THE SENILITY OF VLADIMIR P.
Author: Michael Honig
Publisher: Pegasus Books
Price: $24.95
Pages: 329
There's a reason Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump seem to like each other: They both dislike reality. It takes a special dispensation, not to say freedom, from the facts to look at garbage and call it a garden, and vice versa; to - in Putin's case - advocate against corruption while using political power for personal gain; to make a promise one day and the next do its opposite. Putin has so comprehensively transformed Russia (restored, some might say, after a flawed semi-democratic interlude under Boris Yeltsin) that he has transformed reality itself. Putinism seems as pervasive in that country as Soviet rule was, and all without the machinery of a totalitarian state. It's phantasmagoric performance art on the world's grandest stage, which makes it only more remarkable that Putin has spent so little time as the subject of fiction. Perhaps his reality doesn't require artistic embellishment.
And yet Michael Honig's The Senility of Vladimir P. makes for an essential entry in the field. Twenty or so years from now, after "he had been five times president and twice prime minister," Vladimir, as the novel tends to refer to him, has finally retired because of creeping dementia. He spends his days on an estate near Moscow, tended by a staff of 40, breaking out of his mental murk to shadow-brawl with an imagined Chechen assailant until he's tranquilised by his nurse, Nikolai Sheremetev. Sheremetev is our hero, and what a man: the last honest person in Russia. As a young soldier in the waning days of the Soviet Empire, he, along with the rest of his unit, was illegally hired out to a local builder; a fellow soldier had to explain what was happening and disabuse Sheremetev of his charming intention to complain to the captain.
The rest of the staff does not have Sheremetev's probity: There's Stepanin, the promiscuous, boozing, talented cook, who dreams of running his own Moscow restaurant ("Russian Fusion! Minimalist decor!"); Barkovskaya, the terrifying new housekeeper, usually stalking somewhere offstage; Goroviev, the elusive gardener; and an array of security guards whose alliances and duties never become clear. These ambiguities not only urge the reader along but also cleverly animate the fact that in modern Russia the truth is always elsewhere. The only thing that's clear is that everyone's skimming, though in Honig's portrayal, Sheremetev seems dark even to this.
Then Sheremetev's nephew Pasha publishes an online screed against the ex-president, which lands him in detention, his release priced at $10,000 until the authorities learn that the young man's uncle serves on Vladimir's staff, which raises it to $300,000 - everyone knows the riches to which the estate staff has access; no one can imagine a man without his hand in the big pocket. Sheremetev's wife died from kidney failure because he wouldn't, or couldn't, come up with the bribes to get her the right treatment; his brother's family emptied its accounts trying to help. To save his nephew, the babe must enter the woods. What Sheremetev finds does not lead him to a happy ending.
One of the most refreshing things about Honig's novel is that it is neither satire nor polemic. That would have been easy.
The novel is full of humour, even if an initially comic war between the cook and the housekeeper can't help turning deadly. But Honig controls the tone so well that the high jinks never speak for the book. The rage and heartbreak are never unclear: Putinism restricts common dignity to those with money and power, and even they serve at the pleasure of one man; the ordinary person has no choice but to humiliate himself or suffer privation, or worse.
Paradoxically, it's the novel's largest character who keeps tripping the story. For Sheremetev to remain as comprehensively naïve about the way Russia - and its microcosm, the estate - worked under Vladimir Vladimirovich, as the story wants him to, he would have to have been a hermit, or his innocence would have to have been the primary subject of the novel, a Russian Candide. As it is, Sheremetev's scalded shock as he makes his bumbling way through the underworld feels jarring rather than tragic.
As Sheremetev sinks deeper and the novel enters its final, page-turning, stretch - Honig is an adroit plotter - the author loses faith in his readers and begins to spell out not only what's happening but the extent of Russia's tragedy. The size of that tragedy, however, is such that even this excess can hardly convey it. "To live in Russia is to live in hell," the cook says to Sheremetev. "If it wasn't Vladimir Vladimirovich who screwed us, it would have been someone else."
© 2016 New York Times
