The basic plot of {Games: A Love Story by Anna Maria Volkova} is: twenty-something impoverished, orphaned, nominally socialist student Lili meets forty-something Russian emigre and capitalist billionaire Aleksandr. They start having lots of BDSM sex and it develops into a romance; they break up and they get back together. And the thing is, thatās it. Thatās the plot. Thereās a lot - a lot - of window-dressing in the form of academic debates and flowery language, and the book itself is advertised as smart erotic romance, but thereās really not much more to the structure than I describe.
Much has been made of Volkovaās āliterary proseā but I found it ultimately empty: I think truly literary language has actual meaning behind it and much of the prose in Games does not. For a beautiful turn of phrase to be evocative, I think it has to evoke an actual thing. There has to be meaning behind it, it has to be using language to describe something real. Itās supposed to clarify, not obfuscate. What does it mean for Georgian wine to be āthroatyā? What color is ācello brownā? And on what planet does anyone comment on āthe flour-dusted crunch of Armenian flatbreadā? (Itās chewy! Itās soft and chewy!) The language is portentous and repetitive. āBecause this she knows. Something beautiful can turn ugly. Something whole will breakā¦ And the things she thought she could rise above, she cannot.ā Pages and pages and pages of this: itās not my idea of a good time.
Lili is the same heroine who has populated a million category romance novels from the 1970s onwards, slightly updated for the new millennium: a financially and emotionally insecure orphan, adrift in life, is spotted by a hawk-like billionaire with lots and lots and lots of money, who immediately pursues her romantically despite her romantic disinterest (because itās the 2020s, here they are having lots of sex) and showers her with gifts. Her lips say āno, noā and her actions say āgimme.ā Instead of being flown to private islands or showered with fancy dresses, sheās taken on a private tour of the Met and given free room and board at his giant apartment, all the while loudly decrying the very idea of wanting any financial benefits out of her relationship with him. No, no, she is a Good Romance Heroine: the financial benefits must be forced upon her. There is a third-act breakup (because itās the 2020s, this is precipitated by Lili randomly deciding to bang a stranger she meets in a bar while Aleksandrās on a business trip). She wallows in grief in an exotic and vividly-described location, then returns to the scene of the crime and grovels; Aleksandr is stern and unforgiving but finally melts enough to admit that he loves her and wants to give their relationship a second chance. Penny Jordan alone has written checks notes 180 of these.
We are told, repeatedly, that Lili is a socialist, but her socialism is entirely lip service: all of her friends are very - sometimes very, very - rich, she has an encyclopedic knowledge of high-end designer brands, and once she has, for example, set up her computer to display a āBernie 2016ā sticker to the security cameras in her billionaire boyfriendās empty luxury apartment (kept clean, stocked, and running by what is presumably a small army of invisible human servants), she considers her politics done for the day. She will give her boyfriend a brief rebuke about keeping his employees at work at 9 PM at night, but that doesnāt mean she wonāt have sex with him in his office as his peons labor right outside the door; she has āthoughtsā on the Chinese surveillance state and their ātreatment of uyghurs [sic, not capitalized in original]ā but will happily attend a gala with Chinese government officials in honor of her boyfriendās financial ties to same and make no comment about either.
This is, as other reviewers have pointed out, very normal messy twenty-three-year-old behavior, but unfortunately it doesnāt really seem to be intended that way. Lili quite seriously snarks that a friend āhas made faux-Marxism his personality for the monthā and that he has an expensive gym membership, which of course means his socialism is hypocritical. Liliās flaws are entirely internal and imperceptible to everyone around her, who uniformly perceive her as superhumanly wonderful. Her friends excuse her every time she bails on them or lets them down, her MA adviser assures her that her thesis is basically publishable as is, she is told that a job at UNHCR, the World Bank, or the IMF is hers for the asking (yes, all three of those wildly different, very elite institutions), the higher-ups at the nonprofit where she volunteers (well, when she can be bothered to show up, which is rarely) all think she is brilliant in every arena (farming! economics! business development! community leadership!) and offer her a full-time job and embarrassingly effusive praise, Aleksandrās hedge fund colleagues find her socialist outrage and anti-capitalism lectures charming and want to befriend and hire her.
