Kostyuchenko’s writings are also a personal reckoning, an attempt to work through how she missed-or, rather, failed to adequately react to-Russia’s descent into fascism. But it was only upon leaving Ukraine that she fell victim to what may have been an act of Russian aggression: a suspected poisoning attempt inside Germany. She filed dispatches on Russia’s occupation and bombardment of Ukraine’s southern cities, bracing accounts laced with a sense of guilt and the utter futility of that guilt. In February of 2022, Kostyuchenko crossed into Ukraine, becoming one of an exceedingly small number of Russian journalists who managed to report from the war zone. The article that emerged from that experience-a wrenching and visceral text whose details almost seem to waft off the page-is the masterwork at the heart of “ I Love Russia,” a memoir and collection of reportage translated by Bela Shayevich and Ilona Yazhbin Chavasse. A decade and a half later, she spent two weeks living inside a state-run residential facility for people with psychiatric and neurological disorders. But Kostyuchenko was less interested in the Russia hurtling forward than the one left behind, a place-or, rather, a people-defined by trauma and disorientation, hardiness and resolve. In 2005, when Kostyuchenko started as an intern at the storied Russian independent newspaper Novaya Gazeta, Vladimir Putin was relatively new to the Presidency and high oil prices were fuelling a consumer boom. The book isn’t a caustic takedown of the rich so much as a queasy reminder of their invulnerability. But Alex is too passive a character for revenge. Alex, like Cline, is a consummate collector of details, and part of the book’s pleasure is its depiction of the one percent-their meaningless banter, their blandly interchangeable clothes. They let her into their parties, their country club, their cars, their homes. Because Alex is young, pretty, well-dressed, and white, the privileged people she meets believe that she’s one of them. But what follows is riveting, a class satire shimmed into the guise of a thriller. Her only tools are a bag of designer clothes, a mind fogged by painkillers, and a dying phone. Alex must make a choice: she can return to the city, where she has no friends, no apartment, and a vaguely menacing man on her heels, or she can wait out Simon’s anger, hoping he’ll take her back at his annual Labor Day party, in six days’ time. They appear to be on the ritzy east end of Long Island, though the location is never named. Near the start of “The Guest,” Alex, a sex worker, is booted out of a mansion by Simon, her affluent boyfriend. As the book continues, the Earth’s climate and the apocalyptic climate of the Barnes family appear almost to merge, and what began as a coming-of-age saga pulls in stranger and darker forces. The catastrophic price of such denial is evident in the book’s frequent allusions to the climate crisis. Murray is interested in denial and how it ultimately fails to contain our unruly attachments and weird desperation. The chapters featuring Imelda and Dickie are thornier, more treacherous, and formally more ambitious, using stream of consciousness to invoke the shattering power of grief and lust. It’s hard to resist Murray in his schoolyard mode, wittily choreographing nerds and bullies. Again and again, details come back reframed or reanimated by another perspective. Irony, both caustic and elegiac, flourishes in the knowledge gaps between characters. Its more than six hundred pages employ a rotating structure: the four members of the Barnes family-twelve-year-old PJ, his sister Cass, and his parents Imelda and Dickie-take turns as narrator. Paul Murray’s fourth novel is about the eeriness of transformative change.
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