Masterful, Stylish Immigrants’ Tale

AMBASSADOR OF THE DEAD

A Novel

By Askold Melnyczuk

Counterpoint

266 pages, $25

Askold Melnyczuk’s second novel, “Ambassador of the Dead,” brings the dark, fabled world of the Ukraine, with its brooding passions, to the shiny, optimistic streets of America in a triumph of style and storytelling. His masterful book begins ominously: The narrator, Nick Blud, a Boston physician, receives a phone call from Adriana Kruk, the beautiful mother of his childhood friend Alex, whom he hasn’t seen in years. Adriana summons Nick back to his New Jersey hometown, telling him she has something urgent to relate. As he sits in her living room awaiting her revelation, he begins to meditate on his past: “In different ways I had loved all the Kruks--they were my little Russian novel, so impulsive and uncontainable, you never knew if they were going to kiss you or bite you ....”

The same could be said of Melnyczuk’s writing. He skillfully re-creates the post-World War II immigrant neighborhood of Nick’s youth, where Ukrainian families alternately struggle to assimilate and be true to their heritage. Nick’s family is all for the New World, but the Kruks, led by the mysterious and powerful Adriana, cling to their past. Though Nick and Alex attempt to blend in to the American landscape, neither can escape the otherworldliness of Adriana. She is a country all to herself, the compelling heart of Melnyczuk’s story.

Nick’s life ends up taking a very different course from Alex’s. Nick goes to college and makes good, while Alex becomes a tormented rebel who finds himself in one rehabilitation center after another. The Kruks, all of them, are a mess. Alex’s older brother commits suicide after serving in Vietnam, while his uncle, Adriana’s brother, is a reclusive drunk who has never gotten over the years he spent in Stalin’s gruesome concentration camps. The father, meanwhile, adjusted to American life by leaving Adriana for a younger woman, stranding her with two sons and her emotionally crippled brother.

Yet Nick sees that for all the sorrows the Kruks have endured--and for all of their idiosyncrasies--they possess a gravitas that his own family, in their rush for suburban respectability, has forfeited. “The efficiency of my well-oiled life assures me that each time I use my ATM card I participate in a ritual older than prayer, so effortlessly have the technological changes of the last decades integrated themselves.

“And it is not enough.” Even before arriving in America, Adriana’s fate had been a hard one, and we learn of it in a most unexpected way. One of Adriana’s earliest suitors was a poet who was forced to flee Russia. Eventually he established a respectable literary reputation for himself in England, but he never got over Adriana. When Nick and Alex are in their teens, the poet tracks down Adriana and hands her a story he has written about her called “The Ambassador of the Dead.”

We, along with Adriana, read the story. It is a piece de resistance, a stunning shift in the novel’s tone that takes us back to the mother country, where Adriana’s tribulations--she is raped as a young girl and many of her friends and family members are executed or starved in death camps--lead her to resist her losses in an unusual way:

” ... she forgave the world its failings since she herself had from an early age moved beyond it, establishing a link to the larger and infinitely more powerful shadow empire of the dead,” Melnyczuk’s poet explains. She has become an ambassador to lost souls, a preserver of memory, a link to fallen lives.

In the final chapter we return to the scene of the first: Nick, a prosperous doctor and married man who has seemingly mastered the trick of assimilation, sits and waits for Adriana to give up her secret. Whatever she tells him, Nick has become sure of one thing: “Only heroes spend lifetimes refusing to forget or betray their homes.”

Melnyczuk’s “Ambassador of the Dead” is an eloquent meditation on the human need for a rooted historical perspective. His ambassador, Adriana, invites comparison to one of the tempestuous Karamazovs. With her, he has brought the great tradition of Russian literature to American soil in a transplant that is a work of art.