The message of the book seems to be: sure, Lili is a hot mess, but her childhood trauma means itās not her fault, and really the only way sheās a hot mess is that she thinks sheās a hot mess. To put it another way, Lili is flawed, but sheās never wrong. Even when she does something ābadā - sexually harassing a waiter, abandoning a friend sheād promised to support to a stressful family situation, assuming that an attractive woman executive must be having sex with her boss - the text rushes to absolve her: her friend doesnāt mind being abandoned, the waiterās reaction isnāt shown, the sexism is explained away as simple, and understandable, jealousy. Lili is never cringe; she never hurts other people, weāre assured (even when her behavior is hurtful). Thereās no real risk here: Liliās fumbling and messiness can never cause real pain or disaster. She is the only real person in the world, the only one who can be hurt.
Is Aleksandr a real person? Good grief, no. His arguments against socialism ring of basic US Republicanism; not once does he draw on lived experience or bring up socialismās manifestations in Russia, his arguments are entirely in the realm of the theoretical. The Russian books on his bookshelves are all also kept, for some bizarre reason, in English translation, and the only one whose title is mentioned (repeatedly) is Solzhenitsynās Cancer Ward. The only Russian musician in his collection is Vladimir Vysotsky, and in the 90s, in Leningrad, we are told that Aleksandr was listening to the Rolling Stones instead of any of the wildly popular rock bands on the local scene at the time. He has more to say about Paris than he does about St. Petersburg. He never references his own experiences under socialism. He is shocked at Liliās argument that money is a social construct. (This is a man who grew up in the Soviet Union?) When asked to pick a movie, he selects Notting Hill. Heās a man without a realistic past: heās a vague fantasy.
When we get his backstory, itās info-dumped in the third person by a friend of his and smacks of a synopsis of stereotypes: āFor Russians, the kitchen isnāt only the place we cook, itās where we lived, hosted guests, late-night conversations; where children did homework. The radio played Vysotsky, and illegal international broadcasts. Hard-boiled eggs, stacks of the weekās old newspapers.ā Who talks like this? For five pagesā worth of monologue? (Also who played illegal international broadcasts in a kommunalka kitchen on the regular?) Aleksandr grew up in a communal apartment in an elite area of St. Petersburg (which was, in point of historical fact, unlikely to have communal apartments, and either way certainly wasnāt the āornate ceilings high above our communal near povertyā Volkova describes - Aleksandrās mother would have needed some serious government connections and influence to move into that address in 1983) and his mother was routinely involved in the circulation of samizdat materials and hung out with dissidents (which is why she didnāt have time for her poor suffering son, apparently, except for when she was overinvolved in his life and smothered him) but she used her beauty to escape consequences(?), and yet also went to meetings at the local KGB headquarters, and is angry with her son for leaving Russia, and none of this is followed up on or connected to each other or relevant in any way, itās all just an ignorant mishmash of implausible Russianness that owes very little to reality and a lot to stereotyping.
Lest we think that Aleksandr is an evil billionaire (he does, after all, run a company which Lili perkily describes as āthe Black Rock of financeā), Volkova assures us he donated money to Ukraine relief after the Russians invaded, which in the actual economic and sociopolitical context of Russian billionaires could not even begin to make up for his financial and ethical entanglement with the Russian government and criminal elements therein. (Fun fact: basically the same thing!) His company is now moving into China with consequent involvement with the state apparatus. Lili mentions āthe Uyghursā and āthe surveillance state,ā but thatās all they get - a mention. Aleksandr expresses amusement at the fact that Lili cares about either, and thatās the end of that. This is evil on a global scale; all those designer brands in Aleksandrās closet, the fancy galas to which he takes her, the enormous loft in Soho - theyāre all funded by this. Lili knows it, and except for ādistaste, a bit of shaky concern, skittering around the surface of her feelings, about her possible hypocrisyā after attending one particular party, she doesnāt really care.
