In “Lit,” Ms. Karr has written an energetic, unpretentious book that sweeps the reader into the turbulent struggles that rankle the author until her conversion into Catholicism, trailing off where her searing memoirs “The Liars’ Club” and “Cherry” had left off. The former focused on her fractured childhood marked by an absentee father and an impossible, dipsomaniac mother who once, in a fit of madness, incinerated her daughters’ toys and threatened them with a butcher knife; whereas the latter outlines the author’s drug riddled, erotically charged adolescence and her coming to grips with the travails of teenhood friendship.

“Lit,” the third installment to Karr’s memoirs, continues by chronicling her harrowing battles with identity, addiction, marriage, motherhood and spirituality, with the longer arch of this narrative underpinned by her transition from being soused in pubs to salvation at the pews. It is a memoir that traces her descent into alcoholism, paralleled by her wrenching visits to memories of a feckless mother who rescinded her parental responsibilities for her unhinged artistic ambitions and the author’s analogous regression as she too assumes the role of motherhood. And as it recounts her resurgence from this painful abyss, it is also a memoir that explores the discovery of her poetic voice and her artistic vocation along the spiritual path to recovery.

Karr opens the book as a letter to her son, Dev, to whom she writes, “However long I’ve been granted sobriety, however many hours I logged in therapists’ offices and the confessional, I’ve still managed to hurt you, and not just with the divorce when you were five, with its attendant shouting matches and slammed doors. Just as my mother vanished from my young life into a madhouse, so did I vanish when you were a toddler.” Although her missive immediately disconnects from the rest of her memoir, this sincere, well-worded confession just as effectively sets the tone for this story as it recapitulates and references events that had transpired in her previous works, providing the reader not only flashbacks of her fractured history, but also reminding us that these traumatic memories (her mother brandishing that butcher knife over her) continue to haunt her.

The author then transports us into the crucial moment when she breaks free of the self-conscious, unbridled adolescence explored in “Cherry” and attends a Midwestern college as an escape from her conflicted mother-daughter relationship. Mary’s matriculation into college, however tempestuous at the onset, signals a turning point for the author—her mentors not only gave direction and shape to her aesthetics (the poet Etheridge Knight provided artistic insights to enhance the beauty of her poetry), but illumined her too on a goodness and a generosity that were previously absent in her life (Walt, the professor she meets in the Midwestern college, becomes a lifelong confidant).

Karr later attends a graduate program at Vermont where she eventually meets her husband, Warren Whitbread (the thinly veiled Dickensian pseudonym of the poet Michael Milburn)—the handsome, disciplined, yet reticent son of an affluent and stereotypically WASPish family of East Coast blue bloods. Even before their son, Dev, enters the picture, the disparities between Mary’s hardscrabble Texas background and Warren’s aristocratic New England lineage expectantly generate much friction—the family frigidly calculating her motley missteps; the author unwittingly incurring various social faux pas and misconstruing the upper class’ esoteric code of etiquette.

Mary enters into this clinically stultifying, “airless box” of a marriage as a woman evading the clutches of her broken childhood, as “a girl starving for stability,” whereas Warren, similarly in a quandary about his past, comes to her as “a shy, brilliant man fleeing the aristocracy he was born to.” However, as Mary attempts to bridge contact with her stiff in-laws, the tremors of class struggle further undercuts the stability of their marriage when Warren’s family hides little of their aversion to her more bohemian folks.

The situation becomes more unbearable when the couple attempts to toggle the responsibilities of rearing Dev, this time compounded by Mary’s liberal quaffing of many a bottle of whisky and beer. As Warren becomes more distant, Mary vacillates between damning episodes of sobriety and inebriety, her wayward attempts to correct her addiction landing her in multiple A.A. sessions and a psychiatric facility dubbed as the “Mental Marriott,” culminating in the expected dissolution of her marriage and, consequently, her writing career. All is forlorn, or so it seems until redemption and faith begin to kindle changes in her, some of which are nothing short of miraculous.

