THE GIFT

In this mad romp through the wilds of London, a burnt-out idealist’s struggles against the onset of middle-aged realism become increasingly desperate.

Phillip is a writer who dreads being asked what he writes, for his projects are more likely to involve instruction manuals than screenplays. Happily married to a beautiful woman and the proud father of bright and witty twin daughters, Phillip nevertheless feels something of a failure. As a boy, he was a promising soccer player who actually made it onto the national juniors and toured to the world match in China—where he shattered his knee and could never play again. He has seen many of his former teammates go on to success in the professional leagues while he’s settled into hotel management and technical writing. But if Phillip is out of the loop, it’s not by far: His London friends are, by and large, successful and accomplished. That’s the problem, of course. His gay chums Barry and Sean, for example, are film producers who can’t resist sending Phillip and family exquisite and costly gifts (a Venetian designer corkscrew; a Chinese jade carving) on the least provocation, and this soon becomes a kind of private penance for Phillip, who feels obliged to reciprocate but can’t keep up with them. His obsession with outdoing Barry and Phillip develops at the same time as does Phillip’s lunatic quest to find Syd Barrett, a onetime member of Pink Floyd who left the band early on and fell into a kind of mythic obscurity. Like all good obsessions, these two land Barry in a variety of bad places (like jail) that help him to concentrate his mind wonderfully and, in the end, find something other (and better) than he’d originally set out for.

A light touch and steady place, though first-novelist Flusfeder’s ramblings are slow to find a destination and turn tiresome after a while.