Minding Manners

Corruption is an old story, but globalization has given that story new forms. In Sana Krasikov’s debut story collection, “One More Year” (Spiegel & Grau, 229 pages, $21.95), she describes the lives of New York Russians with one foot still in the Old World. In her stories, the precarious, sometimes gut-churning state of affairs in the former Soviet republic of Georgia makes life even more precarious for the illegal immigrants of Long Island and Westchester.In “The Repatriates,” one of tightest stories in the collection, a Russian-American wife, Lera, leaves her idyllic home and garden on the banks of the Hudson to return to Moscow, where her husband, Grisha, tired of the condescension he endures at Morgan Stanley, seeks “opportunities.” Grisha wants to be a kingpin. Despite his idealistic talk about how robust mortgage markets would benefit ordinary Russians, Lera doubts that they can assume anything like the security of their American lives. When she realizes that Grisha has paid off the Orthodox Church, of all things, in order to win business contacts, she is disconcerted; when she discovers a lover’s marginalia in one of Grisha’s self-improvement books, she realizes she has been had. Divorce laws are much more favorable to men in Moscow than in Dobbs Ferry.Grisha’s infidelity comes as a surprise, even though “The Repatriates” begins with Tolstoyan generalization:The last days of Grisha and Lera Arsenyev’s marriage might have been a story fashioned out of commonplace warnings. Retold, it became no longer about the Arsenyevs at all, but about the ambushes that befall the most gleefully naïve of us, still laboring under illusions.Ms. Krasikov never lets us presume that her characters definitely love one another. When the Arsenyevs’ marriage reaches its end, Ms. Krasikov brings her curtain down swiftly — and in her denouement she summarizes the reactions of Lera’s friends back in New York: that what Grisha did was animal, but that Lera was a fool to miss the warning signs. Ms. Krasikov’s world is a cruel one.In subject matter, “One More Year” is overshadowed by the Russian writer Ludmila Ulitskaya’s “The Funeral Party,” a novella about Russian bohemians in New York. Ms. Krasikov’s stories do not have Ms. Ulitskaya’s thick atmosphere of smoky emotion; instead, her stories live in the astringent world of housewives and housekeepers, and her theme is best summed up by the phrase “laboring under illusions.” Indeed, her book is more cogent, as a collection with a point, than most. Though in terms of structure and technique they offer nothing new to the form, Ms. Krasikov’s short stories are some of the finest debut work to appear in recent years. Bitterness and martyrdom are the spice of these stories, and one of her characters, bewildered by the petty tit-for-tat around her, wonders: “Must every simple decency now be counted?” But that kind of counting is precisely what makes a writer of manners superb.* * *In 1880, Henry Adams had at his disposal a world of manners much more finely calibrated than anything now extant. Not all readers know that the famous historian and author of “The Education of Henry Adams” was also a novelist, but the timely reissue of “Democracy: An American Novel” (Penguin Classics, 202 pages, $13) may inform them. Published in 1880, a year before Henry James’s “The Portrait of a Lady,” Adams’s novel could be fairly called Henry James-lite. It is the story of a wealthy, strong-willed widow, Madeleine Lightfoot Lee, who has tired of New York and exhausted Europe and who now turns to Washington, D.C. “She wanted to see with her own eyes the action of primary forces … to measure with her own mind the capacity of the motive power.”What she finds is corruption, resplendent and ultimately repugnant. Written while his landmark history of the administrations of Jefferson and Madison (1889-91) was under way, “Democracy” was published anonymously, and it casually satirized the forces that Adams was otherwise obliged to take seriously. His disgust with the Grant administration, which is outlined more explicitly in “The Education,” inspired the creation of Senator Silas Ratcliffe, the “Prairie Giant of Peonia,” Illinois. Ratcliffe outfoxes a hostile president-elect by drumming up so many entanglements for him that the president must make Ratcliffe his confidante in order to untangle them all. Thus empowered, Ratcliffe makes his play for Mrs. Lee, the most eligible and interested political spectator in Washington.Seduced by the pragmatism of Ratcliffe, Mrs. Lee undergoes a set of Jamesian convolutions, only to realize her moral peril in a fireside study almost worthy of Isabel Archer. “Underneath the scum floating on the surface of politics,” Madeleine had hoped that “there was a sort of healthy ocean current of honest purpose, which swept the scum before it, and kept the mass pure.” Though it would be a better novel if Adams had included more than one great politician, and set them at odds, “Democracy” may be one of our most direct novelistic approaches to the question of “whether America is right or wrong.”blytal@nysun.com

Minding Manners

Minding Manners

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