Keeping Bedlam at Bay in the Prague Cafe

December 3, 2012
As the title suggests, disorder predominates in Ellis’s debut novel set in Prague during the dizzying days of the early 1990s. John Shirting is a quirky and unbalanced former barista from Chicago with a pill habit who winds up in the newly capitalist city hawking a plan to establish a chain of mobster-themed coffee shops. A lost soul with a passion for customer service, Shirting becomes embroiled in ventures that are threatened by the many nameless forces vying for the soul of the city. Along the way he wanders into diffuse adventures, from a disquisition with a skinhead and his pet pig to a game of Frogger with a mysterious prostitute. He also encounters a colorful array of expats, including a pair of professional golem hunters, an old nemesis who has acquired outré sexual proclivities involving tranquilized cats, as well some philosophically inclined pornographers. The picaresque absurdity will be familiar to fans of Thomas Pynchon, along with the low-grade paranoia and aggressively whimsical dialogue. The occasional self-indulgent metaphysical discourse and derivative style, however, are offset by genuine imagination and an energetic wit. Ellis vividly re-creates the atmosphere of a city in the throes of transformation as well as the American Quixotes who populate this new frontier.

January 1, 2013
John Shirting, a quiet Chicago native with a passion for excellent coffee and a bad habit of self-medicating, has been let go from his barista job at a branch of the Capo Coffee Family, an eerily recognizable global coffee powerhouse. Determined to win back his job and impress the Capo higher-ups, Shirting decides that Prague is the perfect place to start a new franchise. Shirting soon discovers that it won't be easy to plant the seeds of capitalist coffee culture in recently postcommunist Prague, once his college nemesis resurfaces in the same boardinghouse and his first hire abandons him. An ode to expatriate living, culture clashes, and the heady days of early 1990s Europe, this novel is a manic, wild ride with a loose narrative style full of off-the-cuff observations. Seeing Prague through Shirting's eyes is a bit like wandering in a new city without a guidebookthe major landmarks are recognizable, but you're always on the verge of being lost. The novel is darkly comic (reminiscent of DBC Pierre's Lights Out in Wonderland, 2011), immersive, nostalgic, and thoroughly enjoyable.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)