DIVIDE ME BY ZERO

By Lara Vapnyar

There are a handful of novelists who excel in describing, often from ludicrously comic heights, the Russian-American experience. Call it the Borscht Shelf: Gary Shteyngart, Boris Fishman and the resplendent Lara Vapnyar. Vapnyar’s latest novel begins with an exquisitely distilled example of her gifts: “One week before my mother died, I went to a Russian food store on Staten Island to buy caviar.” The moment is couched in depressive humor (“I was brought up in the Soviet Union, where caviar was considered a special food reserved for children and dying parents”) and chased with deflating truth (her mother doesn’t even want the caviar). The narrator eats it herself, feeling “as if I were robbing a grave.”

The woman sobbing over the fish counter is Katya Geller: novelist, mother of two teenagers, professor of creative writing at “Enormous University” in New York. She is separated from her husband, Len, longing pointlessly for her lover, B., and dating Victor, a fastidious billionaire whom she introduces to friends as “a Russian Great Gatsby.” In Russia, her mother, Nina, was a renowned writer of children’s math textbooks. Now being treated at “the World’s Greatest Cancer Center,” Nina sleeps among pill bottles and yellow flashcards, the refuse of her final project, “a math textbook that would guide you through life.” And Katya is considering her next novel, “a comedy so dark that it made you cry.”

“Divide Me by Zero,” which begins with Katya’s Russian childhood and ends in her American middle age, is structured throughout with Nina’s flash cards and various missives from Katya: “note to an astute reader,” “note to a politically astute reader,” “note to a reader about to scream at her mother.” (The content of these notes leans toward the tediously self-evident. “Note to children of parents. Parents do have their own problems.”) The framing can feel contrived, though it’s in keeping with Vapnyar’s track record: deeply affecting but playful, edging into cutesy. The world hews closely to Vapnyar’s own life (note to an attentive reader: Vapnyar’s mother taught math), but everything about it is slightly notched up, surreal. Consider the photo illustration breezily equating Brezhnev with an iguana, or the one ringing George H. W. Bush’s head with raw chicken thighs, like greasy laurels.