The New Criterion

In Vassily Aksyonov’s 1980 novel The Island of Crimea, an upset woman named Tanya walks into a diner and orders shish kebab. A tremendously fat woman taunts Tanya and eats pie. A KGB agent enters. Things get clamorous. The chef, who is not wearing any pants, accosts a waif at the counter. The pie-eating woman snatches a man by the shirt, force-feeds him, and threatens him sexually. The KGB agent slips out the door and disappears into the night; the cashier doesn’t even blink. Tanya knocks her plate to the floor and dashes outside. A group of German tourists locks arms, sways back and forth, and sings Nazi songs. A trio of elephants, ridden by “bottomless sex maniacs,” charges through. Finally, someone yells “Cut!” Tanya had walked onto a movie set; the director liked her chance appearance and kept rolling.

In Aksyonov’s latest novel, The New Sweet Style, no one yells “Cut!” Rather, the novel rockets imaginatively and seemingly without limit through the story of Alexander Korbach, a dissident Moscow theater director who is expelled from the USSR as an undesirable and emigrates to the United States. Though he has been told many times that his name is big in the States, Korbach’s arrival is anticlimactic. Wandering around Times Square, “at one moment striding along like the Futurist poet Mayakovsky, at another shuffling along in the Beckett manner,” drunk and on the verge of a psychotic break:

There appeared to him a sight in the center of which, in huge, burning letters standing out against a dark sky, was his own name: alexander KORBACH. Well that’s it. My time has come. They’re calling.

“Qu’est-ce que c’est, madame?,” he babbles at one of the passing “Nuevo Yorkers.” “Just ‘Korbach,’ sir! Un grand magasin!,” she answers.

Sitting down on a stoop next to a bum and resting his head against a shaky skyscraper, he took a swig from the flask and looked at the evenly illuminated letters of his name. They did not blink, and they did not change colors like a Times Square chameleon. With a calm, yellow, electrical light, they confirmed it: “Alexander Korbach is a great name in the States!”

This discovery is only the beginning. He also finds the genealogy-obsessed fourth cousin billionaire owner of the Korbach department store, the astronaut/archaeologist daughter of said billionaire with whom he falls in love (the Beatrice of this book, the reason for the dulce stil nuovo), a job in a Los Angeles parking garage, and a small business as a drug dealer. Characters abound, as do plot lines. If Aksyonov weren’t so genial, if he didn’t write with such easy self-confidence, the thing would be a catastrophe.

Aksyonov frequently departs from the world of the plausible, or even the possible, but he does so with an enchanting nonchalance. Authors on flights of fancy often think they are up to more than caprice, and radiate a smug pomposity that is, at best, unbecoming. Not so with Aksyonov, for whom the funhouse is indeed fun. His intrusions (though they could number fewer) are friendly:

Characters, characters, oh, these characters, we’ll say in Mr. Gogol’s style of “lyrical digression.” Isn’t it a bother to keep them in mind all the time, to make them interact, to display at least some logic in their actions … to drag them out from time to time, give them a good phonetic shower, a good healthy breakfast, a beer over lunch, champagne over dinner, to treat them well on the whole, as equals, or otherwise you might discover one day that they’ve run away.

Certainly he is playing around, but there’s a big Russian history of gamesome authors. When Aksyonov has one character say to another, “That’s right, my friend, the very building you took for the gates of Judgment Day at the beginning of the book,” he isn’t scribbling Roland Barthes on the blackboard; this is not a textual concern. He’s having a good time of it.

A man steps into a wall and joins a virtual meeting going on there. Two business men get in a fight at a Lower East Side steak house; 59,438 bystanders die. Our hero, who is frequently described in terms wholly simian, runs off into a crowd and joins up in the popular resistance to the August Coup. Are we to believe that anyone would give our drunken monkey of a hero some astounding chest of Hollywood money so that he might make a movie about Dante and Beatrice? Well, no, but as Askyonov insists: it’s a story. No one believes she lived in a shoe, either.

Still, tolerant as I am of Rabelaisian enthusiasm, Aksyonov makes some very odd missteps. He flubs screwy little details. A man dreams of driving on a beach, in a Jeep, away from it all, wind-blown and sun-bleached, wearing velvet jeans. No American man dreams of velvet jeans. A university parking lot is full of students setting their fancy coffee drinks on the roofs of their cars while they unlock the door with one hand, the other hand clutching a cellular phone. But it’s the late Eighties, students didn’t have cell phones, and coffee shops were not the defining ubiquitous element that they were soon to become. Nitpicky stuff, yes, and in a sense it is understandable that an émigré author would mess up some small details. That he’s been playing with this book for well over fifteen years (sketches of it appeared in his published journal of arrival in the States titled In Search of Melancholy Baby) explains, but does nothing to excuse, the slips.

There are autobiographical elements to The New Sweet Style, but they are easy to spot. Aksyonov found here no billionaire fourth cousin, but rather a professorship at George Mason University and a stint at the Keenan Institute. There are limits to autobiography that don’t suit Aksyonov’s abundant absurdism. Cluttered with memoir and faux memoir as my bookshelves are, it gives me great relief to find an author who makes things up. Flipping through book after book of domestic squabble, family struggle, and flat-out whining leads me to approve of unrealistic fiction. Fiction that is invention, such as Aksyonov’s, is like a cool drink of water. At times the draught goes on too long, but as I said, no one yells “Cut!” in this exuberant outpouring, and it was never for restraint that we turned to Russia.