Life in a glass house

‘First and last I was, and always would be, an American,’ Jeremy O’Keefe, the professor narrator of Patrick Flanery’s new novel, insists, with just the kind of pedantic over-emphasis that makes the reader suspicious. Equally dubious is the way he talks. Having spent the last decade at Oxford teaching and writing a book about the Stasi, O’Keefe’s speech is now an odd mixture of affectation and deracination (‘helicoptering’, ‘faux-artisanal’). On his return to New York he finds that he is ignored or mistaken for an Englishman — something which affronts him as much as his Oxford colleagues, with ‘their exclusionary quality’, refusing to accept him as one of their own.

His memory, too, is in doubt. When boxes containing lists of his emails and phone calls arrive at his apartment, O’Keefe wonders if he has sent them to himself. And now a man is watching him from the street below. Is he paranoid, or is someone monitoring his every move?

The possibilities are endless, and O’Keefe, a fastidious intellectual, is determined to explore them all in his written account of what he thinks has happened. The word ‘or’ occurs repeatedly, leaving the reader to determine whether his uncertainty is the result of enlightened speculation or deliberate obfuscation. Perhaps, as the Egyptian student with whom he becomes entangled implies, it’s a way of masking the latter with the former.

Then again, his tendency to dilate the story could be merely a sign of vanity. Like Humbert Humbert in Lolita, O’Keefe expects the law to close in on him at any moment. He feels guilty, though he’s unsure of what exactly, and he fantasises about the purpose of his ‘confession’. Might it be ‘entered into evidence’, subversive enough to ‘classify’, or just an ‘eccentric legacy’ left to his heirs? At any rate, he’s playing to an audience, his imagination so excited at the thought of being an object of even the state’s attention that he dreams of being hooded and handcuffed, incarcerated in some Guantanamo-type prison.