Doling Out Love in America and Russia
SCHWARTZ, LYNNE SHARON
On Fiction Doling Out Love in America and Russia By Lynne Sharon Schwartz Richard Price's terrific new novel opens obliquely, with a five-page italicized Prologue. Ray Mitchell (introduced as...
...For people like Ray," the smart and persistent detective, Nerese Ammons, notes, "the state of repose, of emotional satiation, was a lifelong mirage, perpetually just ahead but never experienced...
...all this multitude of people so loudly and uniformly lamenting the recent death of Stalin...
...His screen writing gig, like his teaching stint, like his marriage, came to an ignominious end through his penchant for-to put it politely-messing up...
...At that recognition "his voice...
...Medea herself, who "could never understand waywardness, whims, urgent desire, caprice, orpassion," might not be so tolerant...
...She was also a sole parent, the master builder of a reasonably intact son on the cuspof his majority...
...Later, again about to reach for his pen, he "felt half-moved by his own earnest tone...
...But it also possesses philosophical breadth, clearheaded social commentary, and a fine facility with language...
...for her son and nephew, whom she struggles to keep straight (succeeding with one, failing with the other...
...Ulitskaya shapes Medea and Her Children much as she did The Funeral Party (reviewed here in March/April 2001...
...Even Ray's physical agony after his brain is knocked afloat in his skull is not lesson enough...
...She "had saved lives, restored and/or maintained order, locked up every conceivable kind of transgressor from multiple murderer to bus-riding ass grabber, and had been responsible at least in part for delivering to innumerable people over the years varying degrees of justice, solace, comfort, and revenge...
...No one in Samaritan is granted quite the fresh start he or she dreams of...
...By the century's end, the reach of this emblematic Greek and Russian clan has become global...
...Samaritan (Knopf, 400 pp., $25.00) is Price's seventh novel and it ranks with the best of the others, Clockers, also set in a tough multiracial housing project in a town bearing a strong resemblance to Jersey City...
...The Funeral Party was short, perfectly structured, brisk, and disciplined...
...But he needs to win over other children as well...
...Don't spoil things, as I did, by peeking ahead out of feverish curiosity...
...And their endurance, amid the swirling chaos that surrounds them, is a tacit, potent act of defiance...
...that the war was etched more deeply in the memory of the land than in...
...She "was deeply convinced that frivolity led to unhappiness, and had no inkling that levity can equally well lead to happiness or, for that matter, lead nowhere at all...
...Ulitskaya loves an offbeat character and a good yarn, and indulges her narrative gift like a great storyteller with total recall...
...Ray has returned to his old neighborhood and had his own head split open in a vicious attack...
...then repulsed by it, repulsed by the fact that even now he was automatically reviewing himself...
...Ray even acts as surrogate father while Danielle writes her college papers on his comfortable terrace...
...One is inclined to be forgiving because she writes so wryly and so well...
...His most useful act of generosity is the writing class he teaches, as a volunteer, in his old high school...
...Ancient Greek by heritage, Crimean by birth, Greek Orthodox in faith, and iconic in appearance, the prescient Medea-born with the century and in her 70s when we meet herlives in an antiquated house in a village near the Black Sea, a place she considers "the hub of the universe...
...His addiction is not conquered...
...eroded shell craters full of stagnant water, ruins and bones embedded in the ground which filled the landscape...
...The title announces the theme, and the theme is embedded in the protagonist, once a high-school teacher and cocaine addict, now a Hollywood screenwriter between jobs...
...Nike is a passionate, vibrant hedonist who drops in and out of love affairs as lightheartedly as Butonov...
...He gives before he is asked and gives too much, to the point of embarrassing the recipients-all of them black, which raises the sticky issue of white liberal guilt...
...Most were dispersed, adopted by various relatives, from Tashkent to Tbilisi to Vilnius to Siberia...
...Characters in novels need to be persuasive and three-dimensional...
...Anyone can successfully touch Ray for a loan, and over the course of Samaritan many do...
...She could not detect...
...So quirky a mix of virtues makes him unique...
...Medea's reach is vast too, an embrace of the entire family...
...Ruby, who lives with her mother in Manhattan...
...Price's vivid documentation may tease us into thinking we are in Dempsy, New Jersey, but in fact we are in existentialist territory, where shame is as innate as original sin, and the hero's excessive self-consciousness undermines his quest for the elusive self...
...commitment, not gesture...
...became truly his own...
...and for her mother and ancient father-in-law (her husband having long since decamped...
...the sense of responsibility which from an early age had defined her own life...
...The tone and pace of the stories vary...
...It is precisely because his acts are sentimental gesture, impulse not commitment, that he ends up in a hospital bed...
