The title of Keith Gessen’s new novel is A Terrible Country, but the novel is less about a country than a city: Moscow. Not just Moscow as a city in its own right, though the city is very much a character in the novel, but the experience of Moscow by an American millennial, Andrei Kaplan, a thirty-something academic in flight from his failures in Brooklyn, failures of love and work, family and friends. A Terrible Country, in other words, is the anti-Brooklyn novel.

If the Brooklyn of the public imagination is the place where young intellectuals move to make their lives among writers, journalists, academics, and artists, public lives that happen out of doors, in parks and readings and rallies and talks (now in election campaigns, too), Kaplan’s Moscow is the opposite. Everything of interest happens inside. In part by necessity.

For most of the novel, the city is so damn cold. Even spring is haunted by the cold: as the rooftop snows begin melting during the ever so slightly warming days, the sub-zero nights freeze the droplets into murderous icicles, which then fall on the heads of unlucky passersby the next morning.