The Mayor's Tongue by Nathaniel Rich

In its first pages, before hitting its stride, this debut novel by Nathaniel Rich elicits a sense of mild foreboding. Is it just another young-and-literary-in-New-York novel? Happily, Rich has his own style and his own concerns, which twist playfully around the search for a (fictional) famous writer, Constance Eakins, who may or may not still be alive, living near Trieste and working on a novel called, yes, The Mayor's Tongue . There's a little too much going on here (and elsewhere: the book's exuberance seems to have spilled over into its website, where resides a wealth of information on Eakins, including a faux Paris Review interview.) The proliferating stories prove tricky for Rich to tie up, but the sheer inventiveness is hard to resist.