As the novel opens, thirty-one-year-old Joel LaVine - American, Jewish, in flight from failed jobs back home - has lost his apartment and is about to be fired as an English teacher in East Berlin. His response is to sink into inaction: he stops doing his laundry; bisexual, he becomes impotent; and he begins to gain weight in an alarming fashion.

We follow Joel through a winter of absurd and eventually profound wonderings about the nature of his own predicament and that of the others he meets in the ordered chaos that is Europe in the 1990s. We see him crisscrossing a wall-less Berlin, looking for places to live, keeping tabs on neo-Nazis and one-time secret-police informers, obsessively reading Jewish writers - Kafka and Freud, Walter Benjamin, Primo Levi - visiting and revisiting friends he's made.

Along the way, as the novel takes us from the suburbs of Milwaukee to the ruins of the old Prussian capital of Konigsberg, we meet skinheads, drag queens, aging students, international hustlers. We visit bomb shelters that have become discotheques, abandoned Communist monuments, prettified concentration camps.

In the tradition of Henry James and Christopher Isherwood, but with a ferocity all his own, Marcus gives us an indelible portrait of the innocent abroad, a young man emblematic of his generation - ironic, skeptical, at a crossroads - confronting, as youth does, the large questions of existence with insight, humor, and despair. He gives us a portrait of Berlin itself, a city in perennial transition.

And perhaps most important, he gives a sobering, inspired glance back over our century at its close, as we are forced to ask ourselves - on Berlin's broad boulevards and reconnected subway lines, in the deep recesses of Joel's memory - what it means to be a German, a Jew, a human being.