A Muse Without a Genius

By DAVID MOGOLOV

Memoirs of a Muse
By Lara Vapnyar
224 pages. Pantheon. $22.95.

Dramatic irony has its limits, and Lara Vapnyar has exceeded them. Its effective use, whether in comedy or tragedy, leaves us peering between our fingers, cringing, squirming in our chair as our hero plunges into a situation we see more clearly than she does. But when we know too much, when the result of the character’s actions are so certain to us that any sense of conflict is eliminated, we give up on the character when the tension ought to be peaking. Long before then, really. We are to be forgiven for being less than anxious on her behalf.

So I don’t feel bad that, despite Vapnyar’s many gifts as a writer, I was bored by her novel Memoirs of a Muse. Plenty of pieces came together to make it that way, but the lack of real conflict is sufficient. Vapnyar prepared such a soft landing for her immigrant heroine, Tanya, that even the most complete failure of her journey—the failure of her relationship with a temperamental American author—would only cause anguish in a reader with a very comfortable life. Coupled with the shallowness of Tanya’s passion and her general listlessness, I just found it hard to care. Memoirs is a moat without alligators, a demolition derby with airbags.

It didn’t have to be this way. Vapnyar brought an awful lot of potential to the book, and every tool, every detail was right there, ready to be used. Tanya Rumer tells the story of her childhood in Russia and the first years after her arrival in New York City in her mid-20s. As a recent immigrant with a college degree but no real job prospects, a poor command of English, and no connections beyond those of her family that arrived several years before, she’s got plenty of significant problems. Vapnyar seizes on details and contrasts that vividly depict the immigrant reality. Tanya would arrive home to find her uncle, a doctor in the Soviet Union, “circling sale items on a supermarket flyer with a felt pen. Discussing whether they wanted to buy a jar of Hellmann’s mayonnaise for $1.99 or wait and see if it won’t be two for $3.00 next time.” It wasn’t that they shopped for bargains that embarrassed Tanya as she became immersed in wealthier American culture; it’s that they reveled in their ability to shop for bargains among only awful options. The contrast between what they were and the bargain-hunters they’ve become is drawn with just the right weight and to perfect effect.

But it’s only a minor part of the story. The novel is really built around another, much less distinctly drawn contrast. It so happens that from an early age, Tanya was fixated, artistically and sexually, on the great dead Russian novelists, particularly Dostoevsky. As a child, her mother and grandmother told her stories of Dostoevsky’s second wife, Anna Grigorievna, and she believed that the loyal, long-suffering woman was the great writer’s muse. Fine and dandy. The seeds are planted.

But Tanya intersperses her tale with scenes from the relationship of Dostoevsky and another woman, Apollinaria Suslova, his lover before he met and married Anna Grigorievna. Polya, as this first woman is known, is fiery, demanding, and unwilling to continue the secret and demeaning relationship that he seems insistent on. They travel Europe, their strained and secret unmarried tryst heating and cooling. We are to presume that Polya, along the way, inspires him to great artistic creation. Why? Because… because that seems essential to Tanya’s believing she ought to be a muse. Because there needs to be a conflict between the wild, passionate, impulsive side of Tanya, the side that will inspire works of art in another, and the domestic, servile, self-sacrificing side of Tanya, the side that will become, like Anna Grigorievna, the tortured wife of a crazed man. If only such a comparison could be made: Tanya has neither side, but leans toward the latter. She’s Anna, yearning to be Polya, but failing to be either.

So we’ve got two historical Russian women and a great male writer, and a modern Russian woman in New York with no long-term career plan and little ambition. Enter her great male writer, Mark Schneider, whom she meets at a reading. Though she hardly understands a word he reads from his novel, she is carried away by his voice, the portrait of him in the bookstore, and the large crowd there to hear him. Surely he is a great writer.

Whether he is doesn’t actually matter, because it’s absolutely clear from the outset that her ability to influence him artistically is about the same as her ability to influence the orbit of satellites. The entire muse mission is premised on her fascination with Dostoevsky’s lovers and the fortune-telling of a lecherous high-school instructor in Russia who, she knew, foretold her becoming “the companion of a great man” only to seduce her. She knew that. We know that. The scene in which she is told she’ll be a muse is a poor setup in that if she buys it, she’s foolish. Later in the novel she suggests that maybe she never believed all of these things, that she assembled the stories of Polya, Anna Grigorievna, and her high-school teacher’s prophecy in order to justify her behavior. This suggestion is a let-down: is it better that we have a narrator who went to great lengths to be dishonest without being interesting? An unreliable narrator should at least offer some real conflict. There’s nothing fruitful in either option. You’re reading about a dull dissembler or a dull dullard. Memoirs of a Muse is an ironic title, of course. Since we’re meant to know that, there’s no reason to hammer it home ten different ways (nine if she gets credit for the tacked-on ending that suggests the title isn’t all irony).

Polya, in a brief affair with a Spanish artist, can’t understand him because of the language barrier. Tanya tells us of this affair:

The only way she can interpret him is to construct the meaning of his words and gestures based on her assumptions, which in their turn are based on what she wants to believe. Most people act like that in the beginning of their love affairs, when our lovers are foreigners for us. We… build dream castles based on illusion and hopes. Then, of course, we get to know them, the illusions crash, the hopes go.

When Tanya tells us this, the show’s over. Vapnyar’s completely right, and from this observation, 1,000 novels might bloom. But she’s also just told us everything there is to know about this novel. No surprise, no conflict, nothing to worry about. Just a long wait for the end. And that’s not comedy or drama.