I was browsing in the fiction section of the library when I recognized this author’s name on the jacket of this book, from her stories in The Atlantic and The New Yorker, so I signed it out. I am glad I did. This epic first novel is a treasure of extensively researched historical fiction, a War and Peace for modern times. Set in New York, Moscow, Washington, and numerous other places, the complex plot covers the era of 1933 to 2008; families are torn apart by blind loyalty to political beliefs, best friends are betrayed amid the paranoia, duplicity and distrust of the Stalinist purges, and moral dilemmas, family loyalties and eternal truths are delicately explored.
An idealistic young educated American woman leaves what she sees as the corrupt U.S.A. in the 1930’s for the utopian Soviet Union. In spite of deprivations, deceptions, loss of family ties and almost losing her life in a Siberian labour camp, she ever wavers in her loyalty to Marxist ideals. Life in the cruel, paranoid, antisemitic world of the Stalinist era U.S.S.R. is graphically depicted. In many ways, this reminded me of Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago. But the plot is much more complex, including the abandonment of U.S. citizens in Moscow by the U.S. government, the fate of U.S. prisoners of war in the Korean War, the convoluted relationship of U.S. entrepreneurial industrialists with corrupt Russian oligarchs as they plan to cooperate in developing oil fields in the Barents Sea after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the problematic relationship between Russian Jews and the birth of the state of Israel.
Each of the 43 chapters starts with an official-looking slightly smudged stamp of the year and the location. The chapters are not sequential, jumping back and forth between 1933 to 2008, and from Moscow, New York, and Washington D.C. to Siberia. Nor is there one narrator- some chapters are related in the first person singular, others from the viewpoint of a disinterested third person. This makes it a bit of a challenge for the reader to keep the characters and their relationships straight, as does the usual Russian practice of using multiple names for individuals, depending on the circumstances. The first few chapters need to be read slowly and carefully (or reread, as I did) in order to keep track of who is who in what follows.
There is a lot of introspective analysis of motives and moral problems by various characters, but this never comes across as sappy sentimentality; rather it infuses the story with depictions of universal human weaknesses and dilemmas.
Among many memorable lines, I chose two. “A memory is a difficult thing to judge from a distance” and, in relation to the unfairness of life, “Fair is a place where pigs win ribbons.”
Inevitably, this work will be compared to A Gentleman in Moscow, which I reviewed last week. This story’s plot is much more complex, and there is much more suspense and intrigue. I am ambivalent as to which one to recommend if you only have the time or the inclination to read one Soviet-era historical novel, but on balance I would recommend The Patriots, which I just finished this week. I changed the order of the reviews I had planned to post this week, in the hope that readers will enjoy this book as much as I did. And no, I have no relationship to the author or the publisher. This is not a paid plug.
The Passionate Reader 