BOOK REVIEW: Ambassador of a generation: Melnyczuk's new novel of the Ukrainian American experience (06/17/01)

BOOK REVIEW

Ambassador of a generation: Melnyczuk's new novel of the Ukrainian American experience

"Ambassador of the Dead" by Askold Melnyczuk. Washington: Counterpoint, 2001, $25 U.S./$39.95 Canadian ISBN 1-58243-132-9.

by Robert De Lossa

Askold Melnyczuk's second novel, "Ambassador of the Dead," is a finely written, ambitious tour de force. With its publication, American literature has a definitive expression of the post-war Ukrainian emigration in the United States. The children of that emigration, who are creatively pushing the boundaries of what it means to be both American and Ukrainian, now have an emblem to push onto friends who "just don't get it."

But to pigeonhole "Ambassador of the Dead" as a Ukrainian American novel is to do it an injustice. It is a fine novel all around: well-framed, carefully styled, informed and knowing, but puckish, too. It has both historical sweep and personal enlightenment. The story has sex, politics, and mystery. "Ambassador of the Dead" is a book that will move well from the beach - a must read for the summer and just right for languid vacation days or after-work relaxation - to the classroom, where one sees it being taught with equal profit for its insight into the Ukrainian American experience and for its writing style.

(Mr. Melnyczuk himself has edited Agni Magazine for 18 years, teaches creative writing at Boston University, and has taught in the prestigious Bennington Graduate Writing Seminars for many years. His first novel, "What Is Told," was a New York Times Notable Book. Mr. Melnyczuk also is a recipient of the prestigious Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Award and, most recently, the 2001 PEN/Nora Magid Award for Magazine Editing. He is a writers' writer.)

"Ambassador of the Dead" opens with a phone call. Nick Blud, a Boston physician, is telephoned from the past. Literally. It is a call that he cannot resist - from the mother of his close childhood friend, the voluptuous, mysterious Ada Kruk. It is clear that something is wrong, and his quick decision to return to the world of his childhood begins a long reminiscence of what has made him a man and what has gone into him as a human being. At the center of this are the Kruks and the sights and sounds of northern New Jersey.

New Jersey and the city of Roosevelt (read: Elizabeth) loom large as an immigrant heartland. This is where Nick's parents came after fleeing their war-torn home and passing through displaced persons camps after the war. As he travels in space south to Roosevelt, he travels back in time to his boyhood summers at a Ukrainian summer vacation camp in the Catskills, where the reader gets a first glimpse of the unusual Kruks: Lev, the fiery revolutionary; Ada, the great beauty of their community who hides a dark secret; Viktor (the "Spinner"), her brother, half-crazy and hiding even darker secrets; Ada and Lev's sons, Paul and Alex, different as night and day, but united by the storms of their family's passions.

Nick and Alex become friends, largely through Nick's attraction to Alex's immense intellectual and physical energy. Alex has triumphed great obstacles simply to exist (as a baby he had "the disappearing sickness," which a doctor says is "as common as dust in the old country" and seems to temper baby Alex with unusual maturity and drive as he overcomes it). Alex embodies, recklessly, all of the contradictions from which Nick is cushioned by gentle and accommodating parents: the contradiction of understanding keenly what makes Americans American, but still being a stranger to America; the need to grow into something that will somehow justify the Old World and the new, though it is not at all clear what that means; the weight of ghosts born of countless unspeakable tragedies. The Kruks cannot but help stand out and clash with the world around them. The Bluds manage to press forward, shoulders to the plow, and quietly meld into their new world and prosper.

As the story progresses, Ada becomes a divorcée and struggles to keep her family afloat and to keep passion, no matter how tawdry, in her life. A man who might once have been the great love of her life returns to it. Anton, the poet, has chosen Britain over America and has assimilated mightily, not so much into British society as into the Western life of the mind. Ada must make difficult choices.

We learn the semi-fictional (or is it?) account of Ada's life through a story that Anton has written. This story-within-a-story changes pace from the rest of the narrative, adds gossamer to the tapestry already woven (with magical evocations of summers on the beach in Crimea), presents the brutality that Ukrainians faced during the second world war, and reveals Ada's dark secrets, secrets that surround her with ghosts who pull her away from the physical world.

