Necessary Errors: A Novel

Praise for Caleb Crain’s

Necessary Errors

“Caleb Crain has written a novel of surpassing intelligence and unexpected beauty about a young American’s year in post-Communist Prague—and about how we find, and construct, the story of our lives. His great achievement is to make the unfolding of Jacob Putnam’s newfound sexual freedom resonate with the unfolding of Czechs’ new historical freedoms, so these separate arcs seem of a piece. His precision of description, whether of architecture or emotional weather, is enviable; his dialogue both playful and profound. It is rare to read a book of this length and feel that every sentence mattered, rarer still to finish a novel of such intellectual depth and be so moved.”

—Amy Waldman, author of
The Submission

“Youth and innocence—remember them? Caleb Crain’s
Necessary Errors
stabs the heart with the story of Jacob Putnam’s sentimental education in Prague, and reminds us that to be young is to live abroad in a fallen empire where the talk goes on all night, the dumplings are sliced thick, and blue jeans are rare and too expensive. Pick this novel up and you won’t forget it.”

—Benjamin Anastas, author of
Too Good to Be True

“As someone who is often unduly nostalgic about having been in her twenties during the 1990s (though not for as good a reason as having been in Prague during the aftermath of the Velvet Revolution), this novel triggered something like a sense memory. Caleb Crain is remarkable at capturing that time in life when ambition and longing are at once all-consuming and all over the map. I winced in self-recognition more than once—and marveled at the author’s insights more often than that.”

—Meghan Daum, author of
Life Would Be Perfect If I Lived in That House

“Caleb Crain describes a young man’s and a country’s first tastes of freedom with a lucid and matter-of-fact intelligence.
Necessary Errors
offers an invaluable record of Prague at the beginning of the 1990s in a style that places it among the great novels of Americans abroad. It’s
The Ambassadors
for the generation that came of age with the downfall of the Soviet Union.”

—Marco Roth, author of
The Scientists

“I don’t know that I’ve ever read a novel that gets down, the way this one does, how it felt to be an American and a gay man at the end of the Cold War—so exiled from the country you grew up in that you go abroad to make a new world. Caleb Crain’s
Necessary Errors
is an adventure of the head and heart. His hero, Jacob, turns to the cafés, bedrooms, and libraries of newly free Eastern Europe, an American in search of a European bildungsroman, in search of love and possibility both.”

—Alexander Chee, author of
Edinburgh

Caleb Crain
has written for
The New Yorker
,
The New York Review of Books
,
The Nation
,
The New York Times
,
the London Review of Books
,
The Paris Review Daily
, and
n
+
1
. A graduate of Harvard and Columbia, he is the author of the critical work
American Sympathy
. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

ALSO BY CALEB CRAIN

American Sympathy:

Men, Friendship, and Literature in the New Nation

About the Author

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Staré Mesto

Vy
š
ehrad

Šárka

This epoch of unexpected happiness and drunkenness lasted only two short years; the madness was so excessive and so general that it would be impossible for me to give any idea of it, except by this historical and penetrating reflection: the people had been bored for a hundred years.

—Stendhal

It was October, and the leaves of the oaks around the language school had turned gold and were batting light into its tall windows. A young Irish woman was seated alone in the teacher’s lounge. She had made herself a cup of tea on the range in the corner, and she was opening a tangerine on a paper napkin, with hungry carelessness.

One of the American teachers walked in. “Are you always the first one here?” he asked.

“It’s quite far, the trip from the
. I like to collect myself.” Her hair was disorderly and thick, and had all the colors between blond and red that you might find on a peach. When she wasn’t wearing her glasses, she didn’t always meet a person’s gaze.

The American sat down opposite her. He was younger than she was.

“Would you like some?” she asked doubtfully, offering the tangerine. “I wouldn’t offer if poxy Thom and all of them were here, but seeing how it’s only you…” She neatly turned off a cluster of three of the fruit’s plump wedges and put them on the corner of the napkin closest to him.

“You eat it. You need the vitamins.”

“My mother sent them to me,” she continued. “You can’t find tangerines in bloody Prague. But you’ll spoil it if you don’t take some now I’ve offered it to you specially.”

He ate one of the wedges. “Thanks,” he said. He took out his keys.

“I quite like having a cabinet with a key of my own, don’t you?” she said. “I feel as if I’m an established person.”

“It’s very grown-up.”

“Well, it may not be such a new experience for you.” She had abruptly dropped the color from her voice. “As a Harv. No doubt you had
lockers
and such.”

“I’ve never had a serious job before.”

“Your man Rafe”—it was spelled
Ralph
, but
Rafe
was how everyone pronounced it, even though he was American—“your man Rafe started teaching here with us but then they asked him over the castle.”

“What does he do there? No one will tell me.”

“Don’t you think it’s peculiar that there are so many of you? Harvs, I mean. You’re like rabbits or something. You’re all Agency, aren’t you. That’s what they call it, you know.”