City of Strangers

Unlike his older brother Ben, Paul Metzger has kept his father’s last name. At 36, he’s a fairly successful freelance writer, and his father’s past has never haunted him beyond a fairly melancholic estrangement between the two. But now that his father is on his deathbed—nearly brain dead and given a week to live on machines—Paul suddenly receives a call from an editor at a large publishing house. He wants Paul to write a book about his dad who, in the ’30s, fronted the German-American Bund, a pro-Nazi organization that supported Hitler from the States. He has the perfect title, The American Nazi.

MacKenzie strikes the flint early in his debut novel. When the book opens, Paul meets with Ben to discuss their father’s imminent passing, but Ben’s not interested. He then meets and sleeps with his ex-wife, before interceding on behalf of a young Muslim teenager being beaten by a couple of racist thugs, who then turn their fists on him. That’s when the editor calls.

A big-question novel stuffed into a slight thriller—after Paul frees himself from the thugs by cutting one with a broken bottle, the villain pursues—City of Strangers can’t quite pull either off. Place the blame largely on the language, which absolutely adores itself. When Paul stands outside wife Claire’s door, MacKenzie writes: “He doesn’t want to lose what little he can say he has: this moment now, the memory of the last hour: her words and his, the flickering of her face, the uncontrived delicacy of her hands and the way they use the air.” That’s two colons for the price of one and indicative of the way MacKenzie oversells even the slightest moments. It’s tough to create much momentum when the reader keeps getting stuck in sentences like that.

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