A Door Behind a Door

May 1, 2021
Moskovich (The Natashas, 2018) offers up a tense puzzle box of a tale in her third outing. Olga's family fled Russia in 1991, leaving the ashes of the Soviet Union behind as they settled in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Olga is now in her twenties and estranged from her brother Misha, who has converted to Judaism and changed his name to Moshe. Olga lives with her girlfriend, Angelique, whom she adores, and works odd jobs until she gets a call from Nikolai, who lived in the same building as she did in Russia and was infamous for stabbing a neighbor. Olga is not thrilled to be back in touch with her dangerous former neighbor, but Nikolai has a lead on Moshe's whereabouts, which sends Olga down a dark path of criminality as she hopes to reunite with her brother. This impressionistic novel is relayed in short paragraphs of sparse, measured prose as Moskovich portrays a loosely connected group of Russian immigrants caught up in a heady mixture of desire and violence.

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February 15, 2021
A stabbing sets off a mysterious chain of events. When Olga was a baby in the Soviet Union, a boy from her apartment building went up to the sixth floor and stabbed an older woman three times. Now Olga is all grown up and living in Milwaukee with her girlfriend, Angelina. Then, suddenly, Nikolai Neschastlivyi--the stabber--starts calling her phone in the middle of the night. Despite all these details, though, it's hard to say what Moskovich's latest novel is actually about. Nothing here is straightforward or linear. The prose appears in short bursts, each one topped by an all-caps header and most no more than a few sentences in length. One is titled "YEARS PASSED." The text that follows: "I forgot all about Nikolai from floor five." The next header reads: "AND THE OLD LADY WHO GOT STABBED?" followed by: "What was her life, lived with such precise values, against ours, unfolding into daylight like a corn being husked." The effect of all these flashes and bursts of prose is rather like that of a pane of glass that has shattered onto the floor. Individually, the shards are slick and sharp, but taken together, it's hard to know what to make of them. There's a diner in this book, and a waitress named Lisette, and then somehow Olga is in jail with someone named Tanya, and then, finally, the first-person narration is taken over by a dog. How these details connect to each other is anyone's guess. Olga's brother stabs Tanya, but does this actually happen, or is it a dream? And if it happened, when did it happen? And why? Moskovich doesn't give us anything to go on, and that makes it hard, in the end, to feel much of anything for these characters--including a sense of humor. Moskovich offers her readers little insight into either her characters or plot, and the result is frequently alienating.

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