The first verse : a novel /

Pop-culture scholars have theorized that our digital age, which emphasizes the linear and logical, has created at least a generation or two starved for ancient rites and ritual, for the mystical, magical elements a world structured on bits and bytes lacks. How else to explain the multigenerational appeal of Harry Potter, The DaVinci Code, and even Joan of Arcadia? Some culture gurus suggest an almost cultlike yet mass hunger that seeks to use Code and its ilk to explain the world's mysteries. Into this milieu comes McCrea's first novel about Trinity College (Dublin) freshman Niall Lenihan, who dives into new experiences, in particular a cult that makes a game and, eventually, a dangerous addiction of signs and secrets its members derive from literature, e-mail, and text-messaging. Set in Paris as well as Dublin, McCrea's gay Gen X opus delivers sharp pacing and a sense of place colored by the state of mind that leads a young man to lose a year of his life to odd pursuits. --Whitney Scott Copyright 2005 Booklist

Young Irish newcomer McCrea works Joyce's territory with Beckettian irony--and a healthy splash of Patrick White. Niall Lenihan has come up to Dublin to do his studies at Trinity. He's not exactly a bumpkin, just a boy fresh off a crush on a boy who is now off to the continent, ignoring his cellphone calls and text messages. These little techno-accouterments are important to McCrea's story, the stuff of subtext and context; via text messages, Niall begs off beery meetings with his college chums to visit what was "for a long time Dublin's only gay pub and still the unrivaled center of Dublin's homosexual world" and suchlike places, where his horizons and circle of acquaintances most definitely expand. So do they when, inspired by a shadowy figure with a wondrously improbable name, Niall and school friends are drawn into a literary game inspired by the old Roman sortes virgilianae, by which the answers to life's questions are to be located among the lines of the Aeneid. Niall's texts are broader, including novels, poems and even travel guides; naturally, Joyce turns up early on, convincing Niall of the merits of the game: when he challenges pal Fionnuala to tell him where his parents live, she dusts off Ulysses to reply, "Oh damn you and your Paris fads . . . I want Sandycove milk." You don't have to be Irish--or gay--to follow the twists of McCrea's plot, though it might help at points to have read Maeve Binchy, to know what an "RTÉ accent" sounds like, and to have some sense of the layout of Dublin and, later, Paris, where Niall's bibliomanic fortunes take him far from Sandycove, to spend his hours "being led to an apartment block where the initial letters of the names on the bells formed an acrostic of 'Sarah' . . . or ending up in conversation with a drunk Irish gay man in the Marais called John." Rich in ideas and true to the real world: a promising debut. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.