Historian is protagonist in new novel
Askold Melnyczuk has written two short, excellent novels about Ukrain ian immigrants in America, “What Is Told” (1994) and “Ambassador of the Dead” (2001). His new novel, “The House of Widows,” feels more ambitious.
James Pak, the central narrator, is a mild, introspective 40-year-old historian biding time in a job at the American Embassy in Vienna. In May 2006, when the novel opens, an anonymous informant has sent James a package: a dossier of materials from soldiers deserting the war in Iraq. The dossier documents “unspeakable crimes. Torture, beheadings, rape — the catalogue raisonné of all wars.”
As he decides whether to leak the information to the press, James thinks back on 1990, when he left America after discovering a “box of letters from Vienna gathering years in a closet.” The letters revealed that James’s Ukrainian grandmother, Vera, was still alive; James’s father, Andrew, had always claimed that Vera was dead. James confronted Andrew, Andrew committed suicide, and James headed to Oxford, Rome, Vienna and Kiev to seek the truth of his ancestry.
It’s a premise as old as Oedipus; and like Sophocles, Melnyczuk finds room in his tale for patricide, incest, mutilation and exile. The action spans much of the 20th century and in tro duces three troubled families: the Ukrainian family into which Andrew was born in the mid-1920s, the English family that adopted Andrew in the 1930s and the American family Andrew started after moving to Boston in the 1950s.
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James Pak, the central narrator, is a mild, introspective 40-year-old historian biding time in a job at the American Embassy in Vienna. In May 2006, when the novel opens, an anonymous informant has sent James a package: a dossier of materials from soldiers deserting the war in Iraq. The dossier documents “unspeakable crimes. Torture, beheadings, rape — the catalogue raisonné of all wars.”
As he decides whether to leak the information to the press, James thinks back on 1990, when he left America after discovering a “box of letters from Vienna gathering years in a closet.” The letters revealed that James’s Ukrainian grandmother, Vera, was still alive; James’s father, Andrew, had always claimed that Vera was dead. James confronted Andrew, Andrew committed suicide, and James headed to Oxford, Rome, Vienna and Kiev to seek the truth of his ancestry.
It’s a premise as old as Oedipus; and like Sophocles, Melnyczuk finds room in his tale for patricide, incest, mutilation and exile. The action spans much of the 20th century and in tro duces three troubled families: the Ukrainian family into which Andrew was born in the mid-1920s, the English family that adopted Andrew in the 1930s and the American family Andrew started after moving to Boston in the 1950s.