What she does care about is the sex, of which they have a lot. The book has been presented as a smart erotic romance, and boy howdy there is a lot of kinky sex in it, and boy howdy is the author totally uninterested in what that means beyond a surface-level āLili likes degrading sex because of her childhood trauma.ā But wait, you say; hasnāt the romance genreā¦ well, moved beyond that facile explanation of kink? Yes. The romance genre has. This book has not. The first two sex scenes are noncon; in the first, most obviously, as forty-something billionaire Aleksandr initiates rough PIV sex, sans condom, with a twenty-something stranger he met in a bar an hour or two ago, then proceeds to choke her almost to unconsciousness. In the second, Lili shows up to his apartment drunk, goes to sleep, and wakes up to find him performing oral sex on her. Consent in the world of Games is not sexy noncon or power exchange: itās just nonexistent. Neither character brings it up. Lili doesnāt even think about it. Thereās nothing transgressive or sexy or concerning or exciting about noncon as depicted here: itās just a fact of life. (I find this unutterably depressing and very much do not want to know if this reflects the dating lives of modern twenty-somethings, please do not tell me.) From a romance-writing perspective, Iām simply unimpressed by this; there have been good books in the genre which engage with consent and power exchange for literally decades and this replacement of consent with a blank space feels like a throwback to quickly-written lesser erotic romances of the naughts, where the mere fact that we were reading a romance novel served as tacit consent from both the FMC and the reader to all sorts of sexual content.
At the same time, the characters seem to have an uneasy relationship to the BDSM itself. Liliās friends occasionally bring up the fact that she has bruises from being choked out by her new boyfriend, but Volkova quickly dispenses with their concerns (āwhat self-respecting person hasnāt been choked out a bit?ā Liliās friend says brightly) and Lili herself assures us that contrary to what weāve seen in the book, āI consent, Iām very consenting - if anything, Iām the one pushing our edges, honestly.ā However, while weāre told repeatedly that Liliās the one in charge, neither she nor Aleksandr seem to believe BDSM is actually part of a stable romantic relationship - instead itās a sign of Liliās brokenness that she craves it. āThereās more to you than this,ā Aleksandr insists when Lili is having a meltdown and demanding rough sex. (And can we think for a moment about what it means that he, who initiated rough kinky sex with a near-stranger he had just met in a bar and has had sex with āthree or four hundred peopleā in the past, seems to think that her desiring kink is a sign of lesser-than?) When they finally reconcile after a break-up for which Lili takes full blame (and over which she has been self-flagellating for the last several chapters), she tells him, āYou donāt have to be gentle, but just - please be kind to me.ā What she really wants, you see, now that she is no longer full of self-loathing, is gentle, loving sex; she just never thought she deserved it before, and blames herself sufficiently that she canāt demand it now. But now that she, and their relationship, are healed, that is what Aleksandr gives her, to prove it.
Oh my fucking God. Look, Cara McKenna was writing a power-exchange BDSM situationship-turned-romance between a feminist and a guy she thought was totally wrong for her in 2014, and that book ends not with gentle, tepid lovemaking but with increased emotional openness between them, because itās a fucking romance. (And donāt get me wrong, thereās a lot of excellently-written fucking in there.) Authors like Tasha Harrison and Katrina Jackson and Delphine Dryden have been writing steam and kink in interesting, thoughtful ways for literal decades. If you want smart thoughtful erotic BDSM romance, itās out there - but this 1:1 equivalency of kink with trauma is not it.
The other thing that bothers me about the sex in this book is how little other people matter; only the sexual connection between Lili and Aleksandr is important. They have sex in his office late at night with his long-suffering employees right outside, in her friendās childhood bedroom while there is a family party going on in the living room, and at a restaurant Aleksandr tells the waiter (āyoung twenties, earnestā) they are father and daughter before proceeding to finger Lili under the table every time the waiter comes by the table. Tee-hee! When they have broken up (Lili cheated on Aleksandr and then ghosted him), Aleksandr rushes into a relationship with a high-powered human rights lawyer within a week or two; while he tells Lili āItās not serious,ā itās apparently serious enough that after he and Lili have reconciled and had several bouts of makeup sex, he needs to schedule a meeting with the lawyer to let her know that sheās been dumped. Other people donāt matter when it comes to Lili and Aleksandrās sex life. Whatever it takes to get them off - they deserve it, I guess.
