Life in a glass house

‘First and last I was, and always would be, an American,’ Jeremy O’Keefe, the professor narrator of Patrick Flanery’s new novel, insists, with just the kind of pedantic over-emphasis that makes the reader suspicious. Equally dubious is the way he talks. Having spent the last decade at Oxford teaching and writing a book about the Stasi, O’Keefe’s speech is now an odd mixture of affectation and deracination (‘helicoptering’, ‘faux-artisanal’). On his return to New York he finds that he is ignored or mistaken for an Englishman — something which affronts him as much as his Oxford colleagues, with ‘their exclusionary quality’, refusing to accept him as one of their own.

His memory, too, is in doubt. When boxes containing lists of his emails and phone calls arrive at his apartment, O’Keefe wonders if he has sent them to himself. And now a man is watching him from the street below. Is he paranoid, or is someone monitoring his every move?