The Catastrophist

The narrator of this morbidly comic debut novel is Daniel Wellington, a 30-something art historian recounting the arc of his own self-destruction. Married, tenured, a rising star at Massachusetts's fictional Franklin College, Daniel falls apart piece by piece, beginning with the onset of "prepartum dread" when his wife "R." gets pregnant. He briefly recovers when she loses the baby, but the damage to their marriage is already done. The hapless Daniel proceeds to make a series of personal and professional misjudgments, including several unconsummated affairs. An expert on war memorials (he's at work on a manuscript titled Art and Atrocity ), Daniel is appointed to the commission for a Berlin Holocaust Memorial, a position he jeopardizes by impulsively and falsely claiming to be the child of Holocaust survivors. Though Douglas covers familiar territory—the insularity of academia and the neurotic male in crisis—he does so with arch homage to Philip Roth. Even if the novel's landscape feels derivative, Daniel's maddening, pitiable voice is all his own. (May 16)