Reviewed by Meehan Crist
2.16.07

Katherine Shonk is not a Russian. But she has made some of her readers, including at least one at the Times Literary Supplement, wonder if she had some sort of Russian upbringing which might help explain how she manages to so convincingly inhabit the minds and worlds of her Russian characters. But Shonk was born in Chicago and grew up in Evanston, Illinois. She is very much an American and reveals, in the trajectory of her debut collection, a struggle with a deeply American difficulty of finding a place in the world. That she manages to pull this off with such empathy for her characters from both continents, with her vision clear of any trace of the nostalgia or naiveté that so often creep into expat or travel literature, is what makes this collection exceptional.

The eight stories in The Red Passport are all set in post-Soviet Russia, where people are reeling from the ongoing collision of tradition and modernity. In “Kitchen Friends,” Leslie is standing near a trolleybus, looking up at the “oversized kitsch and clutter of the All-Russia Exhibition of Economic Achievements,” when a bomb goes off. “Suddenly conscious of the shape of the earth and of her body riding it like the pointer of a compass, she clawed the pavement, certain that if she released her grip, she would tumble into the stratosphere.” These characters are all struggling to gain their footing and their sense of direction in a newly globalized world where old expectations no longer apply. In “The Young People of Moscow,” the only story in which no Americans appear, an aging Russian poet and his wife desperately try to sell his once-famous poetry in a tunnel crowded with street vendors. In “The Conversion,” a rudderless young American, Tom, returns to Moscow with hopes of belonging only to discover nothing is as he left it, and perhaps nothing had ever been as he thought. In the collection’s beautifully crafted opening story, “The Death of Olga Vasilievna,” a young Russian woman takes a job as an assistant at an American company after the death of her mother, a Russian homemaker of an older era. Her husband stays at home, missing his dead mother-in-law while trying, and failing, to write poetry like the great Russians poets of the past. When the new American boss and her husband come to dinner, hungry for an authentic experience of their provisional country, the tension between the couples is excruciating. The Americans are well-intentioned but offensive. The Russians are eager but awkward. “The apartment had never felt cramped before, even when Olga Vasilievna was alive, but now, he felt as if the walls and ceiling were closing in on them.”

These stories hang together because, collectively, they trace a path from arrival to departure, from naiveté to understanding. Indeed, the book can be read as the emotional narrative of an American abroad. The first story reveals both the young Russians and Americans trying on new lives, but by the final story, “Honey Month,” Rachel has realized that she does not belong in Russia and longs to return to America. Shonk knows what she’s talking about, having lived in Russia for a year before returning stateside.

The collection also traces a literary path which begins at classic Russian fiction. The first story’s title and theme echo Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich. Andrei, the young husband failing at poetry, searches out the graves of Chekhov, Gogol and Bulgakov within the first ten pages. The point of view (a detached third person hovering near Andrei), the pacing (self-contained scenes that often end with a meaningful pause on objects or scenic elements, building to an ultimate climax), the placement of metaphor (a black kitten bought after Olga Vasilievna’s death attacks the Americans’ baby at dinner), and the overall tone will all seem familiar to readers of classic short stories. Even as it deals with modern issues it reads like a much older piece, something one might encounter in a Chekhov collection.

Writers and literary scholars appear throughout to remind the reader of the book’s literary journey: the romantic Andrei, the young American who writes “the type of slice-of-life-in-Russia columns that expatriates publish week after week for other expatriates to read,” the ageing and forgotten Russian poet, the obsessed student of Russian literature in the final story. But while Shonk dabbles with slight innovations in form and voice, it could be argued that, in the end, we do not arrive at any new literary place. She takes no great risks with her prose or narrative techniques and sometimes comes across as bullish with her use of symbolism and metaphor.

And yet, this collection describes quite eloquently what it is for a young writer to feel herself at a certain place in literary history, a place where the old conventions of storytelling still resonate and even succeed, but where writers who make use of them are subject to an anxiety of form: are the old ways still valid in a modern literary world? Writers like Anne Carson, Ben Marcus, and George Saunders have been busy exploding genre, subverting the meaning of language, and incorporating fantastical elements into fiction. While clearly none of these writers has abandoned the tools of their predecessors, they and their legions of young followers are experimenting with fiction in exciting ways. And so the question remains: are the old ways still valid in a modern literary world? This collection suggests they are. At times, Shonk seems to wield these tools with less grace than she might someday display. But the tools of traditional fiction are not rusted or obsolete. The Red Passport offers some of the greatest satisfactions of fiction, the feeling of having lived other people’s lives and seen into the deepest core of their persons. It allows the reader to feel some of the connection, albeit to imaginary people, these characters so desperately seek.

This collection’s greatest success is the population of rich and complex characters whose craving for intimacy makes them absolutely familiar. “It had been so long since she had touched someone, since someone touched her,” muses Lara in “Kitchen Friends,” “even in the stores, money was passed back and forth on a dish.” Money separates many of them, mostly Americans from Russians. As is true all over the world, money begets choice, as does an American passport: Americans can leave at any time, Russians can’t. When they come into contact with each other, they must negotiate a complicated web of need and expectations. In “Our American,” Sasha woos the girl from Ohio who moves in next door in the hope that she will take him and his younger brother back to America and away from military service in Chechnya. In “Kitchen Friends,” Lara misguidedly orchestrates a survivors group in the wake of the bomb blast. She is looking for healing and emotional exchange, while the Russians who attend want to know when they will get their much-needed compensation checks. The anxiety of privilege and difference creates misunderstanding and pushes people farther from the connections they so crave. Still, none of these characters is cast as a villain. All of these characters are human. Russian or American, often bumbling, imprudent and naïve, Shonk’s characters are rendered with strokes of absolute empathy and understanding.