Although Ms. Karr’s story ostensibly appears like one of those putative A.A. accounts of addiction and recovery, her ability to salt these mundane narratives with funny poetic locutions (on drinking whisky, she describes the feeling as akin to “a poof of sequins” go “sparkling through my middle”—try picturing that when downing a shot of Jack Daniels), her ability to impart such palpable energy into her characters, and her honest, unaffected forays into the mysterious world of the divine, all enliven an essentially grotesque, Flannery O’Connoresque story with such drawing, humorous élan. Aside from her often-candid theological exchanges with priests and nuns, one other memorable excerpt from this book recalls her brief, animated tryst with the late, “logorrheic” literary savant David Foster Wallace, of the Infinite Jest fame.

As the author ascends the stages of religious maturity, she begins to discern what she once took for granted now as grace; and as she immerses herself further into the spiritual, she achieves solidarity with life, reconciles with her still feisty, octogenarian mother, and launches a stellar writing career beyond her wildest ambitions. Impeccably written, poetically rich, and spiritually inspiring without being proselytizing, Mary Karr’s “Lit” reads as a touching narrative on the solace found in redemption, and, for those traversing this hard-boiled path to faith, an honest invitation to “presence of the numinous.”

The winners for the 2010 Pulitzer Prizes have just been announced on the organization’s website.

By Charles McGrath of the New York Times

J. D. Salinger, who was thought at one time to be the most important American writer to emerge since World War II but who then turned his back on success and adulation, becoming the Garbo of letters, famous for not wanting to be famous, died Wednesday at his home in Cornish, N.H., where he had lived in seclusion for more than 50 years. He was 91.

But writing in The New York Review of Books in 2001, Janet Malcolm argued that the critics had all along been wrong about Mr. Salinger, just as short-sighted contemporaries were wrong about Manet and about Tolstoy. The very things people complain about, Ms. Malcolm wrote, were the qualities that made Mr. Salinger great. That the Glasses (and, by implication, their creator) were not at home in the world was the whole point, she said, which said as much about the world as about the kind of people who failed to get along there.

The unwritten handbook on parenting tells us that the enterprise of child-rearing, while ideally resting between the shoulders of husband and wife, ultimately remains, by merit of performance, in distaff territory. Mothers must impel themselves to lord over the household with an eye trained for disaster, detecting “the vast invisible flow of peril through which their children are obliged daily to make their way”; conversely, fathers adopt a more casual approach, often brazenly oblivious to the “specter of calamity that haunts their children.”

However, considering the cultural changes of the last few decades, it is now not uncommon to see more mothers assuming the post of the materfamilias while fathers play the part of the Gen X housedad—milkless and endowed with a shade less testosterone, but skilled in laundering, folding, cleaning, and most importantly, cooking. That said, society at large still revolves around a familiar and well-established norm—dad finances the family, whereas mom, though now employed and ambidextrously equipped for paternal substitution, still tends to the children’s needs.

Like many of the pieces in Manhood for Amateurs, Michael Chabon extrapolates on the revisions made on this proverbial handbook of the male trifecta, outlining manhood’s inherent flaws, behavioral theories and egotistical dispositions; about cultural dialogues with popular art that shape its intractable methodology, illustrated with artifacts as diverse as Lego’s, comic book characters, baseball cards, kiddie paraphernalia, and sci-fi films like Star Trek; and on tidbits lifted from his personal history that govern the raison d’être’s of his writing, his artistry, and moreover, the cruces of manhood that challenge him to refine his approach to the ever-evolving craft.

Readers familiar with his finest novels like The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay and The Yiddish Policemen’s Union will find much that resonates thematically with these essays—particularly, how he stitches elements of popular art into the fabric of fiction, shaping not only his characters’ imaginations and impulses, but also how these influences throttle them into universes molded on emotions and relationships mirrored by these cultural relics. Elsewhere, as he relates his own past experiences (his flirtations with the opposite sex, his children’s bar and bat mitzvah’s, and his fascination with celestial bodies, to name just a few), we also get a glimpse into Chabon the puppeteer and the obsessive-compulsive tick that underlines his tendencies to fashion characters with a precious, self-conscious penchant for control and order.

The medium of the essay, however, affords Mr. Chabon the luxury to burrow deeply into the more intimate dimensions of his thoughts, allowing his equally comic and wistful raconteur skills to regale us with well-accepted truths remastered in his energetic, richly drawn prose. For instance, in “Hypocritical Theory,” which discusses capitalism’s hegemony on childhood imagination, he is confounded by the realization that kid culture, described once as “that compound of lore and play,” has now transformed into the “trademarked product and property of adults,” robbing its activity of the individuality and the freeform fantasies of a lost decade.

