In Nathaniel Rich's fabulist first novel, The Mayor's Tongue (Riverhead), a young man sets out to find his future while an old one seeks out his past. An aimless boy from Inwood, New York, Eugene Brentani quits his job at a moving company to work for the mildly delusional author who is penning a biography of Eugene's favorite writer — the elusive and prodigious Constance Eakins. When Eugene falls for his employer's daughter, he follows her to the hills of Italy, where Eakins is said to have disappeared 30 years earlier.
In a parallel narrative, a faithful insurance man, Mr. Schmitz, is lost after the death of his wife and wanders off to Italy. He and Eugene find themselves in a mysterious region known as the Carso, where, amid dark hills and forests, reality and fantasy begin to blur: Eakins is revealed to be the maniacal mayor of his own little world. "In my voice they recognized the source of all their speech," he says of his towns-people. "They spoke in a universal tongue of my own creation." In this tale about the obsessive relationship between a writer and his voice, Nathaniel Rich finds his own.
