First 30 pages of "The Mayor's Tongue"

A book I found at The Bookery on the new releases table, and then again in the Olin library at Cornell, bound with one of those glossy library jackets, I took out and read the first thirty pages today. It's by Nathaniel Rich, editor of the Paris review, the second prominent release of literary fiction that I'm aware of in the past year that was written by the editor of an intimidating periodical (the other being Keith Gessen's book).

I am posting after having read the first thirty pages, since I think the speculations made in the first encounter with a novel, which are usually lost as you read on, can be of some use and amusement. So far, I've been introduced to the two protagonists, and though I squirmed a little during the conversation between two old men on a park bench about dreams, I did willingly follow the initial adventures of this Eugene. Oddly, I would look up from the page and down again, and was surprised to see third-person pronouns. It feels first-person.

Eugene avoids a typical New York City setting, but somehow ends up pulling up familiar dirt-and-eccentricity that I've come to expect from New York Novels. His coworker from the Dominican Republic is affectionately rendered, but remains an exotic; his benevolence towards Eugene feels at times like a cautious measure taken by an author in writing about someone who is "different" and doesn't want to provoke a conflict in the story or in the reader. That his coworker speaks an obscure dialect emerging from a secluded valley in the Dominican Republic....this also seems like a measure taken to ensure that the character does not get associated with immigrant stereotypes, even though it also feels like a joke.