The women outside the Twin Palms, an exclusive Russian nightclub in Anya's Los Angeles neighborhood, go in wearing "silk and pearls and amber, their hair in root vegetable colors," crushing slim cigarettes underneath towering heels. The men have silk shirts and unbuttoned leather jackets and "Eastern bloc homemade haircuts." When Anya walks by, the women curse at her in Russian and the men stare. "I know what they want to ask," Anya says. "Polska? Ruska?... Or maybe just Amerykanska. They can't tell with me."
Anya, the 25-year-old narrator of Karolina Waclawiak's How to Get into the Twin Palms, is not exactly any of those things. Born in Poland but living in the States since childhood, she has spent years mimicking "American" while never quite becoming one. So Anya decides she will pass as Russian instead. She dyes her hair from California blonde to dark maroon and takes up smoking. She gives herself a Russian name. And she pursues Lev, a Russian gangster who comes knocking only in the early morning hours. Meanwhile, her unemployment checks stop coming, and fires are burning in the hills. "LA was trapped and I was trapped within it," Anya narrates. "And neither of us should have been here in the first place."
Displacement and profound loneliness pervade the novel's short, fragmented chapters like smoke from the encroaching fires and Anya's cigarettes. A young Polish immigrant herself, Waclawiak writes of Anya's struggle to belong with wit and sensitive insight. Anya may eventually make it to the Twin Palms, but she won't find herself inside. --Hannah Calkins