...passages of pure comedy slip into fable or parable, recalling Gogol, or into offhand but scathing political commentary...
...She cares for her drug-pushing brothers (when they're not in prison...
...Throughout the dreary and thankfully moribund period of literary minimalism, Price offered abundance and still does...
...On bad days her pride wavers, and she needs desperately to solve the case of Ray's assault...
...Ulitskaya clearly relishes the notion of their international spread and scope, a tonic for the parochialism that stifled her country for so long...
...She has never forgotten Ray's kindness...
...Although many writers continue to reserve judgment, he is a forthright and astute moralist...
...Nerese's situation is a textbook catalogue of the problems facing poor urban blacks...
...they do not need to be lovable...
...When she discovers that Nike is similarly occupied, what began as a sunny summer idyll grows dark indeed...
...He takes the opportunity to mend strained relations with his 13 -year-old daughter...
...There she works as a nurse, gathers herbs on the mountainside, and each spring and summer entertains dozens of adoring visitors, all multigenerational nieces and nephews...
...Once in a while comes a staining recognition of collective trauma, as when Medea, on a train trip after World War II, notes the "vast, uncared-for land littered with rusting metal and broken stones...
...Nelson's real father, along with so many others from Dempsy's mean streets, is in jail on a drug charge...
...Russia's tumultuous changes are glimpsed through a scrim of domestic affairs...
...The novel opens in spring...
...Nerese is both...
...The new book is expansive, mellow and wayward...
...Around a powerful core figure clusters a host of characters, all trailing stories that radiate outward, reaching into the past and across oceans...
...Ray gives money to a former neighbor in the ironically named Hopewell Houses for her son's funeral, and to an unstable former student for a chimerical business venture...
...But words of advice cannot win the love he requires...
...Danielle, his sexy new girlfriend, is equally discerning: "Do you really think you can do things for people, help them out then just walk away like nothing sticks to you...
...His Red Army career ended abruptly when he found himself unable to fire on a group of unarmed peasants and fainted instead...
...Medea and Her Children may be uneven and capricious, but the author's seductive voice and passionate attachment to her characters and their abused country are hard to resist...
...he cannot see that it is tinged with threat...
...Others are delivered in too summary a fashion, as though the author were loath to omit any detail, yet impatient to move on...
...most of them survive the ravages of history through a refusal to partake, a dogged focus on the personal...
...Early on, Ray's ex-wife states his problem succinctly: "Ray likes to save people, you know, sweep them off their feet with his generosity...
...The first time Ray hands over a check, he glances at his daughter to make sure she has registered his gesture...
...Ray Mitchell (introduced as "white, 43") tells his adolescent daughter how, as a 12-year-old in an inner city housing project, he staunchly held his T-shirt to the streaming head wound of a girl accidentally hit by a baseball bat...
...Yet a letter Medea found after his death shook her serenity: It revealed a betrayal that takes 25 years to forgive...
...Can it ever be selfless, or is it a sad fact that, as a Delmore Schwartz title puts it, The Ego Is Always at the Wheel...
...Samaritan is about the nature of altruism in general...
...When the present-day story begins, its path is straight and stark...
...Granddaughter of a Greek shipping merchant from Theodosia, Medea was one of 13 children orphaned young...
...He gives books and toys to the kids growing up in the bleak environment he escaped, and he gives attention and companionship to Nelson, Danielle's love-starved son...
...A number of anecdotal episodes veer off on tangents, always engaging but sometimes disproportionate...
...The novel goes on to adumbrate and deepen the question of the "cheap high" each time Ray succumbs to an addiction no less powerful than drugs...
...His screen writing fortune is not great, a few hundred thousand dollars, and at the rate he spreads it around, will not last long...
...Interspersed are flashback chapters giving the history of each new arrival, as well as Medea's...
...He remains an unrooted soul, uneasy and at risk...
...Writing out their names in a church ritual, she feels "as if she were sailing on a river and in front of her, like a spreading triangle, were her brothers and sisters, their young and infant children, and behind, fanning out in the same way but much longer, until they disappeared in a rippling of the water, were her dead parents, her grandparents, all the ancestors whose names she knew, and those whose names had been lost in time past...
...Contrary to that multitude, the Sinoplys instinctively steer clear of politics and bureaucrats...
...In contrast to his narcissistic giving, she follows a pragmatic variant on the golden rule: Do unto others as they do unto you...
...Medea, at 16, stayed home to raise the three youngest...
...Nike and Masha are aunt and niece, but so close in age that they were raised as sisters...
...Ulitskaya charts the Sinoply family's vicissitudes-travels, careers, marriages, divorces, and secret liaisons that yield children of dubious parentage-through a century of violent upheaval...
