The Ruins

Demonstrating a vein of perversity all her own, Farrell makes a strong bid to join the company of elite postmodern comic writers like Coover and Pynchon. Her exciting, funny debut features a naive shoeshine boy who suddenly finds himself working at an infernal upscale restaurant called The Ruins. Located in an ominously decaying port town called Q, The Ruins is an establishment straight out of the theater of the ridiculous. As he learns to mix martinis and put up with the abuse and fraught affections of his insufferably fey boss, Jones, methodical Tom is maddened by the chaos around him: the menus are either out of date or maliciously inaccurate, the staff is in constant turmoil, parties are arranged and disarranged at a moment's notice. Tom's efforts to impose a system on the restaurant set him on a collision course with Jones, a demiurge of disorganization. The narrative is not only a linguistically glittering fable but a fairly shrewd satire of the way fancy restaurants really operate. Tom's progress is narrated as a series of dreamlike skits in which he finds himself acting as maitre d', quitting his job and then returning for the Spring Frolic, a hellish special event with Jones as master of revels. The one weakness in this novel is its slow beginning, which one hopes will not deter readers from exploring the rest of the intriguing book. (May) FYI: The Ruins won the 1997 NYU Press Prize for Fiction.