Forty Rooms

December 7, 2015
This newest work from Grushin, winner of the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award, is an enchanted meditation on poetry and life in which a child of the Moscow intelligentsia rejects a “small life consumed by happiness” in America and a life driven by “the divine standards of art.” But her path veers wildly in the New World, when she is seduced by and marries a successful young businessman whose “capable presence” she finds relaxing. The narrative then switches from the first to third person, and we witness the choices and conflicts for the young poet, known to readers only by her married name, Mrs. Paul Caldwell, as she has children and finds material comfort. “Perhaps, she thought, if you lived in a place like this, you would get to live longer too, and you would then be more willing to forgive yourself any mistakes, any spiteful wishes any wrong turns along the way. You would have more time to fix everything.” Grushin best captures the nagging regrets of her tortured artist in a magically lyrical pair of conversations with her bitter and bowed husband. At the end of life, Grushin concludes that the impossible, irresistible path of art is what’s most joyful—and memorable.

Starred review from December 1, 2015
The award-winning author of The Dream Life of Sukhanov (2006) and The Line (2010) contemplates the tension between art and domesticity. A little girl walks into a bedroom to find a mermaid sorting through her mother's jewelry. The mermaid knows the story of every bauble: these earrings were a gift from the czar's uncle to the girl's great-grandmother, a ballerina; that uncut emerald was prised from an icon during the revolution and purchased by the girl's grandfather for a "length of smoked sausage and a box of German sweets." In the cramped kitchen of her family's Moscow apartment, this same girl is secretly reading forbidden verse when she meets an angel--or is he a god? "Do you want to be immortal?" he asks her. She says, "Yes." The exhilarating opening chapters of Grushin's latest novel are narrated by an unnamed heroine who can see through mundane reality--beneath it, beyond it--into other worlds. She is a poet. Scornful of the ordinary life her parents imagine for her, she travels from Russia to the United States. There, she experiences doomed love and the romance of suffering for one's art. But--moment by moment, choice by choice--her commitment to immortality recedes until the passionate young poet telling her story disappears and re-emerges as "she," a character observed from a distance, a woman who will soon come to be known as "Mrs. Caldwell." It's taken as a given that an upper-middle-class wife and mother cannot be an artist. There is magic, even in the suburbs; it's just that Mrs. Caldwell can't see it. But, at the same time, Grushin is too sly to be bound by cliche. If Mrs. Caldwell fails to be true to herself--and that "if" is sincere--this is because there are real questions about who that true self is. These are questions that women, especially, will recognize. Honest, tender, and exquisitely crafted. A novel to savor.

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December 15, 2015
The night sky makes a young poet feel vast. But the dreams of that same girl diminish with time as she finds herself becoming absorbed with the everyday concerns of being a wife and mother in the very type of restricted existence she had sworn she would avoid. In her third novel, Grushin follows this unnamed protagonist through the 40 rooms she inhabits during her life, from the apartment of her childhood in Moscow to the dorm rooms of her college years in the U.S., to the homes of her married life. As her aspirations become increasingly divorced from her reality, she wonders more and more about the woman she could have been. The novel's conceit of following her through the rooms of her life is unfortunately a bit belabored. However, the main character's inner life is rich with feeling, her meditations on her writing made vivid through conversations with a dangerous visitor to her dreams. As she feels increasingly confined by her choices, the rooms, no matter their size, feel smaller. Readers drawn to the mood and the complex psychological portrayal of the heroine will forgive the sometimes pretentious prose.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)

February 1, 2016

Grushin burst onto the literary scene with the brilliant The Dream Life of Sukhanov, then followed with the equally impressive The Line, two novels that convey the broad sweep of history as they chronicle life in the former Soviet Union. Here, Grushin's scope is much more intimate, centering on the largely domestic affairs of a protagonist--a child when we meet her, besotted with her mother and encountering forbidden poetry in the repressive Soviet era--who leaves her Russian homeland, marries an American, and raises their four children. The narration shifts from first to third person as it tracks Mrs. Caldwell from student to spouse to grandmother. The 40 rooms of the title (e.g., "laundry," "wine cellar") are the various "rooms" a woman, or at least our heroine, will inhabit during her lifetime. Through this device the author shows how larger problems can be played out in small spaces. Surprisingly, though, we learn less about cultural conflict than we do about disappointed dreams. VERDICT Lacking the grandeur of her previous titles despite the masterly writing (and, at times, overwriting), this work might puzzle some of Grushin's fans but will appeal to readers interested in careful portraiture of one woman's struggles. [See Prepub Alert, 8/10/15.]--Edward B. Cone, New York

Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

September 1, 2015

A child of the Moscow intelligentsia leaves for America, abandons first love to pursue her poetry, then marries a former college classmate and cycles through the joys and losses of married life until she is much older and left pondering what was and might have been. Grushin's too young for such pondering, but she understands the push-pull of art and life, having penned the magnificent The Dream Life of Sukhanov, which made her one of Granta's Best Young American Novelists, a New York Public Library Young Lion, and a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Best First Novel Award and Britain's Orange Prize.

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.