Both a novel of manners and a morality play, “A Changed Man” by Francine Prose begins with the arrival of a disillusioned neo-Nazi at the door of a human-rights organization in present-day Manhattan.
Vincent Nolan, 32-year-old look-alike of Timothy McVeigh, has fled from the Aryan Resistance Movement (ARM) in Tennessee to the World Brotherhood Watch Foundation. He blurts out to Meyer Maslow, its director: “I want to help you guys save guys like me from becoming guys like me.”
Meyer (whom the Kirkus Reviews analyzes as “part Simon Wiesenthal, part Elie Wiesel”) is a 71-year-old Hungarian-born Holocaust survivor. He knows it’s risky to take in a man on the run from a skinhead group, but his religion forbids him to turn away a young man in need. Besides, as he tells a friend later, “He’s my scientific experiment. My golem. What can we extract from him to vaccinate the world?”
He hires Vincent and persuades Bonnie Kalen, a 42-year-old development director and single mother of two boys, to take him into her home. The characters begin at once to accommodate one another and correct their prejudices. A mutual attraction, hedged about with doubts and qualms, grows between Vincent and Bonnie.
The story is told through a prism of interior monologues, in the satiric manner characteristic of Prose. Critics praise her work as “darkly comic” and “compassionate.” In “A Changed Man,” however, the perpetual self-consciousness, soul-searching and second-guessing of Vincent, Meyer, Bonnie and her 16-year-old son Danny become tiresome as they slow down, stilt and sometimes paralyze the action.
More interesting are the vivid and diverse characters, settings and incidents that move the story along. There are some striking, original and absurd scenes: Meyer and Vincent pushing up their sleeves and comparing tattoos; Vincent passing out, from an allergy attack, after making a speech at a fund-raising banquet; Danny catching their guest raiding his hidden marijuana supply; and a resoundingly violent climax on a TV show.
The main characters are haunted by vengeful ARM members, which appear in the novel though phone calls. At one point, we unexpectedly enter the viewpoint of Vincent’s skinhead cousin Raymond. In his flight, Vincent had not only betrayed Raymond’s cause but stole his truck, drugs and $1,500.
Raymond’s angry interior monologue is pungent with expletives, ethnic slurs and crazed conspiracy theories, yet it bears certain similarities to the thoughts and ideas of Meyer and his staff. The characters reveal so much self-interest, malice, fear, vanity and jealousy that there seems hardly anything left to them. Yet Meyer justly credits the foundation with “the shipments of medicine, the rivers of vaccines and antibiotics — the children’s lives saved, the victims of genocide resettled.”
Perhaps the author’s message is that principle must at times be sacrificed for the sake of survival. There’s also a suggestion that the highly moral strivings of Meyer, Bonnie and Danny leave them self-doubting and vulnerable; they may well need the corrective of Vincent’s instinctive sense of self-preservation.
“A Changed Man” by Francine Prose (421 pages, Harper Collins, $24.95).