Phillips’ ‘Tragedy’ tricky, funny

THE TRAGEDY OF ARTHUR: A Novel. By Arthur Phillips. Random House. 368 pages. $26.

“The Tragedy of Arthur” is a tricky, postmodern, nested piece of work that’s also funny and addictively readable.

Here’s the premise: “Arthur Phillips,” the book’s narrator, shares a name, occupation, and some life history with Arthur Phillips, the novelist.

“The Tragedy of Arthur” is the fifth novel of Phillips, the novelist. It’s also the title of a lost-and-found Shakespeare play bequeathed to Phillips, the narrator, by his father, who spent most of his adult life in jail for forgery. Is the play real, the son of a forger must ask, even as his publishers assemble a battalion of scholars who swear by it. At every level, questions of authenticity and belief are central to the story Phillips tells.

The play itself occupies the last 111 pages of a 368-page book. Following a brief preface from Random House that advises readers to “plunge directly into the play, allowing Shakespeare to speak for himself,” the bulk of the novel is a “very personal Introduction” from Phillips the narrator. This ingenious format might in other hands seem overly pretentious or intricate, but Phillips has written a faux-memoir that cuts to the heart of the con: a desire to believe in something beyond the world of facts. Phillips Sr. preaches “the greatness of anyone who adds to the world’s store of wonder and magic, disorder, confusion, possibility.”

Phillips the narrator spends his life alternately falling for and resisting his father’s charms. Raised by a master betrayer, he becomes a flawed and faithless hero himself. His introduction to “The Tragedy of Arthur” is a final stand against all the wizards and dandies and finaglers, including himself, who can’t be satisfied with the world as it is.

Arthur Phillips, the novelist, delivers a hectic, bravura performance. Show over, he leaves his alter-ego standing alone on the stage, “staring out into the darkness with a stupid smile and darting eyes.”