By Keith Gessen, Viking, 338 pages, $26
Keith Gessen’s A Terrible Country feels small and tentative in its opening pages. The sentences do not ring. You are not sure the author is capable of seizing his material, rather than following along behind it, like a man in a boat with a little two-stroke motor. This is Gessen’s second novel, after All the Sad Young Literary Men, which appeared a decade ago. In that time he has established himself as a journalist (largely for The New Yorker), a translator from the Russian (Nobel laureate Svetlana Alexievich’s Voices From Chernobyl), a critic (largely for The London Review of Books) and an editor. He was a founder of n+1, the many-tentacled literary magazine out of Brooklyn.
Picking up his new book one wants to say, in a voice out of an Isaac Bashevis Singer novel: “What? He needs to write fiction, too?”
A Terrible Country is about a young man’s moral and aesthetic progress. His name is Andrei Kaplan. Like the author, he was born in Russia but raised in the United States. Like the author, too, he is afflicted with a permanent sense of semi-exile.
Andrei is a frazzled academic in New York City with scant job prospects. His adviser mocks the vagueness of his area of expertise by parodying him, declaring in a little girl’s voice: “I’m a specialist in modernity. I study the ways in which modernity affects the Russian mind.”
Andrei’s girlfriend has abandoned him. Money is low. In this novel, like his last one, Gessen writes with special feeling about the flyspecked romance of being young, idealistic, frugal and needing to scrounge for a decent meal. Both books are, on a certain level, ramen-packet versions of Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast.
A Terrible Country is about what happens when Andrei returns to Moscow, at the request of his older brother, an amoral uber-capitalist named Dima, to care for their 89-year-old grandmother, who is beginning to show signs of dementia. Dima has fled to London after his latest brilliant scheme has gone bust.
The story is set in 2008. We follow Andrei as he learns to navigate the Moscow subway, searches for Wi-Fi, joins pickup hockey games, is dragged to nightclubs and ultimately falls in with a crowd of bookish and genial subversives and would-be socialists. Their small pickets and protests and “actions” are drawing more attention from Putin’s government than they are aware.
Gessen is a writer of spare sentences; he is more of a Chekhov than a Nabokov. There is little thunder, no off-piste mental excursions, no sense of a writer stropping his razor. His sort of plain writing is difficult to pull off. There is a fine line between elegant simplicity and mere meagreness.
As this novel pushes forward, however, Gessen’s patience, his ability to husband his resources, begins to pay off. He introduces character after character — goalies and oilmen and comely academics, the heartbroken, the disinherited and the excluded — each of whom blooms in the mind.
Which is another way of saying that this earnest and wistful but serious book gets good, and then it gets very good. Gessen finds an emotional tone for his material. He writes incisively about many things here but especially about, as the old saw has it, how it is easier to fight for your principles than live up to them. At the wrong moment, in front of the authorities, Andrei flinches.
Andrei’s grandmother is a particularly vivid presence. She may be losing her mind, but she still destroys Andrei at word games. When anything goes wrong in her apartment, she clutches herself and mumbles, “We’re ruined, we’re ruined.” She pulls out her false teeth in cafes, causing children to scream.
She embodies, in her way, this novel’s complicated sense of Russian politics and morality. She lost her beloved country house due to capitalist machinations. But she got her apartment in Moscow, near the central KGB offices, thanks to her work on a propaganda film for Stalin and to the misfortune of another family in the Stalin era.
Referring to the apartment’s nearness to former execution chambers, Andrei says, “It was like living down the street from Auschwitz.”
There are wonderful moments in this novel when Andrei begins to rent old Soviet-era movies of which his grandmother is fond, because she cannot stomach the violence in new films. They watch them together.
Andrei’s motives for returning to Moscow (he has sublet his apartment in New York to a drummer) are not entirely altruistic. To find a teaching job, he needs to publish. Perhaps while in Russia he can stumble on a topic. He finds one in Sergei, an academic who sacrifices his job for his own ideals.
About the paper he publishes on Sergei, Andrei says: “I placed his work in the context of quixotic Russian attempts to reorganise the world. Sergei struck me as a Tolstoy figure, the sort of person who gives up everything to wander the earth and follow the dictates of his conscience.”
Andrei wants to be this kind of person but is not, or at least not quite. He joins Sergei’s political group but is at best a socialist manque. (“Manque see, manque do,” as John Updike wrote in Bech: A Book.)
Andrei has wandered into this group in part because of his affection for a young woman, Yulia. She has green eyes. This reviewer would like to propose a moratorium on women whose glowing souls can be glimpsed through their green eyes.
It was an earlier young woman, one who rebuffed him, who nailed Andrei. She said to him, “You seem like a nice young man. But I don’t think you’re cut out for this.” Cut out for what, he asks? Her reply: “For Russia.”
Gessen does not declare his intentions in A Terrible Country through a megaphone. He is all about exploring understated antitheses, not brazen theses. This novel builds, subtly, to a moment that allows Andrei a career victory that may enable Putin’s regime to impale those Andrei loves most like moths on pins.
This artful and autumnal novel, published in high summer, is a gift for those who wish to receive it.
–New York Times News Service
