The Wait: On Vladimir Sorokin (Page 3)

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Sorokin took to plundering the conventions of popular genres like science fiction and detective novels, of which post-Soviet Russians are prolific writers and readers. Ice, his only other novel thus far to be translated into English (by Jamey Gambrell), is the first of a sort of science-fiction trilogy, set in Russia, about a utopian cult whose members consider themselves to be a superior race. They identify new members by cracking open their chest walls with a special kind of interstellar ice and waiting to see if their hearts start "speaking"--that is, communicating in a mysterious, wordless, ecstatic way with the hearts of other cult members. People whose hearts simply stop beating in response to the ice attack are mere ordinary humans ("MACHINES MADE OF MEAT"), whose bodies the cult members leave to rot. The cult's bizarre activities unfold against a Russia filled with organized and petty crime, prostitution, ill-gotten wealth and mundane poverty, which Sorokin describes in the clipped, unadorned style of a detective thriller.

One section at the novel's end is composed entirely of consumer instructions and product testimonials about the ICE Health Improvement System--the interstellar ice has apparently gone from being a mystical object to a kind of virtual-reality self-help product (composed of a video helmet, a breast plate with a "mechanical striking arm," minifreezer and computer) that produces feelings of ecstasy and peace. Or perhaps, more to the point, the cult has found that it doesn't have to resort to brutality to find and recruit members; it only needs to offer free trials of the ICE system. In fact, according to several testimonials, the ICE system has become such a popular form of recreation that it is putting the film industry out of business. As usual, Sorokin's tone is slippery; he does not cue the reader to a particular reaction. The testimonials are offered by a cross section of former Soviet citizens--a film director, a saleswoman, a retired World War II veteran from the Caucasus--who describe, in their different voices, upon using the product, an initial sense of aching sadness that summons childhood memories of their first experiences with death, then a euphoric flow of emotion and a vision of holding hands in a giant circle of 23,000 other people experiencing blissful intercoronary communication. The stories they tell are punctuated by clichés of (mild) childhood trauma, personal fulfillment and creative visualization and somehow manage to be obscurely moving and ridiculous. The film director describes "such a warm, sharp feeling in my heart, the sort you have only in childhood when you experience everything directly.... Tears poured from my eyes. The tear aspirator in the helmet began to work immediately. It was such a pleasant feeling; the tears were sucked up so tenderly. I was trembling all over from this attack of universal compassion."

Sorokin is speaking our language here. The idea of people with a desire for communal connection that they can only express in the clichéd phrases of self-help, New Age spirituality and advertising (rather than, for instance, Communist slogans), and can only find, ironically, through private forms of entertainment and pleasure-seeking, has been taken up with anguish by American postmodern writers for several decades. As it has in previous centuries, Russian culture seems to have zoomed through decades' worth of Western developments in a few years, to arrive at a fully formed state of late-capitalist anomie.

It is hard today not to read the The Queue retrospectively. How innocent seems the shoppers' earnest consideration of the fine points of fur collars and leather workmanship. For all their intense focus on products, it has possibly not yet occurred to them that what they buy might change who they are or give them a deeper connection with their fellow men. (They are, after all, still deprived of commercial advertising.) The novel's Moscow is a far less menacing place than the Moscow of Sorokin's recent work, and the lighter mood of the novel casts, for the contemporary reader, a nostalgic glow over the late Soviet period. Not that the times were so good, but they were better than they had been, and if you were idealistically inclined you could still hope that there might be something still better and nobler outside the Soviet system. If, at the time Sorokin wrote the novel, it was a sly joke about the absurdities of Soviet life, it has with time and geopolitical upheavals come to strike more profound notes of futility. We now know that the dissolution of the Soviet Empire and the planned economy will not save most of the queueing Muscovites from consumer indignities but will simply replace the old indignities with new ones. Nor, for that matter, will the end of the empire free them from various kinds of oppression by the state, or even, in many cases, from simple poverty.

But the people in the queue don't know that yet. Time stands still in the queue; the rituals of Soviet life seem to be eternal. The frustration of waiting in line is solaced by the anticipation of whatever it is you're expecting to get--not to mention the gruff camaraderie of these particular queuers. It seems suddenly not so bad to wait and contemplate the acquisition of a shearling coat with an astrakhan collar, to nurse a desire not yet dashed, or complicated, by fulfillment.

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