The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Nowhere Man, by Aleksandar Hemon
reviewed by Michael Pinker

Aleksandar Hemon. Nowhere Man. Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, 2002. 242 pp. $23.95.

Josef Pronek appears in Hemon’s novel as the narrator, who, calling himself “Victor Plevchuk,” tours an English-language school for immigrants like himself while seeking work in Chicago. In one class sits Pronek, a one-time writer displaced stateside from the nineties Bosnian horror, whom “Plevchuk” vaguely recognizes and whose bleakly comic exploits and affecting nature thereafter take center stage. In a series of carefully disjointed episodes ushering Pronek back and forth in time, through childhood and youth in Sarajevo, Yugoslav army service, university, a brief junket at a Ukrainian heritage center in Kiev (he and the narrator room together), to life as an exile in Chicago, Hemon delves into Pronek’s representative nature to mock the masquerades we buy and sell to live. Hemon’s readers have met Pronek before, but here he is given more scope while revealing the same winsome candor, hounded by the wonder of his experience, searching for but never finding harmony in relationships, society, and language. Pronek grew up disaffected from his family, whom he could never please. Moved by adolescent angst to form a rock band to sing his own songs and get girls in the years before certain murderous Serbs descended like wolves on the sheepfold, Pronek assumes the mantle of Nowhere Man, intelligent if feckless booby whose hopes continually go awry. Later, inadvertent if penetrating witness to American pop culture, he plays hapless participant in the absurdist bubble of his life as it takes on the character of a black sitcom. Wistful outrider from a time warp whose charm and broken English prove finally, maddeningly appalling, Hemon’s antihero stumbles down the path his mercilessly humorous creator takes in dissecting, item by item, the postmodern nightmare. The concluding parable on a clever Russian spy lays out his cards for all to see.