WHAT ISN'T REMEMBERED

A collection of short, melancholy stories focusing on Russian immigrants to the United States.

The short stories in this debut collection chronicle the lives of characters beset by persistent regrets and dissatisfactions. Most of the central figures are Russian, and many have immigrated or are considering immigrating to the United States. Gorcheva-Newberry, herself a Russian émigré, displays a keen understanding of her home country’s cultural particularities in some of her collection’s finest stories: In “Heroes of Our Time,” a teenage boy ventures into Moscow in the spring of 1991 to attempt to recruit a sex worker on behalf of his ailing grandfather only to accidentally find himself entangled with a militant pro-aristocracy group. In “Boys on the Moskva River,” the narrator remembers the life and violent death of his brother, Konstantin, whom their mother preferred and who was involved with organized crime. Gorcheva-Newberry’s prose is clear and can quickly cut to the marrow of a complex emotional experience: In “The Suicide Note,” a Russian immigrant reflects, “I thought how hard it was to make someone laugh in a foreign language. And if you couldn’t laugh together, how could you live together? In that sense America remained a mystery to me.” For all its strengths, however, this collection is a frustrating experience. Gorcheva-Newberry’s skills as a prose stylist do not extend to dialogue, and many of her characters state their feelings in an unrealistically straightforward way. The collection’s weakest stories lack the cultural and psychological specificity of its strongest and detract from the reading experience. “Simple Song #9,” for instance, follows the romance and breakup of archetypal characters named “Boy” and “Girl,” featuring dreary sentences like, “Girl meets Man.” Gorcheva-Newberry is on firmer and more rewarding territory in her more conventional stories.

A mixed effort with some real high points.