What Happened to Anna K.

Irina Reyn

A Touchstone Book (Simon & Schuster), 2008

You’re a debut novelist, and for your first novel you want to update Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina and set it in the Russian immigrant society of present-day Queens, where … and at that point, you’d think, any self-respecting publisher would have a guard escort you to the door.

Somehow, first-time novelist Irina Reyn managed to avoid that fate, and it’s a lucky thing for her readers that she did, because What Happened to Anna K. is as smart, funny, and tremendously touching a book as they’re likely to read all year.

Tolstoy readers will be familiar with the outlines of Reyn’s plot: no-longer-young Anna K. is caught in a passionless marriage with older, financially successful businessman Alex and is, at the novel’s beginning, yearning for more:

Was it [the life she imagines for herself, straight out of Woody Allen movies] really science fiction? No, she was sure it was possible, otherwise why would Woody Allen’s old films always be on television when she was at her most optimistic? Those tastefully decorated loft apartments, those stimulating dinner parties dropping names like e. e. cummings, Kierkegaard, Dostoyevsky, Bergman? How many young women have those movies ruined? For God’s sake, even her parents no longer read Dosoyevsky – haven’t they suffered enough, they would say; after thirty years of communism, didn’t they deserve Danielle Steel?

She dreams of meeting her Heathcliff, straight out of a Bronte novel, and she believes she’s found him when she meets and falls in love with young, aspiring writer David – until he announces the precise location of the dream-life together they’re to share – the hellish wasteland known as Iowa:

Did Heathcliff roam cornfields? She wasn’t sure. But there was no doubt in her mind: in Iowa, she would disappear. Already she was fading – on the cruise, in the street, in the way shaggy clerks at Barnes & Noble threw change back at her, coiffed men in suits passed her by. She was a walking mirage, an unfocussed image, the sharp edge of possibility smoothed away.

Even those shaggy clerks at Barnes & Noble will know how a novel patterned on Anna Karenina must end, and yet Reyn’s talent is such that the ending is genuinely moving nonetheless. What Happened to Anna K. is clearly a novel that was lovingly, painstakingly written. Reyn comments that it would probably have appalled Tolstoy; me, I’m not so sure.