Published by The Dial Press on March 20, 2012
What should you do when you know you're losing? That question is at the heart of A Partial History of Lost Causes. Jennifer duBois's skillful storytelling drew me into two distinct worlds, one occupied by a young woman in Massachusetts who knows her clarity of thought is soon destined to fade, the other by a chess prodigy in Russia (a thinly disguised Garry Kasparov) whose empty life is only partially filled by chess and later by politics. By the time the two stories converge, however, I found the woman's story to be a bit thin.
Chess prodigy Aleksandr Bezetov drifts into a dissident movement because its members hold their meetings in a warm building. One of his dissident acquaintances publishes a journal entitled "A Partial History of Lost Causes" that, among other things, reports arrests, detentions, and searches in Leningrad. At the same time Bezetov begins a short-lived romance of sorts with a prostitute named Elizabeta. The story follows Bezetov into the 1980s as he is forced to make a life-changing decision, then rushes through the 1990s until we reach 2006. Bezetov's early internal struggle between individuality and conformity is the novel's strongest element. Even in its late stages, when the story focuses on Bezerov's presidential campaign and his determination to prove that the 1999 apartment bombings were orchestrated by Putin and/or the FSB rather than ethnic extremists, I found Bezetov to be a fascinating character.
Irina Ellison is 22 when she learns that she will probably live another ten years before experiencing the onset of Huntington's, a disease that claimed her father's mind and then his life. In 2006, she is 30, "in the last year or two of sound body and mind," when -- having lived a quiet, lonely, brooding life -- she travels to Russia on a mad quest: she wants to meet Bezetov, to whom her father had once written a letter, asking how Bezetov dealt with failure.
When the two stories finally converge about halfway through the novel, the pace slows a bit. The alternating points of view that characterize the first half continue in the second half, revealing two perspectives of the same events, a technique that has value at the price of repetition.
Bezetov's is the better of the two stories. Bezetov's story is compelling because political struggles in authoritarian countries are a different sort of chess match, one in which a checkmate may mean death. I'm not sure I entirely understood Irina's motivation for seeking out Bezetov, but then, I don't always understand what motivates my own behavior. I understood, and thus connected with, Bezetov; duBois convinced me that I was inside the head of an unhappy prodigy. I like the characterization of the older Bezerov as a man torn between idealism and practicality, a man haunted by the knowledge that other dissidents have been imprisoned or died while he has been -- to some extent, at least -- co-opted by the system. I was less impressed by the characterization of Irena as a woman who struggles to come to terms with her fate, if only because it seems like a device designed to work another character into the story who feels an impending sense of doom.
Both Bezetov and Irina are self-absorbed, albeit with good reason. Both are searching for a purpose in life, but Irina's search is largely the result of self-pity. Her story nonetheless seems authentic. What intelligent person wouldn't be self-pitying, after all, knowing that at an early age the death of her mind would precede that of her body? Still, I sometimes found Irina's unrelenting introspection to be tedious. The karmic resolutions of both stories seemed a little too neat, although I'll admit they were satisfying.
Jennifer duBois' writing style is vibrant but occasionally self-conscious. She deftly evokes the climate of fear and hopelessness that arises from the brutal suppression of free thought while recognizing that brutality is not the only tool of oppression wielded by a political regime. Had she made me feel as much for the characters' personal struggles as I did for the dissidents' political struggles, I would be wildly enthused about A Partial History of Lost Causes. As it stands, I recommend it as an enjoyable but not entirely successful first novel.
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