"You never see anyone thinking about anything besides their own miserable selfish self!"
So declares a wealthy philanthropist midway through a novel that seems intent on proving her point, and little else.
In "A Changed Man," Francine Prose targets New York nonprofit organizations. Enter one Vincent Nolan, halfhearted neo-Nazi turned messenger of brotherly love. Having tattooed Waffen-SS bolts on his forearms and dutifully swallowed the Aryan Resistance Movement's party line as preached by his cousin, Raymond, Vincent has a change of heart - caused, we are told, by one powerful little Ecstasy pill taken during a giant outdoors rave.
What's a former skinhead to do? Try World Brotherhood Watch, a human rights organization headed by Meyer Maslow, a fame-hungry Holocaust survivor who reduces moral issues to bumper-sticker clich\vDes and churns out books with titles like "One Heart at a Time."
Sensing a public relations triumph, Brotherhood Watch takes in Vincent. Despite the extra room in his sumptuous Manhattan home, Meyer decides that Vincent should stay with his long-suffering right-hand woman, Bonnie Kalen, wan divorcee and mother of two teenage boys.
As Vincent becomes a nonprofit celeb, feted by the media and do-gooders alike, he and Bonnie develop feelings for one another. Even Bonnie's sullen older son, Danny, grows attached, bonding with his unorthodox roommate over a school paper on Hitler and their shared love of marijuana.
Prose hit the mark with "The Lives of the Muses," her 2002 essay collection on the women who inspired such men as Friedrich Nietzsche and Salvador Dali. But the creative goddesses seem to have deserted her in this tedious, stiff novel that can't decide between satire and feel-good story line.
Instead, we are given characters who are neither nasty enough to startle nor bold enough to amuse. Vincent is sanitized from the first, a skinhead with a heart of gold who never bought ARM's more racist views. He just needed a couch on which to crash.
As a peace guru who has an activist member of the lowest Indian caste for a servant and harbors European contempt for his adopted countrymen, "sitting here on their fat protected American behinds," Meyer has a bit more bite. But his petty concerns for attention quickly wear thin. And poor Bonnie staggers beneath the weight of her character's stereotypes: bland suburban mom who can't recognize her own selling points, worries constantly about her boys, changed herself to fit into her ex-husband's mold and now, in his absence, cannot reclaim her former self.
"Half the time, Bonnie can't understand how she became that unrecognizable person, and half the time, she thinks it could happen to anyone. Anyone female," Prose writes.
Prose flows between characters from chapter to chapter, opting for a third-person narration that teeters awkwardly between omniscience and the individual voice. Partly because of this strategy, the novel never lives up to its title, failing to convey the sense that any of the characters have undergone fundamental changes.
Instead, we are left with their moralizing. "Everyone's a mixed bag. That's why they call it human. What was it Vincent said about Raymond and his friends? They couldn't deal with the gray areas. But that's where they all live, all the time," Bonnie muses.
Such profundities aside, "A Changed Man" has precious little to offer.
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