When his son wallows in the joys of commercialized, uniformly banal books like Captain Underpants, he regards his disapproval of them as a “small, feeble attempt to reestablish the contours of a boundary that in the greater culture has grown vague, disregarded, abused,” all the while deeming himself hypocritical as he had once indulged in very similar passions. In an almost identical grain, he relates to us his disgruntlement with the present culture’s unimaginative, even grim sketches of the future—once the arena for dreams of fantasized technocracies replete with engineering marvels like the Jetsons, Star Trek, and Beneath the Planet of the Apes. He prods us to “unreservedly and dreamingly” believe in the future, rather than “living on the last page, if not in the last paragraph, of a long, strange, and bewildering book.”

While this memoir stylistically represents a departure from Chabon’s usual outlet of fiction, it ultimately echoes many of the inquests explored by characters like the escapist Josef Kavalier (his aspirations for heroism concomitant with the social travails of his race) and Meyer Landman’s existential obsessions with sleuthing and problem solving, in a way paralleling the author’s own lifelong meditations. In one piece, “Exercises in Masculine Affection,” he waxes lyrical about his in-laws, cherishing their “rootedness, with this visible and palpable continuity of their history as a family in Seattle.”

In “Studies in Pink and Blue,” when writing of an incident that reflects the violence boys are naturally given to, he questions both “the great lost freedom of childhood” and, in retrospection of his reaction to it, “the morality, indeed the sanity, of my gender itself.” And as he pensively evaluates and distills his matured understanding of the father-and-son affair, he declares, “No matter how enlightened or well prepared you are by theory, principle, and the imperative not to repeat the mistakes of your own parents, you are no better a father or mother than the set of your own limitations permits you to be.”

It is both fascinating and edifying to read such an introspective and unflinchingly honest memoir—a refreshing change of pace indeed from the maudlin sphere of Dad Lit, fraught with hammy displays of venereal bravado, self-deprecating and narcissistic tableaus of dirtying one’s hands in the primordial mess of diapers and baby poop, and neurotic, often flat-footed overexaminations of familial life and parenthood. Well, Chabon occasionally lapses into awkwardly phallic and hilarious phrases that, in retrospect, sound cutesy and tart (“A wallet is a man’s totem, his distillation…the necessary corollary to this inviolate principle is that no man, ever, ought to carry a purse. Purses are for women; a purse is basically a vagina with a strap”), but for the most part skirts the sentimentality while beautifully tackling the larger subjects of love, family, remembrance, and nostalgia.

In the end, Manhood for Amateurs really offers no straightforward conclusions about the art of manhood, but the author’s analysis of it, whether venturing into any of its three turbulent tributaries, offers judgment that is sound, wise, and beautiful.

Like the many pieces in this eclectic omnibus of thoughts, this essay communicates not only the intricacies of Smith’s literary craft, but also unveils the inner workings of her dartingly gifted mind, tackling such conventionally cerebral topics like literary criticism, investigative journalism, and mini-memoir with the balances of wit and humor that charmed her critics on both sides of the Atlantic. Deeply personal and arrestingly candid, these pieces venture into the cultural and emotional waters that illuminated her previous works of fiction, for instance underscoring the influences imparted by Zora Neale Hurston’s “unerringly strong and soulful” black characters in “Their Eyes Were Watching God : What Does Soulful Mean?” or expressing admiration for Barack Obama’s polyphonic rhetoric in “Speaking in Tongues.”

On a first glance though, Changing My Mind may read like free-form exercises on a dartboard of random ideas: recollections about her bittersweet relationship with her working-class, unread white father quickly segue into meditations on her brother’s flair for stand-up comedy. Under the section “Seeing,” Smith flexes her critical muscle and performs witty vivisections on mainstream cinema’s blockbuster titles. Adjoining this is a cleverly articulated exposé about feminism revolving around Luchino Visconti’s Bellissima, which sits beside an entertaining exegesis on Katharine Hepburn’s iconic approaches to character while examining the “essential, Platonic and unindividuated” that graces Greta Garbo’s features.

