For the last month, I've been practicing the phrase, "I used to live in Boston," but it still feels strange to say it. In two weeks, I'll put all my stuff in a truck and head south to New York. I'm prepared, but after eight and a half years, leaving this city isn't going to be easy, for the peculiar reason that I never intended to stay so long in the first place. Partly, the problem is that the city itself is so inhospitable to the very idea of settling in. Everyone complains about the consistently inconsistent weather in the capital of New England, but this complaining just symbolizes Boston's single enduring truth: change without significant difference is the order of the day. Due to the number of colleges and universities in this so-called American Athens, a huge percentage of the population is transient; the students come and go in massive, recurrent waves. The major streets, including the one on which I live, seem to be dug up only to be created anew every single summer. And every year, the Boston Red Sox invariably come out roaring in the spring, only to fade away in August.

Similarly, huge expectations have been raised only to be dashed with respect to the notorious Big Dig, which will, at some point in the future, sink the section of Route 95 that runs through downtown Boston under the ground, and replace it with a stretch of public park. I'm told that, in expense and ambition, the Big Dig rivals only China's mammoth Three Gorges project as the largest public works project on the planet. Naturally, the Big Dig has been mired in controversy and cost-overruns from the beginning, yet it keeps chugging on, transforming the city on what seems a daily basis, as auto and pedestrian traffic is endlessly rerouted and new bridges and tunnels appear suddenly as if out of nowhere.

Fittingly, the protean city of Boston provides the setting for much of Fast Eddie, King of the Bees, a first novel by Robert Arellano that's just out from Akashic Books. Fast Eddie kicks off Akashic's Urban Surreal series, and if Fast Eddie is any indication, Akashic's commitment to this series will result in some gorgeous books, for Fast Eddie is beautifully designed, with illustrations by Marek Bennett and Lindsay Packer. Arellano, who holds an MFA from Brown University, where he now teaches writing and hypertext, is also the author, under the pen name Bobby Rabyd, of the Web's first interactive novel, Sunshine69, a wildly imaginative redescription of the historic Altamont free concert at the height of the Sixties. If Sunshine69 time-tripped backwards toward a moment of lost utopian promise, Fast Eddie takes place in a near-future dystopia, a future Boston (known, in Fast Eddie, as the Beast) that's nevertheless near enough to unsettle this erstwhile Bostonian.

But this is a bit misleading, because Fast Eddie has more in common with Oliver Twist than with recent novels, like William Gibson's Neuromancer, set in a dystopic near-future. For one thing, despite its glitzy descriptions of the future of just about everything, Neuromancer still takes itself very serious as a novel that squats firmly in a certain genre, with a plot and characters that even Charles Dickens would recognize, even if he were befuddled by the technology. Not so for Fast Eddie, which does not so much tell a story as question the whole enterprise of storytelling — of creating a series of events that unfold according to an inner necessity that the narrative must slowly uncover, the way a careful dissection can reveal structure and function all at once, after the inessential surfaces have been stripped away.

Fast Eddie is the story is the eponymous main character's quest, familiar from Oedipus, of finding out where he comes from, and in the process discovering, or inventing, who he is. "Don't ask me where I come from," Fast Eddie begins, orphaned and abandoned to Boston's criminal netherworld. "I myself should never have asked...The problem is, the question asked me." This reversal typifies most subsequent developments for Fast Eddie, who must learn to cope with the wild hairpin turns characteristic of his unsentimental education in the school of near-future hard knocks, wild twists that occur on the macro-level of the story as well as (and often most beautifully) on the micro-level of sentences and transitions in the language of the story (of which more below).