STEPPE: A Novel
by Oksana Vasyakina
Translated from the Russian by Elina Alter
Catapult. 222 pages, $27.
STEPPE OPENS with a description of the great Russian sea of grass as seen from the window of an airplane, but most of this short but haunting novel takes place on a highway—a highway the narrator, a young lesbian poet, shares with her father as he drives a load of pipe in his truck from Moscow to Volgograd. The narrator, who has a scholarship at a literary institute in Moscow and is extremely well-read, has decided to spend some time with her divorced, alcoholic, HIV-positive father in order to get to know him better. The father, who loves driving across the steppe, seems happy to have her along, though before too long we learn that the narrator is afraid of this man whom her mother divorced years ago for domestic battery.
Nevertheless, throughout the journeys they take together, he treats his daughter with generosity and consideration. And she meticulously describes the way he does his work, and the places they spend the night, often beside streams in which they can bathe and cool off, and then prepare a meal before turning in under the enormous sky, in or out of the truck, depending on the insects.
The first trip we take, like all their long-haul drives together, blurs with the others, because, while the narrator is a scrupulous observer, the chronology of these journeys with her father is never established. Steppe is a ruminative book in which the narrator is sifting through memories in an attempt to understand the story of her family. She often refers to her father’s death from AIDS, even though he is very much alive on the page until just before the book ends. This leads to a somewhat static quality in the first chapters, but that changes to suspense as we get more of the story of her father and mother before their divorce.
The narrator’s father is a product of the blatniye—the system of Soviet labor camps and prisons that released a plague of petty thieves, smugglers, thugs, and criminals during the breakup of the Soviet Union. His friends are other men like himself, criminals loyal only to each other; his mistress is a woman he infects with HIV; and his favorite singer a man who sings about Russians like himself, an independent trucker and petty thief who feels happiest on the road.
As for the steppe itself, the narrator’s description is at times so metaphorical and at others so granular that I had to Google to see just what it actually looks like. The Russian steppe stretches from Ukraine to Mongolia and is mostly a flat horizon of high grass whose repetitious immensity is somewhat terrifying. Comparison with what another lesbian writer, Willa Cather, did with Nebraska is inevitable. Cather’s people had their tragedies too, but nothing quite as sordid as the father’s very existence or the unfolding revelations about the failed marriage of the narrator’s parents. One is reminded at times of those novels by James M. Cain that inspired Hollywood film noirs. While her father finds joy in driving his truck back and forth across Russia, the portrait of the people and places is one of overwhelming bleakness. Yet we are not only drawn to this man, and to Russia itself, but forced to wonder if Vasyakina is equating the two.
Steppe, Google informs us, is part of a trilogy investigating the deaths of members of Vasyakina’s family. But it is also a portrait of a certain class of Russians, and by extension the history of Russia itself—which can often seem to the Western onlooker like the national equivalent of an abused wife. In one scene the narrator watches her father remove a toothpick from his mouth after dinner and then insert it into his nostril. It’s little things like this that make one think of The Lower Depths, by Maxim Gorky (who is, appropriately, the father’s favorite writer). While listed as a novel, Steppe leads one to wonder where it lies on the spectrum from fiction to memoir.
The narrator’s being a lesbian is not much gone into, although in one scene the father walks in on the poet kissing her girlfriend. “You’ll ask me what it was like,” the narrator says. “It was like a crime. Inside me, shame blazed a path for itself, and the path grew wider and wider, until my entire body was a body of shame.” But the father says nothing. It’s not until he has died that her uncle addresses the subject. “You’re a wandering woman,” he tells the poet when she comes to visit the rest of her family after her father’s death. “There’s no peace anywhere for a woman like you. You always have to be going somewhere, running from something. All most women want is to make a home, but you need something, you’re homeless and you see this homelessness not as a lack but as the only way to live. You’re not interested in men, and you don’t need them either. It’s going to be hard going for you.”
But she does need one man, at least—her father—even if by the end of this intensely observant book he is decomposing beneath the steppe. _________________________________________________________________
Andrew Holleran’s latest novel is The Kingdom of Sand.
