AFGHANISTAN

An editor for a glossy New York magazine, owned by a Russian ÇmigrÇ, gets entangled with the Russian's granddaughter and wayward son while acting out a case of travel-lust. Ullmann's first novel, while occasionally amusing, is too full of tedious detail on the magazine, its staff, and the narrator's various friends and connections. Patrick is the editor at Glee, owned by Kuratkin, who dies (hallucinating ``as if he were inhabiting all the different periods of his life simultaneously'') in his 80s, precipitating a family crisis. Patrick, who writes travel articles, has been dating Kuratkin's granddaughter Irina, who works in the magazine's fashion department, and dreaming of a life of adventure such as his friend Steyer (a journalist who helps the Afghan freedom fighters) has. After Kuratkin's funeral—and much domestic detail as Irina recovers from the patriarch's death—adventure is what Patrick gets when things go wrong with Irina. He goes to Switzerland, ostensibly to write a skiing article and to deliver some Afghan photos for Steyer, but actually because author Ullmann wants to have him reminisce (aching ``with a surfeit of knowledge and memory'') about his childhood there: ``I became my mother's accomplice in her contempt for everything Swiss.'' Finally, Patrick gets called to southern France, where Michael, Irina's drug-crazed brother, trying to research his grandfather's life, is in the middle of a debauch. Patrick babysits him through slapstick misadventures, then helps him get out of France—whereupon Ullmann goes for a lyrical end: ``Life makes sense not when reason tells you that everything is as it should be. Life makes sense when some imponderable and apparently random event confirms your most irrational prejudices.'' Too little too late, unfortunately. Some interesting social detail and a few funny escapades can hardly make up for a great deal of bagginess.