Among universally known writers, Fyodor Dostoyevsky is one of the most quintessentially writerly – colorfully tragic and mad, but indisputably serious and worthy. So he makes the perfect presiding deity for Lara Vapnyar’s first novel, “Memoirs of a Muse” (Pantheon, 224 pages, $22.95), which proposes to study the quintessential relationship of muse and author.

Tatiana grows up fatherless but surrounded by pictures of famous Russian authors. Chekhov looks like he is enjoying a secret, she thinks, and Tolstoy looks like a stern Santa Claus. Tatiana chooses Dostoyevsky as her surrogate father: “He had serious eyes, and he looked straight at me, without hiding, without the fake playful expression of other adults.” Ms.Vapnyar has a happy way with little cynicisms.

Tatiana not only chooses Dostoyevsky; she chooses to become a muse, like Dostoyevsky’s mistress,Apollinaria Suslova. Contrived as this premise feels in its original statement, it mellows as Tatiana moves to New York and meets and moves in with a successful American writer. Her dream of Dostoyevsky becomes a perfectly plausible reference point, because her Mark Schneider is no Russian genius.”I could hardly imagine Dostoyevsky jogging, gulping down protein smoothies, or summoning the shrink to relieve him of his sadness or agitation,” she observes.

Ms. Vapnyar knows she cannot go very far with such a simple comparison, so Tatiana comes to regret her fantasies. She decides that Dostoyevsky’s needs were as banal as Mark’s.

The relationship of muse to author proves to be analogous to that of an immigrant to her adopted culture.The relationship is not uplifting: “Possibly humiliation was a requisite state for recent immigrants,” Ms. Vapnyar writes. Tatiana’s attitude toward Mark is indeed submissive, and she has to give up her noble sexual imagination. Mark credits her with something called “Eastern European gloom,” but Tatiana’s gloom is not derived from a national character. Indeed, Ms. Vapnyar wants to demystify the potency of crosscultural pollination. Tatiana’s Russian-Jewish sensibilities bring nothing to Mark’s work, and in an epilogue, we find Tatiana living in New Jersey, living a standard American life.

There is a problem of pacing in the book. Looking forward to Tatiana’s affair with the writer, the reader might speed over the rich Moscow chapters.Tatiana’s time in Brighton Beach is a sketch; look to Ludmila Ulitskaya’s “The Funeral Party” for a fuller portrait of a Russian community in New York. Readers must also give up hopes of finding a penetrating critique of the state of Manhattan letters in the chapters on Mark; Tatiana states that his writing is dead on the page and leaves it at that.

Ms. Vapnyar writes more for the reader than for the writer, and her disarming treatment of Tatiana’s musedreams speaks to the young woman in the front row at the reading, not to the writer. What Ms.Vapnyar makes of her own career, beginning with the valuable stories in “There Are Jews in My House” and continuing with this unique and sometimes humorous novel, remains to be seen.

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Louis Auchincloss’s work appeals to two parties: to the actual inhabitant of Mr.Auchincloss’s world, and to the reader who can find that world, with its glamour, its history, and its stern moral dilemmas, attractive. For no matter how much Mr. Auchincloss identifies the contradictions of Upper East Side society, he always makes that world appealing.

“The Young Apollo” (Houghton Mifflin, 256 pages, $24) collects linked stories, though not as linked as those making the generational chain of last year’s “East Side Story.” These are more an anthology of Mr. Auchincloss’s favorite settings: New York, Washington, Newport, and imperial Rome. Rome excluded, Mr. Auchincloss’s stories occupy about the same long band of time as “The Godfather”: from the gilded age of immigration to the crisis of confidence in the 1970s.

His narrators often call their stories “memoranda,” offering a sweeping dossier of a life. Some speak as children trying on fancy dress: “Whether I shall ever show it, or to whom, I do not know as yet.”Their conceits are schoolish: Has the art consultant sold his soul to the devil? “I’m afraid not quite,” he says, and proceeds to measure the margin between himself and Faust, which turns out to be quite large, to the reader’s disappointment. In other stories, central conversations turn out to be not as important as advertised, and stories often end with a sudden shift in promise, offering a short relish of irony in place of resolution. Yet these stories entertain and sometimes truly reward the reader.

If Mr. Auchincloss’s problems of craft do not sink the value of his work, does that mean his work is not exactly literature? It is invention; like an excellent writer of crime fiction or fantasy, he trades in the completeness of his world and its interest to the reader. Reading Mr. Auchincloss, I imagine that the stewardship of great fortunes is the universal human condition, and it is a pleasant fantasy. If it comes with the trappings of James and Wharton, so much the better.

blytal@nysun.com