Her fate, and how she gets there.

I once tried to write an updated version of ANNA KARENINA. This was one of the NaNoWriMo years I couldn't finish, although I don't fault the idea. In my version, all 13,000 words of it, Anna was a high-school runner, an object of mystery to her classmates who were constantly talking, chatting and e-mailing about her.

Irina Reyn clearly found the same kind of inspiration as I did in Tolstoy's classic tale when she wrote her debut WHAT HAPPENED TO ANNA K, which resets the tragic heroine in contemporary Queens in a tight-knit community of Russian-American Jews. (The author says she didn't explicitly set out to rewrite the novel, but when she noticed certain parallels decided to make them clearer without re-reading Tolstoy.)

A somewhat aimless young woman, this Anna, a translator for a publishing company who has moved to Manhattan, marries a much older and richer man of whom her mother approves but struggles to find fulfillment in full-time motherhood. Meanwhile in Queens, her cousin Katia, an overprotected girl in a sheltered Bukharian Jewish community, pines for her secular professor, David, while the local pharmacist, Lev, pines for her. When Anna meets David at a New Year's Eve party, sparks fly and her husband and son are forgotten.

Anchored with lush detail in this idiosyncratic world, ANNA K doesn't fall back on any easy cliches of assimilation, nor does it subscribe to a one-to-one retelling of the novel, clumsily replacing (as my adaptation probably did!) letters for e-mails and marriages for hook-ups. But you can't read this book without the richness and depth of the other one in your mind. And that's not a bad thing, but it also struggles with a certain expectation on its leading lady because of the modernization.

Without spoiling either book, Anna's response to her situation in the final third left something to be desired -- while faithful to Tolstoy's rendering, it felt unfaithful to the age in which it was set. I didn't find her "self-centered and unfeeling" -- I wished she had been a little more self-centered, instead of to some extent accepting her fate. Still, I found Reyn's take on the story fascinating and am excited to see what she does as an author on her own steam.

Read the first chapter of WHAT HAPPENED TO ANNA K at NPR.
The Houston Chronicle calls this adaptation [SPOILERS] "an act of literary temerity."
Find out more about writers and Central Queens.
And finally, Irina Reyn is appearing in New York three times next week in three different boroughs. I have to miss all three -- bummer.