[In the following review, Howe lauds the farcical aspects of Say Cheese! but faults the novel's attempts at seriousness in the latter half of the book.]

There's a lot of pleasure to be had from the first half of this novel, a satiric farce about the life of culture in Brezhnev's Russia. Vassily Aksyonov, an émigré Russian now living in the United States, writes with the happy abandon of a true farceur. He commands a taste for the ridiculous, cares little for cautions of verisimilitude, and has a ready supply of puns, jokes, and saucy footnotes. His episodic narrative might almost be taken for a picaresque tale, were its hero not deprived of the picaro's traditional freedom to roam and to poke about.

Say Cheese! draws upon Aksyonov's own experiences. In 1979 he was a central figure within a group of "intellectual gangsters," that is, serious Russian writers who wanted to issue Metropol, the first uncensored anthology of Soviet literature. The results proved to be most unpleasant, Aksyonov resigning from the Writers Union because it expelled two of his colleagues and a year later emigrating from the Soviet Union. In Say Cheese!, Russian writers are neatly transformed into Russian photographers, but the cultural bureaucrats harassing them in the name of the Party and History remain pretty much the same. The basic situation is ambiguous, one of neither total unfreedom or total freedom.

They are a lively bunch, these photographers. They carouse, achieve enviable results with women, snap fine pictures; but some nub of memory or imagination troubles them. They aspire, as they would put it, to the manliness that is a sign of creative independence. So they plan a picture album that won't be submitted to the censors: a seemingly innocent, even innocuous venture, but it sets off a flurry of intrigues and counter-moves among the cultural overseers.

The struggle that breaks out between the "New Wave" photographers and "the glands" (a nickname for "the organs" of State Security) is a curious mixture of the ominous and the farcical. Ominous, because the non-terrorist repressions of the Brezhnev regime are brutal enough. Farcical, because neither side, bureaucrats or artists, is prepared for a complete showdown. The situation has a certain resemblance to those silent-film comedies in which a multitude of violent motions settles into calm—yet with the crucial difference that "the glands" are still there, very real, very powerful.

Aksyonov's depiction of his photographers contains a motif of male bonding, rather innocent despite the virtuoso sex. They are quite serious artists, but also behave like rambunctious adolescents—and somehow Aksyonov makes it all very appealing. Allergic to political cant, the photographers are intuitively anarchist in spirit and style—which seems exactly right for farce, since in its disdain for official proprieties and big questions, farce is a genre with affinities to anarchism. It's also a spirit—anarchism—appropriate for the sclerotic Brezhnev regime.

Leading the New Wave is Max Ogordnikov, who combines genius with irreverence, and who is also a veteran skirt-chaser now into his seventh marriage. (During a visit to New York, Ogo rises, after an initial Stendhalian embarrassment with his publisher's secretary, to seven powerful orgasms in rapid succession. Talk of lucky numbers!) Ogo despises the cultural bureaucrats not so much because he is committed heart and soul to democracy, but because they evoke in him an irritable boredom: it's tiresome to have to submit your work to a dimwit like Fotii Feklovich, "First Secretary" of photography, a character who last inhabited Gogol's The Inspector General."

"I'm tired," explains Ogo, "of only playing their games, I'd like to play just once to my own taste, as if they didn't exist, after all it's not against them, just without them …" This strikes me as one of Aksyonov's cleverest strokes: to show how boredom with bureaucracy can lead to artistic defiance.

The resourceful Ogo manages, by tricking his bosses, to have an unsanctioned trip to Germany and the United States, with an eye toward getting the New Wave album published. In Germany he has a very funny encounter with an enraged ultraleftist bedecked in rags, who turns out to be (of course) the son-in-law of a billionaire. In New York, Ogo meets Alex Konsky, the émigré photographer who now "dictates [cultural] fashion." Reports another émigré: "In New York it's hard to work seriously in Russian art unless you kiss Alex Konsky's ass…. He's started this snob idea that Russian photography requires translation into Western language." This "unbribable genius of pure form" has become a virtuoso in the American art of making it, and it figures that he will stick out his foot to trip up Ogo's project.

But about halfway, alas, Say Cheese! succumbs to seriousness. There's a sound logic behind this: Aksyonov is being faithful to the social reality that constitutes his setting; and by the last third of the book, the conflict between New Wave and "glands" has turned quite deadly. While plausible as rendered history, the literary result is unfortunate. It's a case of historical conscience triumphing over a gift of farce; of reality over art.

Farce, as the masters of silent film understood, is a short-breathed form. It is a kick in the pants, a slide on the banana peel, and then do it again. And again. In farce, development yields to repetition, or more accurately, repetition is development—but it can't go on for 404 pages. Had Aksyonov cut his book by a third, mostly in the last third, he'd have had a marvelous piece of work. As it is, much of it offers acute pleasure.

I suspect, but of course I cannot prove, that there is another reason for the novel's decline into seriousness. With rare exceptions like the early Waugh and the early Amis, writers of farce seem to feel uneasy at the thought of staying with the mode they have begun with, as if it's a violation of man and nature. They want also to show that they are serious and thoughtful people, able to don the double-breasted suits of respectability. It never works.