Siberia, Phoenix and a Wandering Star

PETROPOLIS

By Anya Ulinich

Viking. 324 pp. $24.95

Sasha Goldberg, the protagonist of Russian-born Anya Ulinich's striking cross-cultural coming-of-age novel, is different from her uniformly blond schoolmates in the "proletarian soup" of Asbestos 2, a bleak Siberian village that was once an administrative center for the Soviet gulag. Sasha is clumsy and plump, with "yellow, freckled" skin and frizzy hair, thanks to a chance encounter between her paternal grandmother and an African athlete.

When she is 10, her father deserts the family to flee to America. At 15, Sasha has a baby, whom she abandons to her mother, while she herself flies off to Phoenix as a "mail-order bride from Siberia." She never marries the dorky Intel technician who has paid for her visa and passage. Instead she sets out for Chicago as the live-in maid and "pet Soviet Jew" of the ostentatiously wealthy and highly eccentric Trakans. She plans to track down her errant father, but Mr. Trakan aims to thwart her by confiscating her visa, while Mrs. Trakan force-feeds her the Torah, "the most tedious thing Sasha had ever read." With the help of their crippled son Jake, she escapes to pursue her father.

"Petropolis" was the poet Osip Mandelstam's name for St. Petersburg, called Petrograd during much of the time he lived there, Leningrad afterward. His poem of that name, quoted in full by Sasha, laments the death of a "star," a great and beautiful city: "The wax of immortality is melting / O, if you are a star, Petropolis, your city, / Your brother, Petropolis, is dying." But how does this apply to Sasha's experience? "In Osip Mandelstam's view," Ulinich writes, "Asbestos 2 would be a postapocalyptic place," an "ugly little town with a miserable name," hardly a star. On the other hand, the empty urban sprawl of Phoenix seems to Sasha like a site of alien abduction, bearable only because of air conditioning. The Trakans' lavish mansion is presented as a capitalist extravaganza, a gilded cage for Sasha, who sees nothing of Chicago except the temple on holidays. Brooklyn's Borough Park, where she comes to terms with her father and his family and starts her career as a cleaning lady, hasn't much star quality either.

But, at the novel's end, when Sasha's mother dies in Russia, grotesquely frozen at her desk in the local library, her photo appears in the papers with the caption "Your brother, Asbestos 2, is dying" -- a mocking reference to the wretched economic conditions of the Siberian north. The point appears to be that for Sasha there is no ideal to mourn. Life is mundane -- and then you freeze -- but meanwhile you cope, with an ironic eyebrow raised.

This point is a little muddled, as is the last third of this novel. For many chapters, its concentration is entirely on Sasha, a wise child whose clear-eyed but limited takes on the town, her parents, her school, her first love (father of her child), and later America, come across as original, droll and, in the case of the outrageous Trakans, stretching to farce. But as Sasha grows up, the author opens up the novel, abandoning the narrow view to other characters. The vivid early portraits that caught the imagination -- the old man's art class in Asbestos 2, a home in a dump, the Trakans' bizarre Chicago lifestyle -- give way to more generic, new-immigrant descriptions of cultural difficulties. Only intermittently, as when she returns to Asbestos 2 to visit her mother and daughter, do we recapture Sasha's original keen eye.

As the novel scatters and loses focus, so does the reader's attention. Even Sasha's reintroduction to -- possibly -- a genuine Prince Charming, set to rescue her from a lifetime as a Feng Shui Maid, seems underdeveloped and a little pat. Maybe that is why her mother's death seems far-fetched, a jagged grotesquerie incongruously piercing everyday life.

Still, not many novels take us to ugly but exotic Siberian towns, or even to ugly, exotic Arizona sprawl, let alone to millionaires' Chicago fantasias. This young heroine has sharp vision and a pragmatic view of life's difficulties -- together with a pointed sense of irony. Sasha will get by -- that seems certain -- and it seems equally certain that Anya Ulinich will be back.