SOURCE: “Blast, We Forgot the Sisters Karamazov,” in Los Angeles Times Book Review, June 12, 1994, pp. 3, 12.

In the following review, Abrams, a novelist, praises The Russian Girl, claiming Amis writes a plausible yet brilliantly satirical novel which reflects the time period.

Sir Kingsley Amis 21st novel [The Russian Girl], opens ominously: The London Institute for Slavonic Studies is under assault on two fronts. Women faculty members are boycotting staff meetings to protest the Old Guard, Old Boy ways of the institute. Meanwhile, ineluctable and complex social and economic trends dictate that soon none of the school's students will be required to be fluent in—or even vaguely familiar with—Slavic languages. Better to have read The Brothers Karamazov in translation than never to have read it at all, as one character remarks, seeking to win over a hidebound traditionalist to the inevitable dumbing down of the institute.

Not surprisingly...