Swept out of his comfortable, unthinking Soviet existence on a wave of crime, Leonid swiftly graduates from small-time rackets, such as extorting money from babushki street traders at Kievsky Station (including his own mother), to pimping and indirect matricide, before finally becoming the assistant to a cannibalistic contract murderer.
Despite these dramatic changes of fortune, Leonid remains stubbornly unselfconscious. Petulant and selfish, he allows himself to be carried along by events completely untroubled by the pleas of his soul, whose voice is the story's narrator. Overseeing the fate of its host body like a kindergarten supervisor pondering the mistakes of a wayward child in its charge, Leonid's soul tries -- unsuccessfully -- to save Leonid from his slide into both the untimely death and the nihilism of the title.
Unfortunately, Leonid's soul is the only convincingly drawn character in the novel. Leonid himself, with his "ever-rumbling stomach," intricately described body odors and peevish bossing around of his mother, is little more than a poor reproduction of John Kennedy Toole's luminous lead character, Ignatius Riley, from "A Confederacy of Dunces." The supporting cast -- Svjeta, the streetwise 14-year-old prostitute; Aliosha, the contract killer who snacks on the bodies of his victims; Zhenya, the green-jacketed mafioso; and Oleg, the meat-headed thug -- are all crude caricatures drawn from the most banal clich?s.
If "The Untimely Death of a Nihilist" were a comedy, it might have worked. But first-time novelist Rick Bluett attempts to give his narrative a bittersweet tone by dwelling on the gruesome details of bloody murders, abortions, Leonid's unsavory personal habits and the more revolting side of everyday Soviet existence. Comic touches are provided by cracks at Leonid's great weight (making cars lean to one side when he boards) and attempted moments of surrealism, such as the time when Leonid continues sleeping while the side of his apartment building collapses. Neither the bitter nor the sweet is convincing.
The narrative is interspersed with potted explanatory interludes that guide the reader through the events of contemporary Russian history, as interpreted by Leonid/Bluett: "The cynicism of all things political that had so set in in the Brezhnev years in order to help people combat the daily drudgery of their lives had been washed away," Bluett clumsily writes about the "golden year" of 1989.
Although it is clear that the author has spent some time in Russia, at best his observations betray the earnest determination of an undergraduate to "get to know the real Russia." At worst they rankle because of their occasionally patronizing and frequently simplistic tone.
In the absence of strongly drawn characters, the setting becomes the keystone of the novel. It is a keystone that proves too weak to support the poorly constructed narrative.
"The Untimely Death of a Nihilist" by Rick Bluett. Quartet Paperback Original, 195 pages, price ?9 or $14.50.
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