Few American fiction debuts in recent years have thumbed their noses at literary convention like Nathaniel Rich’s The Mayor’s Tongue: Its serio-comic blending of the real and the fantastic often recalls Stanley Elkin’s early work. But Rich’s dual-narrative, poststructural wildcatting fails to trigger the final seismic impact the book’s split story line seems to foreshadow.

The primary narrative concerns Eugenio Brentani, a young Bronx-bred moving-company employee obsessed with author Constance Eakins—a grotesque composite of gluttonous “manly men” writers like Hemingway, Mailer and Kipling. After Eugenio falls for his boss’s daughter Sonia, she flees to the Italian countryside, purportedly hanging around with one of her father’s old pals—who turns out to be Constance Eakins himself. Eugenio jets overseas to track Sonia down, and the semi-mythical Eakins begins resembling the Minotaur at the center of a labyrinthine quest.

The novel’s secondary story centers on the elderly New Yorker Mr. Schmitz and his obsessive attachment to an old war buddy, Rutherford, who relocates to Italy on a writing assignment. After Schmitz’s wife dies, he travels to Italy hoping to reconnect with his old friend, but the Rutherford he finds is a faint shadow of the man he previously knew.

Although Rich’s two fictional worlds have some thematic crosscurrents, they never satisfactorily complement one another. The author, an editor at The Paris Review and the son of New York Times columnist Frank Rich, does manage an oddball satire of literary idolatry; and, in a sense, he pokes dark-humored fun at people’s over-reliance on the imaginary worlds they create to escape hard realities. But in a denouement where the reader is primed for postmodern irony, Rich leaves us instead with the campy, melodramatic twist ending of a Twilight Zone episode.

—Michael Sandlin

Rich reads Apr 17, 2008.