made a path of resistance obvious. Just as he hadn't believed Daniel's claim that Thatcher and Reagan had brought freedom to the West as well as the East, he had declined to believe his theories of love, though he had been made to feel their power in his own case. And now he didn't believe this postcard. Czech men were neither tall nor dark, for the most part, and the name that Daniel had imagined for Jacob's future lover was a Russian-sounding one, which a Czech man his age, born during the Prague Spring, would be unlikely to bear. He had traveled a long way in order to know more about something than Daniel did, Jacob observed of himself, mock-tragically. He tucked the card into a later chapter and tried to read a few pages of Melville. At Mustek, the city's central subway station, he alighted, and rose to the street level on an escalator that debouched beside a small pastry shop, now dark. He felt the sense of difference, the uneasy alertness, that comes over a person on the hunt. He would not be able to explain himself if any of his friends were to see him now. He felt painfully aware of the few people who glanced at him, as if a part of him was trying to keep a record of their faces, in case he had to answer to them later. He found the street easily. The far end-it was no more than an alley, really-was boarded shut, and only the windows of one pub were lit, so once he had read this pub's name off its windows and passed by it, he could have no pretext for walking here. Therefore he had to keep walking; he had to turn out of the street when, having doubled back, he reached the end of it; he didn't stop until he came to Národní trída, a broad avenue a few minutes away. There he rested his eyes on the books in a publisher's display window and tried to think. He hadn't seen any sign of the bar he was looking for, which was called T-Club. If you were to visit the street today, you wouldn't find any sign of it, either; an establishment with the same name has opened in another part of town, but the particular club that Jacob was in search of that night has long since vanished, and the boards at the end of the block have been removed, to reveal a gated pocket park with wrought-iron benches, banks of flowers, and a long rectangle of water where children float toy ships with paper sails. Of course, Jacob didn't know at the time what the boards hid; he wondered if the bar he wanted lay behind them, shuttered. He had to try again. The guide had given a street number. He would walk to that number and look slowly and carefully. He promised himself to look longer than felt comfortable. When he retraced his steps, he found, to his surprise, that the street number corresponded to the pub with the well-lit windows. As he stood before it, awkwardly, he could see men drinking, talking, and smoking inside, a few in blue suits, most in street clothes. They were middle-aged, for the most part, many of them bearded. They had none of the self-watchfulness that Jacob associated with homosexuality. The name painted on the window was wrong, but perhaps the name had changed. Perhaps gay life in Prague was going to be different than he expected, more ordinary-plain, even. He stepped up onto the threshold. No one turned, but the bartender shot him a look of dismay. Jacob saw his mistake. He was not in a gay place; Daniel had taught him that much about the gay world. He was in a straight place near a gay place, and partly out of courtesy, partly as a defense, the men here, he realized, kept up a pretense of blindness, which the bartender was afraid Jacob would break by asking a foolish question; with his look he was warning Jacob not to. It was no different here, Jacob decided. It was like home. He stepped backward silently into the street, and saw, as he did, his vision sharpened by fear and anger, a flight of stairs overlooked before. They led down and to the left. No sign indicated that they led to T-Club, but Jacob followed them anyway, underground. At the bottom of the stairs was a floor-to-ceiling metal grille, painted black, into which a yellowish artificial vine had been artlessly wound. On the other side of the grille, leaning against the counter of a coat-check closet, was an attendant, a short, powerfully built man in his fifties, with a white pompadour and deeply lined, cigarette-gray skin, dressed, rather formally, in a fine white shirt and black slacks. He nodded when Jacob said good evening. Beyond him, around a corner, was the bar. Jacob could hear the tinny sound of European disco played on small speakers. Since the attendant did not offer to open the grille, Jacob tugged at it. It seemed to be locked. There was no knob to turn. -Please, Jacob said in Czech, tracing a small circle in the air with an index finger, to signify unlocking. " Místo není. " The man shook his head. There isn't room. " Keine raum, " the man added, in German, pronouncing the words as if he were addressing a child. He tapped a paper sign taped to the grille, on which was written a word Jacob did not know, no doubt an advisement that the bar was full. -Later? Jacob asked in