George Konrád's first book, "The Case Worker," was a fictive essay built with blocks of grotesque realism: the daily horrors of the lives of the poor and helpless, the deficient, abandoned, crazed and rejected…. Its thesis was that our urban culture grows more vacant of humane values in proportion to our power to process masses of people through a machinery designed to give them well-being….

Still, "The Case Worker" accepts love, is drenched in compassion as it offers a traditional humanist solution of the problem of human imperfection. Konrád sees that it is just the problem—the intolerable evil inherent in our defective human condition—that spurs the revolutionist, and infuriates the utopian planner. The source of our delusions, it perverts our brief residence here to a hell on earth. This becomes the theme of "The City Builder." Its narrator, the anonymous incarnation of our 20th-century's...