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