Lara Vapnyar, author of the short story collection “There are Jews in My House,” makes her stunning debut as a novelist with “Memoirs of a Muse,” the story of a Russian girl coming of age and realizing her purpose in life?acting as a muse for a writer. The story begins with Tanya, a 10-year-old daughter of a professor, taking care of her grandmother who has recently suffered a stroke and is a bit off her rocker.
From the beginning, Vapnyar begins developing the theme of the caretaker female, foreshadowing things to come. Pictures of famous Russian writers are hung around the house, and she grows particularly fond of Dostoevsky. These writers?Turgnev, Chekhov, Tolstoy, Pushkin, Dostoevsky?all hung on the walls around the home like relatives of Tanya’s. There’s a bit of irony in this, as Vapnyar is the successor of the Russian Realist tradition, as she reveals from time to time with her vivid imagery.
She develops a poor self-image in her teens as some girls are hailed as desirable and others, like her, are left behind. She wants badly to be wanted by a man, and when this finally happens, it empowers Tanya and allows her to continue on her quest toward womanhood and musedom. She does eventually find her writer and act as Dostoevsky’s Apollina or Anna Grigorievna, the late author’s lover and wife, respectively.
Tanya is a dynamic, multifaceted young lady with a lot to say about femininity and women’s roles in society. It seems at first like Vapnyar creates a character without her own identity and purpose. For Tanya’s purpose to be defined by her proximity to a “great man” seems to violate everything inherently important in modern womanhood. Still, the reader must keep in mind that Memoirs of a Muse is a novel written by a woman novelist, so the relationship of the main character to creation and gender are both skewed, if not humorous, because of who is writing.
Vapnyar’s writing is simply dazzling. Her language moves and breathes and seems to draw every sensory element off of the page and into the reader’s body. She knows her audience. Writers are readers and readers love writers, so a novel about a woman wishing to be an author’s muse is a perfect fit for the novel form. Structurally, the author creates a very tight novel, absent of fluff and filler, purely concentrated and compelling. Where some of Vapnyar’s earlier short stories are casual in their structure and diction, here we see the confident gait of a poised, capable emerging novelist.
The “impact” lines come at the end of her paragraphs like jabs?the ends of chapters like hefty right-hooks across the jaw. Vapnyar quickly earns the reader’s trust with her confident, economic prose. I highly recommend Memoirs of a Muse for any reader wishing to read an inventive, well-written novel.
