Kraven Images

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Though good-natured, Nicholas Marcus Kraven, a visiting lecturer in English at a Bronx college, is a compulsive liar, a lustful cad and a would-be seducer of students. He's an imposter as well, posing as his dead English cousin, whom "Nicholas" secretly helped through London University by writing all his papers. Yet Kraven is also a man haunted by his past-by the death of his father 33 years ago, in 1941 England, where their family of Polish Jews had emigrated to escape the Nazis; and by family demons of self-destructiveness and relentless womanizing. Isler-whose first novel, The Prince of West End Avenue, won the 1994 National Jewish Book Award (and was a National Book Critics Circle Award nominee)-combines a raucous send-up of the lit-crit industry with a serious tale of one man's quest for identity. Much of the satire is obvious, however, and it's difficult to care enough about Nicholas to sustain interest in his coincidence-laden trip to his boyhood English home, where he learns about the circumstances of his birth. Still, there's delicious irony in Isler's wry portrait of a man who devotes his life to the pursuit of truth even as he lives a lie. Paperback rights sold to Penguin; simultaneous U.K. publication by Random House/Jonathan Cape UK; foreign rights sold to Germany, Netherlands, France, Spain, Portugal, Sweden, Finland. (Apr.)

Kirkus Reviews

Nicholas Kraven, the middle-aged British protagonist of Isler's savagely funny second novel (after The Prince of West End Avenue, 1994), would seem to have it made.

He has an undemanding job as a lecturer in English literature at Mosholu College in the Bronx, classrooms of stolid students to hector, patronize (and, when a particularly alluring young woman catches his eye, seduce), and a longstanding adulterous liaison with a highly inventive neighbor. There are, of course, the occasional indignities: He must turn out scholarly articles and even appear to take seriously the seemingly crackbrained discovery of an elderly student (that Merlin was not only a historical figure but a Jew). Still, life isn't bad. And then, in an instant, it turns hilariously awful. His lover's husband deserts her. He adapts his student's idea about Merlin, taking credit for it himself, at first receives extraordinary praise, then is reviled as a plagiarist. Worst, in a deft moment that sends the novel soaring in an audacious new direction, Kraven is revealed to be an impostor. Raised in England in an extended family of German Jewish émigrés, Kraven could in fact never afford to attend a university. When the loathsome cousin he had helped through school died, just before embarking for America, Kraven had usurped his job and his name. Now, he flees home, returning to London only to discover that his enemies and his past are not so easily eluded. Isler has a wonderful appetite for satire: his portraits of prissy academics, boorish students, and smarmy administrators are unsparing, convincing, and very funny. But his talent can equally meet the demands of sensitively portraying Kraven's suffering as, back home, he begins painfully to sift through the ruins of his life, the identity he artfully constructed and the older identity he fled.

This sly comedy becomes, in the end, a subtle, profoundly moving meditation on identity and responsibility: an ambitious, stirring work by a very promising young writer.