A vivid Moscow on the Hudson

Memoirs of a Muse
By Lara Vapnyar
Pantheon, 212 pp., $22.95

Lara Vapnyar's first work of fiction was the 2003 story collection ''There Are Jews in My House," widely praised for its Chekhovian portraits of the human condition. She had been in America less than a decade, having emigrated from Moscow in 1994 and living in a closed Russian community in Brooklyn. More striking is the way she learned English -- by reading romance novels and watching American TV. From such common ground the specificity of music arises: ''Memoirs of a Muse" is a smart, fetching comic novel that has its heart in the Russian masters and its attitude in modern New York. It is all the more winning because its narrative eye is one of compassion tinged with an expatriate's skepticism. In her portrait of a narcissistic American writer and his Russian émigré girlfriend, Vapnyar manages to be kind and merciless at once.

The premise of the novel is clear from its title, ironic though it is. During her childhood in Moscow, Tanya dreamed of being, like Dostoevsky's Apollinaria Suslova, muse to a great artist. Her father abandoned the family when Tanya was small, at which time her mother replaced his photograph with portraits of the Russian masters. The girl's stroke-addled grandmother, whom she alternately nursed and tormented, completed Tanya's unsentimental education, telling stories of Dostoevsky's cruel genius and the long-suffering wife behind it. By the time Tanya finished school and headed to America, she was convinced that Dostoevsky's mistress, not wife, was the object of her affections: She was determined to be inspiration to greatness but not its hostage. She would avoid the banality and prison of marriage, finding power instead as the seductress and dominatrix of art itself.

Such are the fantasies of a young girl on her own in a new country, and Tanya entertains them daily from her perch in Central Park, where she watches the well-groomed elite come and go from their park-side addresses. Then one day at a bookstore on the Upper West Side, she hears a novelist named Mark Schneider read from his latest work. (That his novel is called ''After the Beginning" should tip us off to its authorial posturing; he also teaches a class at Bard called ''Defictionalization of the Novel.") He is bearded and full of confidence, and Tanya listens in a kind of rapture to words she doesn't really understand. ''I closed my eyes and listened to the graceful foreign sounds joining and supplanting one another as they swelled into complex, fully alive sentences. It was so beautiful that my eyes filled with tears."

It will be some time before Tanya realizes that what Mark has written is far less promising than that lovely first meeting, but by then she will have signed on as his Polina in every sense. She endures his bad coffee and clumsy lovemaking, lets him select her clothes and food, sits quietly on the couch while he reads or thinks. But the rest of American culture invades this faux-literary prison to instruct Tanya in charting her escape. She marvels each day before the magic of TV commercials, where ''a car would drive through a mountain range or even ascend to the sky." She eavesdrops on the neighbors, then befriends them, and the woman -- a lighthearted, true intellectual -- gives her a bagful of romance novels to learn English. ''The vocabulary is limited and consistent," Tanya's new friend tells her. ''You will have no choice but to memorize the words and expressions once you see them for the hundredth time."

Thus happily poised between ''Sweet Enchantment" and the journals of Dostoevsky's Polina, Tanya begins to awaken to the dreariness of her carefully arranged dream. Her fantasies have both led her into this situation and obscured its reality: Nowhere is her relationship with Mark more fulfilling and mesmerizing than when she is riding the subways alone, imagining him to be someone he is not. And never will be, from the looks of his manuscript-in-progress.

If ''Memoirs of a Muse" is a simple end-of-innocence story, its breadth is widened, its delivery sweetened, by Vapnyar's poignant grasp of her character's Russian roots and family: the uncles back in Moscow with their ''heavy, slow eating," the relatives transplanted to New Jersey, where they revel in the American dream by shopping at designer outlets and Ikea. Braided throughout the novel is the story of Polina, scorning Dostoevsky and driving him onward, and this, too, becomes a blend of fact and fiction that Tanya has to comprehend before discarding its tenets altogether. But it is the assimilation Tanya both seeks and must endure that gives the novel its finest touch. When she is shunned by the doorman at Mark's apartment building -- a probable émigré whom Mark horrifyingly calls by the generic name ''Bruno" -- the slight is doubly humiliating; she feels she has been exposed by someone who knows everything about her.

''Memoirs of a Muse" is not driven by gorgeous prose or voice; it is, rather, a carefully wrought story full of generous intelligence that testifies to the essence of language: both to capture meaning and then convey it, whether the lusty reach of bodice-rippers or the bittersweet story of a girl on the sidewalks of a new New York, alone.

Gail Caldwell is chief book critic of the Globe. She can be reached at caldwell@globe.com.