From here we see Alex's chaotic development, Ada's increasing inability to reconcile the demands of Old World spectres with New World bewilderments. In a scene that could not be any truer we witness the secret true nature of Nick and Ada's relationship. And we hurtle onward through revelations about Viktor's past, Paul's fate (bound in equal measures by his Old World inheritance from Lev and Ada, and the New World inheritance of Vietnam), and Alex's wayward journey to a conclusion that is shocking, but, somehow, seems inevitable.

For those familiar with the subject matter that Mr. Melnyczuk plumbs, much will be familiar, but perhaps sharper and more understandable for his brilliant writing. The only thing that does not ring true historically is Crimea. When I first read the galleys several months ago that segment left me scratching my head. It didn't fit the historical narrative. But, months later, the Crimean interlude is among the scenes that have left the most evocative, magical impressions.

This fact points up the manifold strengths of "Ambassador of the Dead." It is a first-class observation of the American condition through the prism of the modern Ukrainian emigration. (Other ethnicities also inhabit these pages. Look for the five boroughs of New York.) As well, like Updike, Melnyczuk has a sure grasp of the inner core of the American male. His Nick, grappling with issues of community, religion, intellectuality and sex, pulls at us every bit as much as Rabbit does at the anxieties and aspirations of youth and middle age. (Mr. Melnyczuk writes sex with more mature kindness, I think.)

At the same time, "Ambassador of the Dead" is a roadmap to a mentality that is not American. It is no coincidence that his guide here is Ada - Adriana - who becomes Nick's Ariadne, inadvertently leaving behind a thread by which Nick himself tries to distinguish which parts of his own path are Ukrainian and which are American. The expression of "Ukrainian" clashing with "American" is schematically laid out in a clash between Nick and his wife. By and large, it is a collision that cannot be explained, but only lived through. The Bluds do it well, and in the end the older generation is gone, having sacrificed and made way for the younger. The Kruks do not. And the older generation lives bitterly on, while the younger has been destroyed.

Despite this, Mr. Melnyczuk presents a proud manifesto of who "we" are, when that "we" is somehow hyphenated. He refuses to allow the individuals in his book to become caricatures and gracefully lays out Ukrainian history in a way that humanizes it in the face of an American culture that sometimes still stigmatizes and stereotypes it.

Most importantly, "Ambassador of the Dead" is an important artistic expression. Mr. Melnyczuk has not limited himself to a historical straitjacket, and where he wiggles out of it, he ultimately wins. This is especially the case with the Crimean interlude. But in those places where he squarely has placed his story within the history that we know, he has done it with great expressiveness and knowing. He has an ability to portray pain and violence without losing sight of the will to live. His story knows that people themselves sometimes step out of reality in order to save themselves. In this sense his magical realism is not really of the same type as Garcia Marquez (with whom he has been compared). In the latter, it is a device that impels history first and comes from within people second. Mr. Melnyczuk has it the other way around, which, I think, is the right way.

The language is dead on, whether you have a Ukrainian background or not. Mr. Melnyczuk is a master of the ironic aside, the gentle reminder, the bon mot. His prose is both poetic and efficient. And meaningful. Those who have command of both Ukrainian and English will have great fun with the names. "Blud" says both blood and sin. "Kruk" hits many places: crux, crutch, crock, crook, krok, kruh, kruk (step, circle, raven). When Alex Italianizes his last name (utilizing American stereotypes of Italian names), the complexity and ridiculousness of the hyphenated life is fully exposed. Ada, I've touched on. Nick is the omnipresent Sviatyi Mykola, Ada's intercessor saint, but also reminds us of "The Great Gatsby's" Nick, chronicler of (and participant in) other great passions and collisions. None of this is heavy-handed, but all of it clearly was carefully shaped on the potter's wheel.

In sum, "Ambassador of the Dead" works on many levels. There will be some readers who may recognize themselves in it. Other readers will come to a deeper understanding of an important community in our country. Still others will appreciate a damned good read.

Robert De Lossa is director of publications at the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, president of the American Association for Ukrainian Studies and co-editor (with Dominique Arel, its founder) of the online information digest "The Ukraine List."

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