Pushkin and the Queen of Spades
A Novel by Alice Randall,  Houghton Mifflin Company, 2004

Reviewed by Dr. Susan K. Hedahl

            You may have heard of Alice Randall in relation to the lawsuit filed by the estate of Margaret Mitchell, author of Gone With the Wind.  Following Randall's satire on that

book--The Wind Done Gone--she has now published a powerful novel about an African-American woman named Windsor Armstrong, a college professor of Afro-Russian literature.

It's difficult to summarize this book--many have tried!  The plot is a journey of several avenues radiating out through time and place, with the center being Armstrong's memories of her upbringing in Detroit and Washington, D. C. and her responses to her only child's impending marriage. As a graduate student earlier, she raises her son, Pushkin, alone.  He becomes a national football star and decides to marry a Russian-born lap dancer.

The backdrop of Russian literature in this book is admirable: Randall knows her Russian landscapes, history and authors.  Alexander Pushkin is known as "the father of the Russian language," and furthermore was of African ancestry on his father's side. Armstrong's decision to name her child Pushkin is a thread that links many themes in this work.

            Randall is a brilliant writer and not for the faint-hearted.  This work explores many of the subjects that run as continuous, subtle currents through the geography of race relations in America.  It is pithy, insightful and demonstrates the author's incredible range of talents and knowledge.

            As usual, I look about for the religious or moral universe any author creates or at least hints at.  Randall's is indeed complex and takes human incarnational realities very seriously.  In an unexpected moment, the protagonist reveals that she spent her first years in an all-black Lutheran day school in Detroit.  The forced departure from that school of its "spunky, jaunty" children for those of "ashy anger" in D. C. forces major changes in her view of the world.

            Randall is, in my estimation, one of the best contemporary and African-American writers around.  We can hope more of her writing brilliance comes our way.