IRONISTS ABROAD.('Prague')

The names of Central European cities may not strike you as being all that amusing; still, the wittiest title in recent years could well be the one that Arthur Phillips has given to his debut novel, "Prague" (Random House; $24.95). It's not that there's anything inherently sidesplitting about disaffected young expats who wander around Eastern Europe right after the fall of the Berlin Wall, which is what Phillips's five main characters happen to be. (As the author himself slyly observes, his setup is "not without a powerful whiff of cliche.") Nor are you likely to consider this particular quintet of innocents abroad--four Americans and one Canadian--very funny: a more grimly self-conscious and hopelessly unself-aware gaggle of twenty-somethings would be hard to find in contemporary fiction, which is saying a lot. It's just that not a single page of "Prague" takes place in Prague. The story is set, instead, entirely in Budapest--that "god-forsaken paprika-stained Austrian test market," one glum resident dubs it, where would-be artistes and halfhearted corporate vultures from the West have flocked because the wealthier, cleaner, more picturesque Czech city is either too expensive or has already been exploited. "That's where real life is going on right now," John Price, a journalist and the novel's most introspective character, declares at one point. "Not here."

But "Prague" is less about place than about time. Or, rather, Time: in this rich meditation on post-ideological ennui, the young Cold War victors don't have real lives because they can't orient themselves properly to what Phillips calls "the rush of History." Much of the action centers on an ongoing attempt by one of the five principals, a slick Hungarian-American venture capitalist named Charles Gabor, to acquire the Horvath Press, a venerable and newly privatized publishing house once known as "The Memory of Our People." Like so many Americans, the Ohio-bred child of refugees believes himself to be free of the past; "Prague" makes it clear that such freedom comes at a high moral and cultural price. While Charles first seduces and then, inevitably, abandons the elderly, urbane Imre Horvath--a survivor of two world wars, of Nazis and Communists, but not of triumphant post-Cold War capitalism--his four friends roam around Budapest doing what people in expat novels have always done, which is to sit in cafes, gossip, have affairs, and feel hopelessly cut off from everything. "Why am I unhappy in the era and the place I was given?" Mark Payton, the Canadian, wonders.

Like some other recent big novels with large ambitions, this one has its fair share of narrative sleights-of-hand and postmodern gewgaws. (Not least, a history of Hungary in the form of a series of M.B.A.-exam essay questions.) But what's gratifying about "Prague" is that, beneath the up-to-the-minute cleverness, it's really an old-fashioned novel of ideas--one of those books in which the plot feels like allegory and each character stands for some grand concept. Charles Gabor, of course, functions nicely as a poster boy for the soullessness of American capitalism. Mark, a forlorn gay academic, is the voice of nostalgia; he's even writing a book about it. While everyone else is drinking coffee and getting laid, he's paralyzed by the thought that "a Central European capital in the opening weeks of its post-Communist era" might someday represent "someone's receding, cruelly unattainable golden age." John Price's brother, Scott, on the other hand, stands for the American dream of starting over: a blond stud, he travels the world putting as much distance as possible between himself and his unhappy childhood as a misfit in an olive-skinned Jewish family. And so on.

And yet Phillips lavishes so much detail on his characters that they are no less textured--no less human--for being so obviously symbolic. This is particularly true of John Price, who reminds us that the flip side of his brother's fantasy of having no past is an anguished yearning for "roots." When John meets Nadja, an old Hungarian pianist who regales him with stories of Austro-Hungarian spies and daring escapes from Communist thugs, he is so swept up in "the rush of History" that he becomes dangerously clueless about the present. Among other things, he fails to notice that the woman he's mad about--Emily Oliver, the ...