Once Upon the River Love

In his novel Dreams of My Russian Summers, the author told lively, fascinating tales of his hero's Siberian grandmother, then wavered into lifeless self-absorption in a present-day section set in France. His quirky, likable new novel returns to rural Siberia in the 1970s, where three clueless teenage boys try to make sense of rumored wonders: women, the Western world, adulthood. Their unlikely guide is the ultra-cool French actor Jean-Paul Belmondo, one of whose films is playing in a town 20 miles away on a river called Amur (Russian for Cupid). Though the boys live in a backwater where spit freezes before it hits the ground, and an escaped prisoner is found sitting frozen in a tree, their real world is Belmondo's fantasy Paris, and their real loves are the miniskirted nymphets who pop in and out of his bed.

--J.S.