Book Review: Pravda

Michael Upchurch - Seattle Times

Mar 28, 2008

Here's an odd dilemma for a book reviewer: Edward Docx's publisher is on a campaign to alert readers to an unusual twist in Docx's family background -- a twist that informs his new, semi-autobiographical novel, "Pravda" (Mariner, 395 pp., $13.95). But to say what that twist is would be to give away much of the surprise in the last 50 pages of the book.

So if you're planning on reading "Pravda" because you were impressed by this London author's debut novel, "The Calligrapher" (a nicely nasty satire weighing the hazards of sexual infidelity), my advice is: Ignore any articles by or about Docx, and whatever you do, don't Google his name!

"Pravda" (published as "Self Help" in England) is a richly furnished, if occasionally long-winded portrait of family meltdown, and Docx is a pull-out-all-the-stops author who sometimes over-writes. Yet his hyperbolic flourishes are often exactly what is needed, because he's describing hyperbolic states of mind.

At the book's heart are twin siblings Gabriel and Isabella Grover, in their 30s, living in London and New York, respectively. Both have just been hit hard by the death of their mother, Maria, a Russian who defected to the West to marry the son of a British diplomat (and possible spy). In her later years, Maria returned to her native St. Petersburg for reasons unknown to her children but revealed early on to the reader -- she wanted to find the son she gave up for adoption, before her marriage, and help him if she could.

The twins are devoted to their mum and long estranged from their dad, Nicholas, a bisexual painter of mediocre talents living in Paris. But Nicholas, the thorniest and most arresting character in the book, is not so easily kept on the sidelines. Neither is Maria's son, Arkady, a gifted pianist left stranded by the Soviet collapse, who with the help of a mild-mannered heroin addict is making plans to head to London to claim his inheritance.

Paris, Petersburg, London -- these are Docx's three cities (Isabella's New York doesn't quite count) and each has an atmosphere of its own. You sense you're in good hands when Docx serves up this description of Russian traffic: "The cars were moving freely -- the battered Czech wrecks and tattered Russian rust crates, the sleek German saloons and the tinted American SUVs, overtaking, undertaking, switching lanes in a fat salsa of metal and gasoline."

The prose is chewy, vivid, musical and funny. Docx can be just as good on agitated states of mind. Each character is like a weather system, full of contrary winds and pressure drops. And all are bent on collision course.

Gabriel, the weepy one, can't choose between girlfriends and takes home no wisdom from his job as editor of a wretched-sounding magazine called "Self-Help!" Isabella, cooler and more confrontational, is more adrift than she admits. As for Nicholas, he lives "in chaos ... through chaos ... on chaos" and has a philosophy of love that isn't exactly in tune with peaceful domesticity: "The head distrusts the heart. The heart ignores the head. The balls want to carry on regardless."

Why the difference between the English and American titles for the book? That may have been a sales-department decision. But while the ironic English title makes a certain obvious sense, the chillier, harder American title works better to my mind.

Pravda, as readers old enough to remember the Cold War will know, was the official newspaper voice of the old Soviet regime, and it was taken for granted among a certain ilk of Russian readers that almost nothing in it was true -- that you had to read closely between the lines to figure out what was going on in the country and in the world.

Gabriel and Isabella's whole family history is Pravda-like -- and Docx does a fine job of following their convoluted efforts to come to terms with their own unraveling reality. Now if he could just tighten up his pace and make sure that every phrase he writes (rather than just two out of three) hits its mark, he'd have the makings of a perfect book.

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