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Fiction

A Very Young Gymnast

In “Winterland,” Rae Meadows’s fifth novel, an 8-year-old from Siberia gets the nod to train with elite athletes in the U.S.S.R.

Nadia Comaneci in the 1976 Olympics.Credit...Suzanne Vlamis/Associated Press

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WINTERLAND, by Rae Meadows


“Above all else,” the famous Romanian Olympian Nadia Comaneci writes in her memoir “Letters to a Young Gymnast,” “you have to be hungry to do something unbelievable.”

Comaneci looms large for Anya Petrova, the Soviet gymnast in “Winterland,” Rae Meadows’s fifth, gemlike novel, both for her virtuoso skill and for the intoxicating extremity of her ethos. When we meet her in 1973, Anya is a charming and talented 8-year-old living deep in the northernmost parts of Siberia with her father, Yuri, a former gymnast himself. Swiftly, she is plucked from her school to join the renowned U.S.S.R. gymnastic program and her life changes in an instant. Anya is certain she now has “the glittering key that would unlock a world that most people could never know. What it felt like to fly. Gymnastics would turn her into herself.”

Anya’s success — as long as it lasts — comes with a sorely needed stipend for her struggling household and also promises to help fill the absence at the heart of the family. Five years before, her mother, Katerina, who was once a principal dancer with the Bolshoi, left the ballet school where she taught and disappeared while running a mysterious errand, never to be seen again. Yuri, pierced by the loss, fantasizes his wife’s eventual return; and Anya keeps her mother alive through long afternoons with Vera, an upstairs neighbor and gulag camp survivor who was her mother’s confidante.

Throughout the novel, Vera’s memories give us clues to Katerina’s fate. Did her growing disillusionment with the Communist Party put her at risk, or did she flee for personal or professional reasons? It’s a tantalizing thread that reaches a somewhat muted conclusion. But Meadows is less interested in mystery and resolution than in the enigmatic force that drives the gymnast — particularly amid the punishing institutional forces and Cold War politics that dominate the sport.

For Eastern bloc gymnasts, the pressure to achieve is intensified not just by desperate economic need but by the ways achievement is yoked to the prestige and power of the state. As the 1980 Olympics loom, Anya notes, with a shiver: “Word came down from the Kremlin that less than gold in Moscow was not an option. What would happen if they failed? Anya didn’t know. Go to jail? Get beaten? Disappear?”

These overwhelming pressures have the effect of aging Anya and her fellow gymnasts far beyond their years, rendering them gimlet-eyed and half-broken by age 16. And yet Meadows savors the contradiction in Anya’s heart: Despite its physical and emotional toll, she never stops loving gymnastics. It consumes her so deeply she never has to “think about what was missing.”

Anya’s path is overlaid with loss — of her mother, of her parents’ youthful ideals of a Soviet state, of an intact family, of her own childhood. And, too, with the sense of future loss that all stories of competitive sports portend. As a fellow gymnast tells Anya, there are four stages in a gymnast’s life: “First you just love it. … Second you need it; you can’t live without it. … Third is when you realize you don’t belong to yourself anymore. … The fourth is when you still want it, but nobody wants you anymore.”

This is a familiar narrative for elite athletes and for the novels that explore their world. “Winterland” is no exception, moving us through all the well-worn tropes (the perilous injury, the punishing coach). But these tropes still have the power to feel both eternal and grand, as they do here. Though it covers 25 years, three continents, the collapse of the Soviet Union and myriad changes in the sport and in the world, “Winterland” is a novel of intimacies in small spaces: the tactile pleasure of enjoying strawberry candies, cuddling close with a fellow gymnast, of Anya’s father braiding her hair.

But above all, Meadows’s novel rests — panting, gasping, breathing — in the span between Anya’s tiny but powerful shoulders. With every cracking bone and snapped ligament, we long for Anya’s success even as it imperils her. We long for her rescue even as we both know that success means buying only a little more time before the end.


Megan Abbott’s latest novel is “The Turnout.”


WINTERLAND | By Rae Meadows | 276 pp. | Henry Holt | $27.99


A version of this article appears in print on  , Page 43 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Gold. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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