There's a reason Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump seem to like each other: They both dislike reality. It takes a special dispensation, not to say freedom, from the facts to look at garbage and call it a garden, and vice versa; to - in Putin's case - advocate against corruption while using political power for personal gain; to make a promise one day and the next do its opposite. Putin has so comprehensively transformed Russia (restored, some might say, after a flawed semidemocratic interlude under Boris Yeltsin) that he has transformed reality itself. Putinism seems as pervasive in that country as Soviet rule was, and all without the machinery of a totalitarian state. It's phantasmagoric performance art on the world’s grandest stage, which makes it only more remarkable that Putin has spent so little time as the subject of fiction. (In the West, he tends to show up in spy novels; in Russia, in elaborate, surreal allegories.) Perhaps his reality doesn't require artistic embellishment.
And yet Michael Honig’s “The Senility of Vladimir P.” makes for an essential entry in the field. Twenty or so years from now, after “he had been five times president and twice prime minister,” Vladimir, as the novel tends to refer to him, has finally retired because of creeping dementia. He spends his days on an estate near Moscow, tended by a staff of 40, breaking out of his mental murk to shadow-brawl with an imagined Chechen assailant until he’s tranquilized by his nurse, Nikolai Sheremetev. Sheremetev is our hero, and what a man: the last honest person in Russia. As a young soldier in the waning days of the Soviet Empire, he, along with the rest of his unit, was illegally hired out to a local builder; a fellow soldier had to explain what was happening and disabuse Sheremetev of his charming intention to complain to the captain. (The captain had bribed the colonel to look the other way.)
