Guess who's coming to dinner

Voinovich wields a double-edged sword here: His satire of a woman who won't loosen her grip on an outmoded, deadly ideology is brilliant. And he's just as incisive in his critique of what might be called the tyranny of liberalization, the Party's effort to enforce its new "freedom" with the same heavy hand it had always exercised. The whole situation bristles with uncomfortable lessons for organizations struggling to reform: the insanity of clinging self-righteously to outmoded ideals, and the equally dangerous tendency of reform-minded leaders to pursue their new vision with the old insistence on total unanimity.

"A schism," the Party warns ominously, "is the very thing on which our enemies have always counted."

Aglaya suffers through constant political change, from Khrushchev's thaw to Brezhnev's neo-Stalinism to Gorbachev's reforms and finally to the collapse of Russia into a gangster paradise. (Voinovich describes this as a move from different kinds of limited terror to a state of "Terror Unlimited.") Never abandoning her ideals or the giant idol in her living room, she becomes a ludicrous martyr to her own unalterable convictions. Meanwhile, the greatest rewards flow to the most cynical members of society, those morally agile enough to adopt whatever new orthodoxy the new leaders proclaim.

To be honest, this is a tough book to read, and not just because of the long Russian names, which appear in maddening permutations. As a classic fanatic, a woman with "no imagination ... no fantasy, sense of humor or feeling for beauty," Aglaya is the perfect mate for her iron idol, but she eventually becomes a leaden protagonist for a novel.

Fortunately, the side characters inspire a variety of laughs and insights. Chief among these is a pompous general who's blended his meager military service with stories of historic battles. And there's a particularly wicked portrayal of the quintessential dissident, a vain, expedient writer wholly dedicated to sanctifying his own image. (This isn't the first time Voinovich has gone after Alexander Solzhenitsyn.)

At their best, these excursions are fun and incisive, but sometimes they're merely digressive. The novel's final portrayal of Russia in the grip of gangster terrorism, for instance, sounds belabored, perhaps because it's so impossible to exaggerate the current chaos.

But don't let the heavy lifting intimidate you, comrades. There are riches to mine here, and warnings worth heeding. Leaders come and go, movements pass in and out of currency, but the old pedestal waits patiently in Dolgov Square and in the center of human history.

"It doesn't take a prophet," Voinovich notes ruefully, "to predict that people will be blinded again, and more than once, by false teachings; [they] will yield to the temptation of endowing certain individuals with superhuman qualities and glorify them." During those times, of course, it's too late to read books like this, so stock up.

• Ron Charles is the Monitor's book editor. Send comments about the book section toRon Charles.

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