Rubble of rubles A novel

In this dizzying, darkly comic novel, Novakovich (April Fool's Day) explores Putin's Russia through the eyes of a Jewish New Yorker arrested on trumped-up charges in 2006 St. Petersburg. David Mariner, a divorced ex-banker who was disgraced after investing nearly all his clients' money and his own in Enron stocks, hopes to start over by importing Georgian wines. In St. Petersburg, his taxi driver deliberately strikes and kills a pedestrian, and the victim turns out to be a Georgian wine exporter. Nobody calls the police--"I am the police," declares the cab driver--and the body stays on the street for days before being incinerated in a literal dumpster fire. A few days later, David is caught urinating on the outside of a building he didn't realize was a church, and is arrested. While in jail, the cops pin the murder of two Georgian wine merchants on him. Novakovich's outrageous humor breathes life into the bleak proceedings (while booking David on the charges of sacrilege, insult to the state, and more, the cop learns David went to Yale and assumes that means he's had sex with George W. Bush and John Kerry), as do such lighthearted elements as David's relationship with the kitten he rescued before his arrest. Later, in vertiginous scenes that evoke Kafka, Dostoyevsky, and Alice in Wonderland, the police and prison officials subject David to extortion, drugging, and interrogation, and even Putin himself gets a cartoonish and nightmarish cameo. Not only is this sickeningly surreal, it's a hell of a ride. (Dec.)

A would-be wine importer finds himself enmeshed in a Russian espionage plot. In the wake of turmoil in both his personal and professional lives, an American man named David travels to Russia in the mid-2000s seeking to start a new career as a wine importer. Readers expecting a predictable story of a midlife crisis abroad will be surprised by where Novakovich's novel heads. As David observes at one point, "My love of Russia was an illness, a self-destructive vortex"--and that vortex takes him to some decidedly strange places. An arrest for public urination finds David in an increasingly high-stakes legal nightmare, one in which he is imprisoned and regularly shaken down for bribes. (A confirmed bibliophile, David frequently comments on the limited selection of books available to him in prison.) At one point, David raises the possibility of his meeting Vladimir Putin when talking with the prison's warden: "There could be several novels about Putin. Maybe a trilogy? Putin's judo youth, Putin in DDR, Putin in Grozny. Can I talk to him?" And then Putin shows up, trying out judo moves on the residents of the prison, and becomes convinced that David would be the perfect person to carry out a sinister mission overseas. David tries to explore the possibility of a nonviolent task instead--"You know, I'd rather not kill anybody. Could I just interview you and publish your biography?"--but is rebuffed and finds himself en route to Georgia. "Maybe I could consider myself an FSB agent? Maybe I was?" he ponders. But throughout the madcap plotting, a pervasive sense of menace never dissipates. An international comedy of errors that ventures to knowingly bleak places. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.