Those who know J.S. Marcus from his stories in The New Yorker, GQ and a few smaller magazines -- they were last collected five years ago in "The Art of Cartography" -- know he possesses a narrative style fit for the waning years of this tired century: A muted voice that sounds something like Nathaniel West on a course of mild barbiturates.

In his new novel, "The Captain's Fire," that voice examines unified Berlin, where American Joel La Vine, mid-30s, Jewish, and bisexual, is about to lose his high-paying job in a language school. Joel doesn't much care about this, or anything else. As an old girlfriend puts it, he was "raised to get back into bed in the morning." Not that there's much happening between the sheets, either. Joel has become almost totally impotent, doomed to "want to be with a woman when I am with a man, and with a man when I am with a woman. This amounts to an eroticized Wanderlust, a yearning to be intimately elsewhere." Where Joel does exist intimately is in the pre-war Berlin of the German-Jewish writers he reads constantly -- Elias Canetti is a favorite -- while drifting from one apartment to another, getting fat on a diet of sausages, beer and cake.

Although his protagonist is obsessed with the Berlin of the past, and the murdered or dispersed Jews who lived and wrote there ("All of Berlin is a Jewish cemetery," Joel says), Marcus also brings to life the bleak, loony scene of today's hastily capitalized Eastern Bloc. This is a Berlin whose eastern side is populated by out-of-work men who throw Honecker nostalgia parties, scrawl "I want my wall back" graffiti, and generally yearn for a return to comforting authoritarianism. Here, Kafka's image on a T-shirt is viewed as "a sort of Mickey Mouse for the Disneyland Prague has become." Marcus' style is often heavy and complicated, but he's made a haunting world come alive.

-- Edward Neuert