by Askold Melnyczuk

Author Information: director of creative writing at University of Massachusetts-Boston since Fall 2002. His second novel, Ambassador of the Dead, published in May 2001 by Counterpoint, has been called “exquisite, original” by The Washington Post. His first, What Is Told (Faber and Faber) was a New York Times Notable Book for 1994.

In 1997 he received a Lila Wallace Readers’ Digest Award in Fiction. Winner of the McGinnis Award in Fiction, he has also been awarded grants from the Massachusetts Cultural Council in fiction, poetry, and non-fiction. He has published stories, poems, translations, and reviews in The New York Times, The Nation, Partisan Review, Grand Street, Ploughshares, Poetry, and The Boston Globe. His poems have been included in various anthologies including The McGraw-Hill Book of Poetry, Literature: The Evolving Canon, and Under 35: The New Generation of American Poets. He is the series editor for Take Three: The New Poets Annual from Graywolf Press and was coeditor for From Three Worlds: An Anthology of Ukrainian Literature.

Book Description: This tale of Ukrainian immigrants' attempts at adjustment to life in America has a dreamy affect, but its undercurrent of emotional honesty gives it bite. Nick, a Boston doctor, is drawn back to his hometown of Elizabeth, N.J., by the news that his childhood friend Alex is in trouble although he does not yet know what kind of trouble. He finds first that Alex's mother, Ada, once vibrant and attractive, is now embittered, lonely and nearly blind.

Nick reminisces about his past, focusing on memories of his friend for most of the book. As a child, Alex was mischievous, but eventually became more and more wild, due in part to his father's abuse and subsequent abandonment. Throughout the novel he is agitated by society and by his own psyche, gradually losing his sanity.

Melnyczuk (What Is Told) writes exceedingly well-controlled miniature narratives that begin as soft-focus reveries and develop into darker tales that confidently clinch the attention and release it just as smoothly. One of Alex's mother's early lovers seems gentle during their initial courtship, then expresses sadomasochistic desires; she pursues another failed romance with an emigre poet. Even the story of the narrator's marriage is laced with strife: his wife confesses that she had rejected his earliest advances because he was Ukrainian and she was Jewish. The book drifts in a Proustian fashion, vividly portraying the difficulties of cultural assimilation until the jarring conclusion. Recollections that might have fizzled in another author's hands here grow luminous and haunting.

Recommendation: This book was recommended to me by frequent Orange Ukraine reader and commenter IIU. The NYT highly praised this book, though Robert A. Papinchak in the Journal Sentinel review thinks it "succumbs to its own self-interests".

Book Links

Full Bio at AGNI

Journal Sentinel Review on FindArticles.com
Great NYT Review
Powell's
Amazon