David Schmahmann, in the era of Spitzer, Edwards, Weiner and Schwarzenegger, has written a novel about a powerful man who risks his reputation and career for illicit sex and ends up in an unlikely relationship with a Bangkok bar girl. “The Double Life of Alfred Buber” may in some ways feel like a mystery novel, but it’s much more than that.
In David Schmahmann’s new novel, Alfred Buber is a respected man with a secret. Telling his boss and colleagues that he’s going to Paris, he regularly travels instead to Southeast Asia to go whoring in the squalid back alleys. And then on one of his trips to Bangkok, he falls in love.