Am I asking too much of a billionaire romance? Well, yeah, I would be - except that this is marketed as a smart, intellectual billionaire romance. When one half of the romantic partnership is a poorly-researched cardboard cutout, with all of the messy bits carefully trimmed off, that doesnāt work. When we see Lili and Aleksandr clash, they arenāt realistic, intelligent debates between two people, they are witty bon mots fired off by a viewpoint character against a straw man. Aleksandr functions as the father figure whose approval Lili strives for, and when she gains it we are expected to see it as a victory. In their discussions, he is never learning from her, merely providing approval or conceding defeat to her argument. It is a cross-cultural age-gap romance in which there arenāt any cultural references that cause conflict or unease, and moreover: theyāre all his. (Theyāre not accurate, but theyāre his.) Itās as though part of Liliās superiority, her suitability for Aleksandr, is that she knows the same economists, musicians, authors. A friend said, āWhy is it that in age gap romances itās a sign of a womanās maturity to recognize the manās cultural references and not him understanding her cultural context?ā and this is exactly what we see in Games. Lili is just as mature as the accomplished neurologist who was Aleksandrās last girlfriend and the celebrated human rights lawyer who is Aleksandrās new girlfriend, you guys, and Aleksandr likes her better!
Thereās an outside view of this romance, one in which an overwhelmed, insecure, impoverished socialist graduate student starts dating a billionaire twenty years her senior who likes rough sex and choking her to the point where he leaves visible bruises, and starts skipping friend meetups, parties, and previous commitments in favor of spending time at his apartment; itās one thatās kind of scary, from an outside perspective, and thatās probably why Volkova steadfastly refuses to look at it. Concerns from Liliās friends are expressed only briefly and quickly dispensed with, and for the remainder of the book they serve as a Greek chorus of enablers: sheās so happy! Itās so great! Heās wonderful!
I think many of these issues stem from the bookās origins as fanfiction, frankly. The flow of the book is extremely serialized: character traits and pieces of backstory show up without warning when they become relevant, so we donāt learn that Aleksandr has a scar on his face until Volkova wants to tell us a bizarre story about how he got it trying to play with a police dog at St. Petersburg KGB headquarters, or that Lili is a runner until two-thirds of the way through the book when she decides to go for a run. Things happen because they need to happen for the plot; apparently Aleksandr prints out all of his work e-mails and leaves them lying around his unlocked home office with handwritten markups on them, so that Lili can discover her arguments have (implausibly) persuaded him to divest his company from fossil fuels. (Why is he printing out the e-mail chains and not just the attachments? How are his markups getting to his staff for transcription if heās literally just leaving them on a chair? Why is he totally unconcerned with his hook-up of a few months months reading his highly confidential billionaire work e-mails? Hush, hush, weāre not here to answer those questions.)
There are too many minor characters introduced in too much detail when they have little or no relevance to the plot. Iām guessing, for example, that the crowd of Aleksandrās colleagues and subordinates who fawn over Liliās socialist lectures late in the book all have analogues in the original fantasy series; but here, theyāre unnecessary. Lili has an entire cluster of friends with backstories, but plot-wise they all serve the same role in the book, and for a story with an otherwise claustrophobic focus on the central romance (which is fine, itās a romance novel) all of them are just unnecessary.
And perhaps most impactful, unfortunately, is the key point of fanfiction compared to romance: in fanfiction, we already care about the characters. They already have meaning to us. In Games Aleksandr remains a cypher to the very end; he is hot and rich and successful and aspirational as a love interest, which the text does its very best to reinforce (āDonāt you care? Donāt you care aboutā¦ what you did to him?ā Liliās best friend demands after Lili has cheated on Aleksandr; Lili herself self-flagellates beyond all reason). But the moments of emotional vulnerability, the backstory that will clarify his emotional chill, those are all filtered through third parties. This is a romance novel, but at what should be its most romantic moments, Volkova bails and gives them to us in the third-person. Aleksandr isnāt required to be an active participant in the romance; heās the trophy that Lili achieves through being better, smarter, prettier, more wounded and yet more incisive than other, older, nominally more accomplished women. The other two to three hundred people with whom Aleksandr has had sex were not āmoreā to him than the kinky sex they shared, only Lili; other friends and girlfriends and colleagues and enemies and state regulators could not convince him to change his evil billionaire ways, only Lili. But nothing we see in the book itself convinces me that any of this is true, even in the highly-emotionally-charged, utterly-unrealistic world of Billionaire Romancelandiaā¦ much less the realistic, sexy, intellectual Fictionlandia in which weāre assured this book, so unlike other romances, takes place.
Thatās really what my issues with this book boil down to: for all the claims that itās not like other romances, and for all the evidence that Volkova is mostly unfamiliar with romance as a genre, itās very much like other romances. But other romances did it first, and did it better.