Elsewhere she writes about subjects as disparate as the power struggles pitted by Vladimir Nabokov’s “bold assertion of authorial privilege” versus Roland Barthes’ “authorial assassination”; Franz Kafka’s surreal renderings as a by-product of his collective Jewishness; reflections on the bizarreness of Oscar weekend in Los Angeles; the “middling” sincerity of E.M Forster’s writing; and the future novelistic paths paved by Joseph O’Neill’s scintillating Netherland and Tom McCarthy’s more daring experimental work, Remainder. Setting a slightly different key in this collection is the essay “One Week in Liberia,” which reads like a tapered remastering of Ryszard Kapuscinski’s artful journalistic expositions; and, in one of the more elegiac excerpts in this book, a most fitting tribute to the late David Foster Wallace.

Given the stark thematic differences explored throughout these essays, it understandably becomes difficult to find the common denominator that underlines this collection. For starters, it is apparent that Smith’s writing is coziest when she dispatches with inquiries into literature and the authors who interest her. As a perceptive reader who also happens to be a remarkable fiction writer, she expresses in “Rereading Barthes and Nabokov” her inclinations for latter’s author-biased “portrait of subjectivity” to the former’s authorial independence. Although she attempts to reconcile both of these diametrically opposing views, she in the end finds greater rewards in the Russian author’s highly involved approach. In expressing her deep affinity with Nabokov, the reader is assured that she is not merely knowledgeable about the devices behind his baroque flourishes and his playful puzzles, but that she grew and matured into Nabokov’s artistic philosophy and his religious dedication to the art of reading and rereading.

When she recounts the grim state of contemporary English fiction, Smith contrasts Joseph O’Neill’s more lyrical model with Tom McCarthy’s stark one, enticing the reader to examine them from a holistic perspective, to place them in context of the artistic tradition, and, ultimately, to take note of how these innovations “shake the novel out of its present complacency.” The essay, entitled “Two Directions for the Novel,” rends one of this collection’s most compelling reads and points to the author’s promising future in literary criticism. In homage to one of the 21st century’s most formidable prose stylists, Smith ably deconstructs the geometric complexities, the “formal, philosophical possibilities,” and the linguistic manipulations of consciousness characteristic to David Foster Wallace’s writing, highlighting his ability to shake the reader out of disbelief by inserting their psyche into the text.

But Smith also allows a bit of familiarity to penetrate the predominantly cerebral fabric of her writing, as evinced when culture and family are brought to the table. In discussing the virtues of Zora Neale Hurston, for example, Smith tells us that she initially resisted reading black authors due to the sentimentality, the “extraliterary feelings,” and the stilted theories of the “Black Female Literary Tradition,” declaring that, “I want my limits to be drawn by my own sensibilities, not by my melanin count.” She eventually comes to terms with Hurston’s work, and acknowledges the universality of that certain weltschmerz, or, as with this particular case, the soulfulness, that aligns any reader with the pathos of Hurston’s characters. And when she devotes space to three essays about her “gentle, sentimental” father, Harvey Smith, one recognizes the inspiration behind White Teeth’s Archie Jones and his daughter who, by merit of her intellectual acuity, managed to wrest herself away from England’s class limitations.

On the other hand, when Smith makes critical forays outside her element into film, one gets the feeling that she hasn’t been able to fully get under the skin of the art form. While her perspicacious insights make her blockbuster movie reviews entertaining and witty, they can sometimes come off as jerry-built and annoyingly cute displays of winded English wit. And while the Vogue magazinesque “Ten Notes on Oscar Weekend” bears similarities with the more accomplished investigative piece, “One Week in Liberia,” the self-conscious demeanor of the piece (which investigates the artifice that drenches Hollywood during the Oscars) renders something like a flat-footed imitation of a Dominic Dunne reportage.

In the end, all of these pieces do converge towards a central concept: to engage with Zadie Smith’s thoughts and to involve ourselves in the process of savoring and creating written art. Whether she is discussing the vocal multiplicity of Obama’s rhetoric, the fractal-like nature of Foster Wallace’s syntax, Nabokov’s game-master-like manipulation of prose, the pitch-perfect dialectics of black society, or the carefully constructed synthesis between body language and speech in film, these essays constantly impart Ms. Smith’s attempts to retune and refine a reader’s intuition and a writer’s wisdom. If this essay collection seems at first riddled with “ideological inconsistency,” ultimately, Changing My Mind addresses and embraces the credo of any great writer—that reading, and more importantly, reading well, is an invaluable precept to living.

