THE INCREDIBLE EVENTS IN WOMEN'S CELL NUMBER 3

A young Russian woman faces 10 days in a detention center.

This debut novel by Yarmysh, best known as press secretary to the Russian opposition leader Alexey Navalny, certainly holds a great deal of promise because of both its author’s job title and its own premise. When Anya is arrested at a Moscow rally protesting government corruption, she is sentenced to 10 days in a detention center. In the cell she shares with a handful of other women, she encounters a kind of cross section of Russian femininity: There’s Diana, who, at 25, is on her third husband; Maya, who has undergone innumerable elective surgeries and makes a living as a “kept” woman; Ida, who seems to have a learning disability and spends all day looking forward to her dose of Lyrica; and a few others. Almost no one Anya encounters has committed anything more egregious than driving without a license. Yarmysh’s intent is clearly to produce a timely, prescient social commentary, but many of her observations come across as trite. She writes that “prison time was elastic: it stretched out interminably, only to then fly like an arrow.” Meanwhile, Anya notes that “the detention center was a bit like a summer camp for dysfunctional adults.” The book moves most freely when the women in the cell get together to gossip and talk about their lives and in the flashbacks to Anya’s earlier life. Still, Yarmysh’s prose is stiff, and her characters seem more like sociological sketches than living beings. A subplot in which Anya begins to see visions or hallucinations in the cell not only strains credibility—it seems to contradict the very project Yarmysh set for herself.

With two-dimensional characters, stiff prose, and a dose of prison clichés, the book fails to deliver on its own promise.