When No One Becomes Someone 
 That weekend in Rhinebeck I was thinking in the mode of the campus melodrama, a middle-aged professor targeted for vengeance by a student scorned. That, I now see, was the wrong genre entirely. 
 What, though, is the right one? 
 I was lucky, I think, to order this book (from the Amazon Vine program) on the author's name alone, and to start reading it without looking at the back-cover blurb. For one of the most intriguing things about it was simply not knowing what genre it would turn out to be. The quotation comes from more than halfway through the book, and even there the answer is far from clear. I will try not to reveal it. 
 Jeremy O'Keefe is indeed a middle-aged professor, an historian specializing in East Germany in the Stasi era. He has just returned to a well-paid job at NYU after teaching for more than a decade at Oxford. In most respects, this is a homecoming: he used to teach at Columbia; he is still on speaking terms with his ex-wife, and he has a much-loved daughter Meredith, now running her own art gallery and married to a media Wunderkind; his mother lives a little way up the Hudson. But he has largely lost touch with his old friends, and feels himself in a kind of limbo between the British and American cultures. In the first chapter, he goes to a cafe to meet a graduate student, but she doesn't turn up. After a rather strange conversation with a young man who joshes him about his missed date, he returns home to find an eMail on his computer from the student agreeing to his suggestion that they postpone their appointment. But he has no memory of making such a suggestion at all. 
 The novel will take a long time to develop. Jeremy is not an academic for nothing, and takes his time laying everything out. All the time I was reading, I caught echoes of an older generation of writers, both British and American, that I could not quite place: Auster perhaps, DeLillo, even Bellow, or across the pond McEwan, Murdoch, or possibly Angus Wilson. Many readers may be turned off by his tendency to look at everything upside and down before moving on, but I was entranced by his intelligence and frame of reference. Besides, the escalation in his story happens in very small stages: the sense that he is being watched and followed, mysterious boxes delivered to his apartment building containing computer printouts that he at first cannot understand, further encounters with the young man from the cafe. Before long, he begins to wonder if he is hallucinating or becoming paranoid; he also begins to look for explanations in his past, during those years in Oxford: 
 My own story, I know, is not only about a state of paranoia at last proved warranted. In the accordion-squeeze recollection of my past, the distant events coming closer during the moments in which I examine them only to recede as the expansive air of inattention pushes them further away again, I sense that in the end the more universal experience of romance and separation may yet prove my innocence. 
 I am giving this four stars because I did so enjoy Professor O'Keefe's voice and comments on a wide variety of topics; I am an academic myself, after all, with experience both sides of the pond. I enjoyed the fact that the novel accelerated from the midpoint on, as revelations from Oxford are intercut with events in upstate New York, building an increasing potential for disaster. But I have to admit that my four stars might be anybody else's three: the author tends to hammer too hard at his theme; he steers a little close to melodrama; he has less success finding the voice of his more sinister characters; and he cannot prevent Jeremy O'Keefe from seeming weaker as you find out more about him. 
 "But I'm no one." 
 "We're all no one until we do something to turn ourselves into someone and you, Dad, have made choices that do just that."Patrick Flanery's novel is about the gradual revelation of what those choices were, and I really enjoyed its slow but steady build-up. Perhaps the ending came a little too easily after such momentum, but it will not stop me looking forward to whatever Flanery will do next.