Czech. For an answer, the man tilted his head back slightly and then looked away. The tilt might have been a variation on a shrug, an indication that the attendant didn't know the answer to Jacob's question, but his manner was so heavy with scorn that the gesture might equally have been a comment on the kind and number of questions it was his lot to endure. Jacob held both possibilities in mind and continued to study the man. He knew no other way to make sense of signals he didn't understand. He knew no other way to make sense of signals he didn't understand. He knew as yet only a few words of the language, and he had to make sense of such signals often, keeping, as a conversation progressed, a larger and larger hand of possibilities, like a player losing at a card game, until at last he was given a hint-drew a card that decided possibilities-and found himself free to set a number of them down. A couple of men in their thirties pattered quietly down the stairs. They greeted the attendant, just as quietly, and he unlocked the grille with a large, old-fashioned key, admitted them, and, before Jacob had understood what was happening, locked the grille again behind them. There was no small talk as he checked their coats; they weren't, in other words, the attendant's friends. It was a puzzle. Perhaps the attendant thought Jacob was too young for a gay bar and was protecting him. Or perhaps he thought Jacob, as a foreigner, might have come to the wrong place. Of course the sight of the two men just admitted, whose aspect was not ambiguous, would have cleared up Jacob's misapprehensions, if he had been suffering from any. -Please, Jacob said in Czech, approaching the grille again, and gesturing along the path the men had just taken. -There's room now? The attendant answered rapidly and angrily, flicking a hand after the two men, as in dismissal. Jacob didn't understand, and he expected that the man would yell at him in German if he asked him to repeat himself. He watched the attendant walk away, to the far end of the short corridor that was his province, and light a cigarette. He couldn't tell whether pressing his case had bettered or worsened it, but the attendant didn't seem to object to his continuing to wait, so he took out his paperback. His eyes passed hollowly over the words. At last there were shoes on the stairs again-louder this time, a clatter-and three young Czechs rushed down. The tallest, who had a comically long face and thin, sandy curls, seemed to be telling his companions a joke, which he himself laughed loudest at. " Dobrý vecer ," he saluted the attendant. There was something arch about the formality with which he spoke the greeting, and Jacob felt at once that he liked the young man. He drifted away from the wall he'd been leaning against, with the intention of slipping in behind the trio as soon as the attendant opened the grille. " Ahoj ," the tall, curly-haired man said to Jacob out of the corner of his mouth-now his voice was feline, and the greeting, sounding very much like the sailor's hello in English, was a familiar one-to intimate that he had noticed Jacob's approach. The attendant had noticed it, too, and because Jacob didn't want to take advantage of the young men's entrée unless he was sure of their permission, and because he was put momentarily at a loss by the touch of proposal in the young man's voice, he hesitated, and the attendant slammed the grille in his face with a clang. "Hey," Jacob said in English, startled into his own language. "Are you American?" the tall young man asked through the grille. He had heavy-lidded, drowsy-looking eyes, but the rest of him seemed to be constantly in motion-turning, stretching, adjusting. "Yes." "Come and talk to us," he offered. "I'd like to," Jacob answered. It seemed superfluous to say that he wasn't certain of getting in. The three young men checked their coats, the tall one spinning, as they did, a long commentary that seemed to touch on every detail of the transaction, even down to the numbers on their claim checks, which must have been funny or lucky, because the other men laughed when the tall one called the numbers out, but Jacob could detect nothing in the way of an appeal to the attendant on his behalf, and soon the three turned the corner, out of sight, the tall one acknowledging Jacob's predicament by no more than a wistful half wave, his hand at waist level behind him. Jacob paced back and forth, then looked up the stairs that led to the street, deliberating. Unexpectedly, at this moment, the attendant whistled at him, as if he were a horse or a dog, unlocked the grille, and said, in English, "Please." He quickly stepped inside. The attendant extended his hand for his coat, smiling with a perfect falsity, and Jacob surrendered it. Sometimes Jacob had a hateful capacity to go along. He paid the two crowns and took his claim check. The attendant had no shyness about meeting his gaze. Jacob wondered what he would have to do later on, to get his coat back. Excerpted from Necessary Errors by Caleb Crain All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