While the market is abundant with myriad editions of Tolstoy’s stories, this new volume of his late fiction is particularly remarkable for the collaboration of translators Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, both of whom have rendered critically acclaimed translations of great Russian classics. Seasoned readers of Dostoevsky will invariably direct neophytes to their landmark The Brothers Karamazov, considered today as definitive for mirroring the author’s ironic humor, tortured spirituality, and most importantly, his language’s cadence and tonality. At the turn of the millennium, the couple released their Anna Karenina, which later garnered international attention upon Oprah’s promotion of the title in her book club. Two years ago, Pevear and Volokhonsky also published their hefty, beautiful version of War and Peace, enthralling readers of serious literature and becoming the subject of a four-week online discussion presided by the New York Times.

The eleven stories in this volume, all but one of which was written after Anna Karenina, signify a distinct change in artistic character—a spiritual crisis engendered when the author converted to Christianity—from Tolstoy’s earlier novels. Pevear notes in his introduction that, “Here the conflicting claims of art and moral judgment strike a very difficult balance, and its precariousness is strongly felt.” Although the polarities between the classes and the idyllic depictions of Russian life still command a presence in these stories, central to them now is the “confrontation with the mystery of death,” which, though initially introduced through Anna Karenina’s progressively “tragic atmosphere,” emerges here as an unmistakably crucial motif.

For instance, in the titular novella, “The Death of Ivan Ilyich,” Tolstoy concerns us with the presently deceased Ivan Ilyich, a judge whose life “was most simple and ordinary and most terrible.” Though commencing as a focused reflection on the hero’s death, the story gradually progresses as an examination of Ivan’s life, tracing his ascent through the social hierarchy until a seemingly arbitrary injury begins to discomfit him. Upon realizing that he faces a terminal condition, his psyche similarly deteriorates, causing him to lash on his family until he alienates all but Gerasim, a servant boy, whose compassion moves him to question the true meaning of life.

With the dark and harrowing “The Kreutzer Sonata,” Tolstoy tells a disturbing tale regarding the moral nature of love, sex, and seduction channeled through the story’s mad narrator, Pozdnyshev. He tells us that, before marriage, he lived “in depravity,” which he envisions more as a self-deprecating act of abstinence. After marrying his wife, both alternate between periods of passionate love and violent altercations. During the latter years of their union, she takes a liking to a dashing violinist, who invites her to participate in a duet by playing Beethoven’s Kreutzer Sonata. The music’s tension rouses a change in Pozdnyshev, who finds that it “affects one fearfully…in a provoking way.” Returning later from a foreign trip, he comes home to find them together, and, in a fit of anger, murders his wife.


In “Master and Man,” one of the author’s most touchingly composed stories, a wealthy merchant, Vassily Andreich, and his muzhik companion, Nikita, are pitted against a treacherous whiteout that strands them during their circuitous wanderings towards another town. As master and man are confronted with the prospects of perishing in the cold, Vassily ruminates about the value of his societal contributions while regarding the unenterprising muzhiks as unworthy of grace; Nikita, on the other hand, ponders about his “ceaseless servitude” and how death might affect his place in society. As the snowstorm continues to batter them, Vassily is seized with a rapturous vision, and undergoes a startling transformation of character right before he expires.

While many of these display the fine-tuned prose of Tolstoy’s maturity, the most unconventional hero of his authorship—and perhaps the finest creation of his pen—revolves not around a Russian compatriot wrestling with his tormented self, but rather, a Muslim warrior who, although by no means peaceable, stands as an essay on the art of the hero. “Hadji Murat,” an artfully symmetrical creation that begins and ends with the scrutiny of a twig, tells a dramatically arresting tale of heroism about its eponymous Chechen rebel commander, who allies with the Russians after a falling-out with his imam.

Unlike the majority of Tolstoy’s creations, many of who are deeply flawed and resignedly human, Hadji Murat is an epic hero streaked with uncommonly divine qualities—his daring, his warrior-like dexterity, his uncanny leadership, his heroic ethos, his wise understanding of reality, and his resignation of fate to God—that mark a departure from the author’s conventional realization of character. Although death inevitably constitutes his destiny, he sees it not as an object of mystery, but instead for what it merely is—a physical detachment from the earthly realm. This apotheosis in character has never been more strongly defined in Tolstoy’s oeuvre, and if it were to stand as the sole exponent of his art, it would still seal his reputation as one of literature’s finest craftsmen.

