THE WINTER ZOO

The interactions of an international cast of pleasure-seekers who meet, impulsively connect, then splinter apart during one gaudy winter in Poland form the core of this intense, unsettling debut.

Its actions begin in the fall of 1990 when young American college graduate Gurney walks out on his unsuspecting girlfriend and their newborn daughter, accepting a longstanding invitation to join his cousin Jane, an expatriate teacher living in Krakow. The barely concealed mutual sexual attraction between the two intensifies almost immediately, and as they draw closer together, then irreparably distant, Beckman makes subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) linkages between Poland’s recent history of defeat, disorder, indulgent sensuality, and rapacity (it’s “a world in which money is what matters”) and the excesses and deceptions practiced by characters who cluster around the brooding, charismatic Gurney and the manipulative Jane. These include Jane’s divorced flatmate Grazyna, a painter, and the latter’s teenaged daughter Wanda; the cadre of willful young bohemians among whom Wanda defiantly asserts her independence; a bisexual American woman student attracted to both Gurney and Jane; epicurean troublemaker Dick Chesnutt; and (the novel’s most compelling character) Grazyna’s ex-husband Zbigniew Zamoyski, a cultivated academic and political chameleon whose contained violence will reach out toward all within his orbit. Their shared and separate experiences during a volatile three-month period, ranging, roughly, from Halloween through Christmas, energetically mock the phenomena of celebration, in a taut narrative that includes a dramatic visit to the museum at Auschwitz, Gurney’s brief tenure at a flashy gambling casino, and a climactic “Xmas feast” of an orgy (“a Holocaust of pleasure”) during which the last vestiges of Gurney’s self-control and self-respect are savagely stripped away.

Echoes of The Sun Also Rises and Isherwood’s Berlin Stories aside, this is a potent and deeply disturbing portrayal of innocence destroyed and corruption rampant: the work of a most ambitious and unquestionably gifted writer.