SOURCE: “Pricks and Kicks,” in New York Review of Books, November 5, 1998, pp. 44–46.

In the following excerpt, Annan offers a favorable assessment of Europa, which she regards as “a virtuoso tragic-comic tour de force.”

The novels by Louis Begley [Mistler's Exit] and Tim Parks [Europa], one American, the other English, present a violent contrast in tempo, temperament, and tone, and yet they have a lot in common. The half-hidden theme in both is free will: or rather its absence, which both heroes come to recognize and furiously resent. Both are highly cultivated, well-read, self-aware WASP males exercising their considerable sensibilities in Europe. Parks's Jerry is a middle-class English academic; Begley's Mistler an upper-crust New Yorker. Jerry is the first-person narrator in Europa, whereas Mistler's Exit is written in the third person. It makes very little difference: everything that happens in Louis Begley's novel is seen, felt, and judged by...