Indeed, throughout this collection, life and death’s many mysteries pose certain powerful questions that reflect the important ruminations of Tolstoy’s art. As with “The Kreutzer Sonata,” stories like “The Devil” and “Father Sergius” challenge us to think about the moral gravity of sex, lust, and love and the sometimes-drastic sacrifices we must make in order to achieve inner peace and happiness. Another story, an eccentric parable entitled “The Forged Coupon,” recalls the corruption that laces an entire community when a young man, in desperation for money, dishonestly alters a coupon’s face value. This bizarre ordeal is ironically settled only when one of the indicted attacks an old woman whose final mournful, yet spiritually poignant words engender a change of heart. And in a stroke that captures the author’s nihilistic tendencies, “The Diary of a Madman” chronicles one man’s descent into madness, his unwillingness to come to terms with spirituality, and a final association with a faith of his own invention that closely mimics Tolstoy’s version of Christianity.

If Tolstoy’s shorter fiction hardly approaches the impressive breadth he invested in his largest masterpieces, he manages to award his characters with a sense of spiritual destiny, with voices wrestling with truth, life, God, and morality. Though many of these morose creatures often face an inevitable end, they also dawn on the idea that happiness and truth are unattainable in this world. Ultimately, these characters come to the transcendent realization that redemption, if only by acknowledging the universal need for morality and truth, is possible for even the most tormented and flawed of us.

Mr. Jin has since published several novels, short story collections, and poems, many of which have won prestigious American literary awards. His 1999 novel, Waiting, was published to critical acclaim and was garlanded doubly with the PEN/Faulkner and National Book Awards. Five years later, War Trash—an epic, bittersweet faux-memoir that chronicles the life of a Communist soldier-turned-prisoner-of-war—walked away with the author’s second PEN/Faulkner.

In his new book, A Good Fall, Mr. Jin gives us twelve stories set in the diverse neighborhood of Flushing, concerning us with the lives of Chinese immigrants dreaming about restarting life in the United States. All revolve around struggling individuals who joust with the country’s promises of easier comfort and wealth. All wrestle with the emotional isolation and the ideological rifts that alienate them from this strange new land. And all emanate a key signature of nostalgic wistfulness for that sense of belonging and security lost when they crossed the transoceanic divide.

Some of these characters are artists who find the unrestricted latitude for expression in America refreshing. Most are impoverished settlers who are culturally obliged to mail monetary remittances to their families back home. Others are foreign visitors who take well to the idyllic promises of a country characterized by freedom and prosperity. One of these is a professor whose publicly distributed verbal snafu inopportunely hovers over his conscience during his imminent appointment for tenure. All of them, however, are bundled by the paranoiac insecurities of living in an environment that puts their linguistic and technical competence on a mettle.

But whereas Mr. Jin spirited readers away with the impeccable command he displayed in novels like Waiting and War Trash, this collection unfortunately resembles little of the untrammeled force, the clearly articulated prose, and the meticulously modulated narrative momentum extant in his strongest works. Instead, these overstuffed stories read like lumpy and cartoonishly farcical studies on the Chinese immigrant, hobbled by a laborious prose deliberately fractured to sound like awkward subtitles from a foreign film.

“A Good Fall,” the collection’s title story, depicts a young, hapless Buddhist monk who faces deportation after his sponsor cheats him of his salary. Upon realizing the irony of the American dream, he carps about the people “who bragged about the opportunity found in America and wouldn’t reveal the hardship they’d gone through here.” “In the Crossfire” tells of an immigrant couple’s agitated interactions with an accountant’s cantankerous mother, who intransigently lords over their household while accusing his wife of exploiting son’s salary as a means of getting through nursing school. As the family and their guests preside over dinner, Shulan, a friend of Tian’s mother, reveals to her that “[l]ife here is no picnic and most people work very hard.”

Like so many of Mr. Jin’s neurotic narrators, an aging Chinese couple, the heroes of “Children as Enemies,” are modeled after old-fashioned stereotypes who grouse about the insouciant attitudes of Americanized children. Their grandchildren persistently assail them regarding their dated ways, spurn them by changing their Chinese names into “empty” English ones, and back up their “indulgent mother” when she suggests that they “ought to let them develop freely as individuals,” estranging them from the deeply embedded sense of family innate to their motherland.

