The Russian Girl. - book reviews

National Review, August 1, 1994 by Thomas Mallon

"IT was the perfect title," thought Lucky Jim Dixon, forty years ago, while contemplating his own academic article on "The Economic Influence of the Developments in Shipbuilding Techniques, 1450 to 1485": "it crystallized the article's niggling mindlessness, its funereal parade of yawn-enforcing facts, the pseudo-light it threw upon non-problems." Ah, those were the days! How preferable were uselessness and obfuscation to the multicultural gerrymandering of today's bluestockinged professoriate. For Kingsley Amis to revisit society's most degraded province just to write a new novel is nearly a heroic act.

At 46, the unhappily married Richard Vaisey is a curricularly incorrect professor of Russian literature fighting a rearguard battle to keep the books he loves from being taught in translation. His old friend "Chair-of-Department Hallett" is a good man but inclined to appeasement; Richard must put up with incurious students, surly staff, and politicized colleagues --until Anna Danilova, an attractive young Russian poet, comes visiting a year and a half before the demise of the old Soviet Union.

Anna is hardly some drab Ninotchka in need of coaxing toward the silk sheets and champagne. She proves herself immediately eager for Richard, and for something else besides: introduction to "as many as possible of the people who can make [her] poetry famous in England." Publicity, she reasons, will put pressure on the Soviet authorities to release her brother Sergei from prison. Not that he's a martyred dissident--just someone who was locked up for illegal currency dealings and deserves to get out now that he has served his sentence: "I'm not trying to get him a retrial or a pardon or anything like that," says Anna in her appealingly frank way, and before long Richard is enlisting the help of his awful wife's ex-brother-in-law, a mover and shaker named Crispin Radetsky, in a scheme to turn Anna into a petition-worthy Cause.

But there is a problem. Anna's poetry, Richard has to admit, is nothing short of terrible. Every time he hears or reads it, he realizes that it's even worse than he thought it the time before. Since Richard is one of the few people any longer inclined to ask questions of quality, he spends most of the novel wondering how he can help Anna without actually signing a statement that touts her work. He is in the sort of moral quandary people don't have much any more in fiction, but which, in his beloved Russian novels, they used to have all the time.

The Russian Girl is full of small pleasures, though the plot upon which they are hung is a bit frail. Could anyone, even in the rarefied precincts of poetry, still hope to plod toward fame in the way Richard envisions for Anna? Radetsky recognizes the project as "the purest bookish fantasy," and although he goes along with it, he surely knows they'd all be better off making Anna do something heinous enough to draw the attention of British TV's version of Hard Copy.

Mr. Amis remains capable of some wonderful two-edged effects (in saying that Hallett "thrashed impotently about on or in his chair for a short interval" he has a go at both modern furniture and modern language), but he has grown almost morbidly sensitive to the nuances of utterance and gesture. There's a tiring, almost Jamesian density to a sort of paragraph that has little more to do than get characters across a room. Still, when it comes to human speech, Mr. Amis has always made Henry Higgins look like an amateur. He can even characterize inhuman speech: the "telephone rang, or rather warbled affectedly in the new way it had."

Richard's wife, Cordelia, is the novel's real monster, neurotically poised for most of it between disagreeableness and insanity, and hellishly over the edge for the last few chapters. She is self-deludingly cheap; she exploits her friends, who are willing to do her bidding for the grotesque fascination of her company; and she ends up exacting a series of revenges upon Richard for his affair with Anna that lie somewhere between Euripides and Stephen King. But mostly she speaks, with a ghastly sort of Anglo-Tallulah Bankhead sound: "Blease zdob gee-bing on and on aboud zumthing thad zimbly zdared you in the vaze." The voice is her own attention-getting invention, and among the book's characters she is the absolute showstopper.

If from time to time Mr. Amis's satire seems a little stale, it's less his fault than the culture's. His targets have been allowed to take unbudgeable hold, from terrible architecture to general illiteracy. It has been a long time since he or anyone else could really say I Like It Here with any enthusiasm. But The Russian Girl retains a certain bounce, and eight years after winning the Booker Prize for The Old Devils, Mr. Amis shows he can still crack a few good lashes with his own pitchforked tail.

Mr. Mallon's new novel, Henry and Clara, will be published in August by Ticknor & Fields.