All That Is Solid Melts into Air

In 1986 Moscow, as first-time novelist McKeon presents it, few expect the Soviet government to change: strikes fail, newspapers are corrupt, and many men and women can only find work in factories. Even Grigory, a successful surgeon, mourns his relentless routine: “The life that had silently formed around him seemed such a solid thing now.” McKeon conveys the U.S.S.R.’s rigidity through the miseries of his characters: Grigory’s wife Maria, a savvy journalist, loses her career, reputation, and marriage in one fell swoop when her anti-Soviet sympathies are discovered. But while hope for personal betterment is relentlessly checked, the horrific nuclear meltdown at Chernobyl proves that massive-scale change is possible. McKeon offers four clear fictional perspectives on Soviet history, and not once do the private affairs of his characters (Grigory and Maria’s love for one another; the tension between a nine-year-old piano prodigy and his mother, who has too much riding on her son’s success; a boy’s efforts to grapple with his father’s sudden death) bump up awkwardly against the historical account. Instead, McKeon’s fiction serves up, without cliché, what so many futuristic dystopian novels aspire to: a reminder that human beings can bring about their own demise. (May)