The grandfather tells us that “[i]n America it feels as if the older you are, the more inferior you grow.” “ This is America,” declares the staunchly traditional grandfather, “where we must learn self-reliance and mind our own business.” Perhaps all of these observations are meant to inform readers about these newcomers’ intemperate concerns, but many are written so heavy-handedly that the whole ordeal comes off as a redundant burlesque of stereotypes.

Many of the stories in this volume, while sincerely informing us about these characters’ anxieties and struggles, are embellished with little of the nuances that sympathize readers with an immigrant culture’s uncertain realities. And although intrinsic elements like the Chinese sense of shame, of an immutable destiny, and Confucian values are externally communicated by the author’s heroes, their transactions with tradition and assimilation are stripped of the complexities that explain their tendencies to drift off into nervous episodes of ennui.

To make matters worse, Mr. Jin resolves each of these psychological battles with the trite, silver-lining brand of endings that pledges an exaggerated version of American economic freedom, without distinctions between “high or low.” In the end, all of these characters wander around Flushing like dour doppelgangers sporting only chameleonic changes of clothes, appellation, and profession—all obsessed with hauling in barrowfuls of greenback, all griping about the anachronistic datedness of their old culture, and all living through a fragile, initially idealistic representation of American society that is ultimately robbed of its paradisiacal charm.

That the author intentionally punctuates his dialogue with bizarre insertions of the engrish.com variety not only hampers the continuity of his stories, but also perpetuates an unsavory Asian stereotype that highlights an inability to compose thoughts sensibly in the English language. Awkward turns of phrase like “I prefer a ripe woman,” “the little fox spirit,” or “[h]e’s a vampire I can’t shake off of me,” while in a sense resembling the poetic license embedded in Mandarin, emerge here as contrived and affected. Though his intentions to capture these speech patterns are noble, Mr. Jin’s discomfiting transliterations do a great disservice to America’s most prominent Asian minority group—a people that have made great strides to be recognized for their outstanding achievements in a country that had officially deprived them of basic rights until the constitution was amended in the mid-20th century.

One of the few stories in this book that essay a more unaffected take on these themes of adjustment and disjointedness is “The Beauty,” which tells of the strained relationship between Dan and his “lissome” and beautiful wife, Gina, when a close acquaintance appears to make unsettling advances on her. Jasmine, the couple’s daughter, complicates the situation when Dan questions his wife about the disconnect between her ravishing features and her daughter’s “homely” looks. Echoing a bittersweet irony reminiscent of Jin’s Waiting, this tale of misunderstanding ends in a revelatory moment where perspectives are changed and relationships mended in an arresting stroke of honesty and candor, qualities sadly absent in other stories in this volume.

As a child, Nabokov was reared in an educated, aristocratic household deeply cultured in arts and literature. The family’s massive collection of books weaned his imagination on cornerstones of the Western canon. Because of their position in society, he was raised trilingual, and was exposed to a confluence of French and English customs that were in the mode among the St. Petersburg elite. Later, his life would be marked by a sense of displacement, death, and loss due to of the events that unfolded in Europe during the following decades. Before his family’s Soviet-imposed exile to Western Europe, his father—a staunch defender of Semitism and a leader of the opposition party—was killed by right-wing assassins, forcing the Nabokovs to flee Russia. When the Nazis invaded Paris during the Second World War, Nabokov absconded the Old World for the United States, where he became an itinerant instructor teaching literature in prestigious universities like Harvard and Cornell.

As he would later discover in America, Nabokov was not merely displaced geographically, but also faced the prospect of abandoning his own linguistic heritage for an entirely new idiom. And although history will remember him as one of the 20th century’s most revolutionary English prose stylists, there always remained in his writing an undercurrent of nostalgia for his lost culture (Humbert Humbert, the beloved, if somewhat leering narrator of Lolita, subtly pines for the relics of the Old World). Anyone who has read him will doubtlessly find Nabokov’s writing strongest when he expresses himself in that stylized diction—at once febrile, almost decadently violent, and always, as John Updike famously noted, titillating.