...A newer betrayal in the younger generation, echoing the old and finally upstaging it, develops over the summer, as two of Medea's "children" take up with the same man, the virile but empty-headed sports medicine doctor Butonov, vacationing down the road...
...What a welcome bonus it is to be able to admire a character as a well-made artifice yet root for her wholeheartedly, with pure unsophisticated pleasure...
...Down the railway embankments, just beneath the spare spring grass, lay the remains of a war...
...Drugs, race, crime, questions of nature versus nurture, the gritty integrity of those who succeed against the odds: However keenly dramatized, these are simply the meat the burglar throws to the dog, in T. S. Eliot's phrase, to keep it busy while he raids the house...
...Back on his old turf in Dempsy, New Jersey, he gives with a ready will that becomes deeply ambiguous...
...Ray felt it lurch to life in him, the slightly suspect craving to give, to do, and attempted to police it, convert it into mere words of advice...
...the girl reappears, grown into Detective Nerese Ammons (black, 40), intent on finding the culprit...
...The racial factor turns out to be a red herring...
...If these were its only features, Samaritan would probably not be reviewed in this space...
...If the philosophical conundrum Ray embodies is the armature of the story, Nerese is its animating heart...
...And only the love can make him feel real...
...That alone would bring her personal as well as professional fulfillment, and allow her to seek a fresh start in Florida...
...He revisits his past from a well-appointed garden apartment in a nearby gated community...
...Their self-absorption and their tragicomic ebullience make them the direct descendants of figures from the great 19th-century Russian novels...
...It seemed...
...The book closes with one of his more dangerous beneficiaries thanking him...
...Despite her mythic dimensions, her name is pointedly misleading, one of Ulitskaya's many whims...
...Only temporarily, alas...
...Ulitskaya delights in satirizing her attempts at metaphysical love poetry and her Russian-style open marriage...
...Unlike Medea's children of legend, the Sinoplys have survived and flourished, with branches in France, Italy, Israel, Yugoslavia, and the United States...
...Patiently if awkwardly, Ray coaxes his students into self-examination and articulate ex pression...
...Family members come and go, cook meals, drink wine, gossip, enjoy the seashore, become sexually embroiled with the neighbors...
...She was a mortgagefree home-owner and, for better or worse, the sole source of financial support for half a dozen people...
...no easy "reinvention" of self would satisfy Richard Price's rigors...
...It's acheap high if you've got the money, but basically it's all about him...
...The descriptions of his classes and the shrewd facsimiles of student work are the only passages where a languor creeps into the narrative: A little bit of high-school "creative writing" would have been enough...
...The results are commendable, and yet Ray's efforts are constantly undercut by an irrepressible need to be loved and accepted...
...Masha is romantic and fragile, with a suicide attempt in her troubled past...
...Koreans and Haitians number among their descendants...
...His books have the gutsy appeal of the classiest hard-boiled mysteries: fast pace, tripping idiomatic dialogue, unpredictable plot swerves, zingy sex, and genuine suspense...
...Ray may BE a highly questionable saint, but Russian novelist Ludmila Ulitskaya's heroine in Medea and Her Children (Schocken, 312 pp., $24.00, translated by Arch Tait) is closer to the genuine article...
...Her late husband was Samuel Mendez, a Jewish dentist working in her clinic, who began as an ideological gadfly and radical...
...Better still, a sybil...
...He must keep writing checks in the futile hope of achieving a sense of self beyond any checkbook-do something "selfless yet to the heart of him, to find that thing, that place, and stand fast...
...Unfortunately, while Masha fancies herself embarked on the great passion of her life, Butonov is simply doing what comes naturally...
...Murders, deportations, deaths in the Revolution and the two World Wars are mentioned casually as landmarks in the narrative, but the effect is cumulative and powerful...
...Medea, the stalwart elder, finds the lives of her young relatives "not quite serious...
...The gratitude makes him happy...
...Medea "had been a widow considerably longer than she had been a wife, and her relationship with her departed husband was as good as ever and was even improving with the years"-a typical Ulitskaya touch...
...commitment, not flourish...
...She is nearing retirement after 20 frustrating years in the police department, frustrating because forever cramped by her status as outsider and her unwillingness to become a political toady...
...Still, on good days, Nerese considers herself blessed...
...he considers financing a real estate deal for an ex-drug addict turned social worker-without-portfolio...
...Ray has returned because he finds himself at loose ends, yet again...
...This Medea is widowed, childless, utterly benign, and, though too reserved to qualify as an earth mother, keeps the scattered Sinoply family together by her magisterial presence and visceral connection to the land and its history...
Vol. 85 • November 2002 • No. 6
