Anna Pitoniak made a fine impression with her recent spy novel The Helsinki Affair. Her earlier release, Our American Friend (2022), is proof that she isn’t a one-trick pony. In fact, this one has a splashier concept with a gutsy approach, which Pitoniak pulls off with aplomb.
Our American Friend follows Sofie Morse, a journalist who spent four years covering White House dysfunction during the first-term of disruptive incumbent Henry Caine. Rather than endure a second term on the beat, she resigns in disgust. She isn’t out of work for long, though; soon, she is contacted by Caine’s Russian expatriate wife Lara with a job offer. The extremely private First Lady wants Sofie to write her biography, and while Sofie abhors Caine’s politics and doesn’t want to be associated with the administration, she can’t pass up this opportunity to crack such a major story. The interviews deliver Sofie back in time to Lara’s past as a disaffected teenager in the Soviet Union during the eighties, and as the history comes into focus, Sofie realizes just how big the story is—much, much bigger than she expected, which forces her to make a momentous choice.
If elements of the set-up sound familiar, they should. Pitoniak has filed the serial numbers off of contemporary political reality to deliver us into an alternate one, in service to a clever secret-history narrative. Caine is clearly a democracy-shredding Trumpian president, Lara the icy, inscrutable émigré First Lady, and there are other elements that make the world resonate with post-2016 American political madness. It’s a big swing that perhaps risks “too-soon” blowback. Yet Pitoniak manages to subtly tweak everything just enough to benefit from the obvious parallels without dragging in the toxic baggage. Her political analogs are still odious, but not quite as extreme, enabling the author to conjure an elegantly structured double-narrative—one in the present focusing on Sofie’s plight, and another in the past, where the history Sofie uncovers unspools in third-person flashback. As in The Helsinki Affair, the dual tracks inform each other, and while aspects of the plot—and, perhaps more importantly, its outcome—may be too neat and comforting, it’s still an impressive tapestry that satisfyingly wrestles with the horrifying realities of our constant-crisis political moment.
