[In the following review, Lingeman comments on Aksyonov's In Search of Melancholy Baby, noting that the book, an account of Aksyonov's life in America after his expulsion from the Soviet Union, provides many witty and satirical insights into life in both countries.]

In 1980, after his novel of life among the Moscow culturati, The Burn, was published in Italy, Vassily Aksyonov was expelled from the Soviet Union. Now he is an outspoken skeptic about glasnost in the Russian literary diaspora. The Burn is written in a brilliantly subversive style, stuffed with satire, surrealism, anarchic Henry Milleresque bawdiness, and thrown in the face of Soviet realism.

His latest book, In Search of Melancholy Baby, an account of his new life in America, will earn its author no rehabilitative points with the Ministry of Culture. Actually, before his expulsion, Mr. Aksyonov published another book on the United States describing a visit he made here in 1975. But then he was a writer in good standing, with a car and a dacha in the suburbs; also, detente was briefly in the air. Now, he is a prominent dissident, stripped of his citizenship, and his reflections are as unwelcome in the Soviet Union as are Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's.

He might be said to have been drawn tropistically to America at an early age. Even Siberia, where he lived in exile with his mother, the historian Eugenia Ginzburg, was a place "farther from Moscow than from California." He vividly recalls his first naïve contacts with those Stone Age Soviet beatniks known as stilyagi, who introduced him to bootlegged songs by Bing Crosby, Nat King Cole, Peggy Lee and Louis Armstrong, surreptitiously recorded on X-ray plates. He reminds us that there is a sturdy pro-American strain in Soviet culture that survived the icy blasts of anti-American propaganda at the height of the cold war.

If Mr. Aksyonov brought to America more affinities than most Russian emigrants, he did not leave behind that sense of irony that is the hallmark of Russian literature. He notes, for example, that he came to America to write a novel about a Russian entangled in the Laocoönish coils of the Soviet bureaucracy and himself became bogged down in the paper swamp of the United States Immigration and Naturalization Service, some of whose minions he finds as boorish as their Soviet counterparts. He describes a frustrating encounter with one civil servant in particular, a black woman who reacted angrily to his suggestion that the information on a certain form he neglected to fill out could be found in his computerized file: "Are you trying to teach me my job?… You have no rights in this country! You're a refugee!"

Mr. Aksyonov sensed a reverse racism in her outburst, but a Polish friend who had lived here longer than he offered some tempering observations about the complexity of interracial encounters in America, compelling Mr. Aksyonov to recognize that he was not as free of racist sentiments as he imagined. Welcome to America, where the rituals of race can be as intricate and subtle as court etiquette in medieval Japan—and as historically determined.

Mr. Aksyonov demonstrates that he has made considerable progress in penetrating to the reality behind the appearances of American life. He understands that the Watergate fuss was an exercise in the "consolidation of American democracy," rather than an orgy of irresponsible, destructive criticism, as many of his fellow émigrés saw it; and he grasps the elemental truth that "as patriotic as the great majority of Americans are, they do not identify their country with its government"—unlike you know where. He has considerable to say about provincialism and the complacent ignorance of many Americans about the rest of the world, rationalized by asserting that anything they don't know about isn't worth knowing about. He decries the commercialization of American literature, comparing the brand-name best-seller writers the system breeds with the nomenklatura—the elite—of the Soviet bureaucracy. He hates Los Angeles (in Hollywood "everyone's eyes seemed glazed over with dollar signs") and likes Washington, where he now lives contentedly with his wife, Maya. He finds the architectural hodgepodge of our cities baffling and decides that it reflects an indigenous esthetic, "American pop," which only someone born here can appreciate.

Outweighing these negative reactions, he inhales optimism in the American air, an energizing hope of finding something better, materially speaking. He attributes this tonic atmosphere to something he calls "beneficent inequality"—the opportunity for all to aspire to at least a middle-class level of material comfort. America's consumer society "offers a new kind of equality, an equality based on the marketplace rather than on Marxism or other social theories." Here the rich man has his Rolls-Royce, but the poor man can buy a Honda. Well, a Hyundai is more like it at today's prices, and how about the numerous poor women who are heads of households and hard pressed to afford public transportation? But Mr. Aksyonov hasn't regressed to Social Darwinism: he stipulates that the poverty line "must allow for a basic level of human dignity … a place to live, food to eat, clothes to wear."

Not that Mr. Aksyonov is uncritical of American capitalism. Noting the rat-infested alley behind his Washington apartment, he wonders about the efficiency of the four privately owned sanitation companies that are supposed to take away the trash but don't. In Russia similar conditions would cause a citizen to cry, "How is this possible under socialism?" No one in the United States, however, says, "How is that possible under capitalism!" He fears that the latter is "undergoing a Socialist warp of apathy, poor service, and hackwork," though I doubt that socialism has much to do with it.

Still, Mr. Aksyonov scores some satirical points in his observations of his adopted homeland; these are neatly captured in the translation by Michael Henry Heim and Antonina W. Bouis. He can be quite witty, as when he writes about his misadventures with American landlords and Texans who can't place the language he is speaking with his wife. What one misses in this account is a sense of the texture and quiddities of ordinary American life, and, at the opposite end of the spectrum, something about the nonmaterial values. The author bounces from Soviet émigré colonies in Soho and Brighton Beach to the tower above the Smithsonian Institution, where he had a fellowship at the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies, to the campuses of some 50 universities where he has been a writer in residence, with stopovers at innumerable HoJos and Holiday Inns en route. His peregrinations are understandable in terms of the need to earn a living, but they have given him a somewhat skewed perspective and make his book a kind of mini-Watts Tower of bright, fragmentary vignettes—objets trouvés. It's a rhine-stone-cowboy-movie-Pop-upscale America. What is lacking is a sense of land and sky and what Lyndon Johnson used to call, "P-e-e-p-u-l folks!"

In The Burn, a character laments her lost "homeland—unhomeland, distant and sweet, stormy." Perhaps that is ever the fate of the exile, caught between the homeland unhomeland he left behind and the one to which he fled; uprooted from one, and not yet planted in the other.