The Scent of Pine

Vapnyar (Memoirs of a Muse) delivers an awkward mix of angst and absurdity in her sophomore novel. Lena, a morose adjunct professor of film studies, catches a train out of N.Y.C.’s Penn Station for Saratoga Springs, N.Y., where she is scheduled to be a substitute speaker at an academic conference. Her husband, Vadim, and their children are spending the weekend visiting his parents. During the trip, Lena runs into an old friend, Inka, whom she knew in Russia, and who immigrated from there years before. The chance encounter brings back memories of time spent together as counselors at a camp in the Soviet Union during one haunting summer in the 1980s. At the conference, she meets and is drawn to Ben, a professor of graphic novels, and the two of them decide to travel home together. The rather bland pair begins a desultory affair, filling their travel time with Lena’s stories of the camp and comparisons of their past affairs and the disappointments of their present relationships. Vapnyar’s spare prose never brings Ben and Lena to life, but Lena’s reminiscences vividly render the anxieties of adolescence amid the waning days of the Soviet Union. Agent: Lynn Nesbit, Janklow & Nesbit. (Jan.)