Books : From Russia With Love and Lipstick

Quite the Other Way by Kaylie Jones (Doubleday: $17.95; 415 pages)

Somebody somewhere must have already pointed out that the 6 o’clock news is the equivalent of soap operas for men. The news and the soaps, it could be argued, like the yin and the yang, make up an eternal media meta-universe. If you only watched the soaps, you might think that life is nothing but lipstick and love. If you only watched the news, you’d get the impression that life is made up of those flags in front of the State Department and missiles and the mujahedeen .

Kaylie Jones has written an extremely unusual novel about the Soviet Union. It isn’t political; it isn’t about spies, it doesn’t have a single missile in it. People stand in line for food, but no longer than 10 minutes. Marvin Kalb would throw up his hands in disgust at this book, because it’s about lipstick and love.

Literary people probably won’t like this book very much either, because while it goes by the name of fiction, it’s probably a novel in name only. “Quite the Other Way” is told in the first person by a 25-year-old woman who goes to study in Moscow for a few months. The narrative begins at the beginning, in the Russian Language Institute, and ends on the plane home to America.

The chapters chug straightforwardly along as Clinton, the young student heroine, meets different sets of people, and gets to know her roommates. The novel reads like a letter; it reads like a journal. It’s artless, it’s fascinating. It has everything in it that Marvin Kalb forgot to tell us.

Clinton has come to Moscow to search for anyone who knew her father, who was a visiting American journalist in World War II, and was later blacklisted in America for his pains. In those old days, Clinton’s father, now dead, had fallen in love with the Soviet Union and with a Russian woman. Clinton, feeling bereft, wants to figure out that love in order to better understand her father. Naturally, she falls in love herself.

We get the story of Clinton falling in love with a fellow American student. But we also get a long wonderful string of anecdotes about friends, and friends of friends, both Soviet and American. We meet Rita, a greedy, rapacious shop-till-she-drops Communist, who makes enormous financial and emotional demands on Clinton. We meet Andrej, a ditsy playwright, who asks Clinton to marry him, even though he already has a wife and baby in another city. We meet the wonderful old lady who loved Clinton’s father, now in terrible arthritic pain, longing for American aspirin. We discover the story of Ceppie, a Puerto Rican student determined to lose her virginity to Misha, who happens to be gay. . . .

The wonderful thing about this book is that a good half of these people are four-star jerks; Russian rednecks convinced that the United States invented AIDS to kill Russians, and so on. The other half are wonderful people who love to party (a marvelous Odessa section follows three young couples going out to a deserted dacha on a crazy triple date that lasts the night).

This is a book full of graduate student parties; of not-so-furtive-sex with unsuitable partners in bathrooms as those same parties blare on; of incredibly good meals. It’s a book full of screeching children who scream and cry and won’t go to bed on time, of evil-tempered mothers-in-law, of bad Soviet girls strung out on drugs, of young Soviet rockers with talent to burn. And information like this: When you go inside a Soviet house in winter, if they’re nice, they ask you to pull off your boots and pick out some slippers from a collection by the door. If they’re not nice, you sit there and sweat to death with your boots still on.

This is a wonderful book that tells us some of what we’ve been missing all these years. It lets you conjure up a different and better world: Marvin Kalb leaning confidentially into the camera: “You’ll never guess where I went last night!” “Quite the Other Way” is chock full of hitherto unknown love-and-lipstick news from the Soviet Union.