Perhaps readers will not be perplexed then by the familiar undertow of death that laces his posthumously released The Original of Laura—a jagged story about artistic consciousness and mortality told through its narrator Philip Wild, “a brilliant neurologist, a renowned lecturer and a gentleman of independent means” who ecstatically fantasizes about a “delicious dissolution” of his body “from heel to hip, then the trunk, then the head when nothing was left but a grotesque bust with staring eyes.” This fragmented novel, resembling more a verbal blueprint, was dubbed by his son as “an embryonic masterpiece whose pockets of genius were beginning to pupate here and there on his ever-present index cards.”

That The Original of Laura channels the author’s fetish with nymphets, metaphysical questions about reality, and urgent contemplations about existence and oblivion is no doubt telling of a nascent project distilled from a lifelong intimacy with the craft. Like Pale Fire, Laura is an edited, metafictional sketch that tells the story of the unattractive Philip and his promiscuous wife, Flora, who intermittently blends into an inner narrative as the fictional Laura. Her character is modeled as a nymphet who attracts the wiles of a persistent Englishman named Hubert H. Hubert (echoes loudly of Lolita’s Humbert Humbert), who happened to have lusted for in his youth a girl named Aurora Lee (again, an homage to Lolita’s Annabel Lee).

Philip, a writer who constantly prattles on with stream-of-consciousness introspections about existence and death, mirrors his life into a bizarre, fetishist story about “Laura-Flora,” through which brief insertions of the author’s character (his background as a tennis coach and as a disgruntled professor of Russian literature make cameo appearances) offer glimpses into his personal wrestling with these same ideas and questions.

Written in a “desperate sprint against Fate,” Laura in several ways stands as a fragmented distillation of his perennial themes and narratives, seasoned this time with an even more poignant obsession with the macabre. When this valedictory nymphet was conceived, Nabokov understood that his days were numbered, thus opening Laura not only to a hasty, desultory recollection of previous works, but moreover, to a cluttered mixer of ideas about existence, death, and its more patrician cousin, dissolution. Pale Fire’s Charles Kinbote couldn’t have more accurately described Laura when he called John Shade’s poem something “extremely rough in appearance, teeming with devastating erasures and cataclysmic insertions.”

Nabokov, ever the perfectionist, instructed his wife to have Laura burned (Lolita once nearly met the same fate), but her “procrastination due to age, weakness, and immeasurable love” allowed the manuscript to survive cremation while laying dormant for more than three decades in a Swiss bank vault. Laura thus “lived on in a penumbra,” arising only now from the shadows when Dmitri and Alfred A. Knopf reproduced his index cards in this distracting punch-out format that the author would probably have regarded as unpolished (the manuscript would likely have gone through a revision) and disrespectful, considering that the final sheet reads destructively with the words “Efface. Expunge. Erase. Delete. Rub out. Wipe out. Obliterate.”

Truth be told, Laura, given the reckless manner in which it was published, regrettably remains for the greater part a novelty, a fascinating memento of the thought processes that governed Nabokov’s genius. In many respects, this preliminary draft signifies greatest elements of Nabokov’s writing, redolent with idiosyncrasies like his playful way with words (“monstrously magnifying a trivial tiff”), his inserted references about his synesthesia (“the orange awnings of southern summer”), and surreal renderings of a world drenched in theatrical artifice (“a romantic refuge where a sparkle of broken glass or a lace-edged rag on the moss were the only signs of an earlier period of literature”).

Yet at the same time, these little segments represent only an incomplete mosaic of ideas that conform little to his grand artistic designs. Unlike The Enchanter (his clumsy Ur-Lolita), Laura does not even stand as a crudely drawn predecessor to an important masterpiece. Nor, like Pnin, does it read like an intricately written, tragicomic cultural afterthought to his experiences as a Russian émigré living in America. And unlike The Gift, his penultimate Russian novel, it is wanting in the ambition, the complexities, and the originality that creatively concealed a heartfelt ode to his mother country.

Despite the abundance of riches contained in this manuscript, it ultimately lacks the precision and the holistic grandeur that completes a great Nabokov novel. It is a puzzling affair, striated with a hauntingly tormented feel that palpably translates his struggle to complete the work during his final days at Lausanne. While the manner in which he dispenses with mysterious, even beautiful and philosophical passages about death unquestionably reveal his lifelong meditations on these great, mysterious questions, Laura reveals itself sadly as a disembodied product, a fleshless backbone of his imagination without the verve nor the magic that made Vladimir Nabokov a legend of modern letters.