Jack grew up in a part of rural Wyoming where the nearest neighbors were eight or ten miles off and school was an hour's drive each way. Carbon County's income figures from those years actually look respectable on paper — boosted by the coal, oil, and uranium money pouring into the state through the 1970s — but that money never reached families running cattle outside the boom towns. A hired ranch hand in Wyoming in these years could expect $500 to $550 a month, room and board included, against $9 to $14 an hour on … Continue reading about Jack Smith
Characters
Eton Volkonsky
Eton's mother, Vera, descends from two of the oldest names in Russia, both of which met, by chance of marriage, in her own parents — and neither name was supposed to survive the century.
Her father's line runs back to Prince Sergei Volkonsky, one of the young aristocrat-officers who rose against the tsar in the Decembrist revolt of December 1825: a few hours of confusion on a Petersburg square that ended in gunfire, then in exile. The leaders were hanged; the rest, stripped of … Continue reading about Eton Volkonsky
Lara Novikova
Lara Novikova belongs to a class the Soviet system wasn't supposed to have, and never officially admitted to: the nomenklatura, the children and spouses of Party and ministerial officials who lived a visibly different life from everyone around them — better apartments, foreign goods, travel clearances, doors that opened because of whose daughter you were rather than anything you'd done yourself. Her father, a Deputy Minister of Culture at the beginning of the novel, has given her exactly that kind of life. … Continue reading about Lara Novikova
Joe Coburn
Joe Coburn is the person who spotted Jack, assessed him as potential and recruited him into the Company.
They first crossed paths at Ramstein, where Jack was a young soldier driving the motor pool and Joe was a passenger on his way to meetings in Munich. They stayed in touch (if you’ve read the novel, you know how). By the time Jack enrolled at Cal State on the GI Bill, it was Joe who steered him toward international studies and Russian, and it was Joe who came calling again … Continue reading about Joe Coburn