Mr. Smith's dramatic stitching [in Gorky Park] is astonishingly plausible—neatly tailored to the grim reflections of Solzhenitsyn and to the grimly hilarious observations of Voinovich. It takes quite an imaginative leap, but, given the suppleness of the human spirit and the imbecility of the police state, a character like Chief Investigator Arkady Renko follows….

In a totalist police state, the ordinary policeman is no less oppressed than the hapless citizen, and one of the minor feats of Gorky Park is that it exposes—incidentally and therefore powerfully—the very core of the totalitarian social order: a system that tacitly encourages its captive people to hate each other.

But the major feat is the characterization of Arkady Renko….

Kingsley Amis once remarked that a critic should resist the temptation to call a fine writer a "creative artist." The writer may believe it, and his writing may consequently go...