Arts Editor

Author Rachel Pastan feels a strong bond with Jane Levitsky, the protagonist of her latest novel.

"When my children were born, I knew it was going to be hard, but didn't know hard," says the former Washingtonian whose Lady of the Snakes (Harcourt, 2008) has recently been published.

She says she didn't see much about the problems of balancing a career, marriage and being a mother in contemporary literature, and thus felt "compelled" to write the book, whose character, Levitsky, a professor of 19th-century Russian literature, certainly has a tough time balancing her different roles.

Sometimes it seemed to Levitsky that her husband and young daughter "were always reaching for her body, as though they thought she was a tree laden with fruit," Pastan writes. "Didn't he know how early she had to get up in the morning?

"When had she started counting hours of sleep as more valuable than sex? When she had to talk coherently and engagingly to a room full of bored-looking undergraduates first thing in the morning, that's when."

Pastan believes "the balance is always shifting" among a mother's various roles, so she always needs to "shift attention" from one to another. "A lot of the novel is about her trying to figure out how to commit herself" to do all three areas.

"I think it is awfully hard for women ‹ and for men," she continues.

Like Pastan, Levitsky is Jewish ‹ as is another important character in the book, Otto Sigelman, the professor she was hired to replace. When they first meet, he refers to her "the young Jew," to which she replies: "And you're the older one."

"She and Sigelman have a shifting, antagonistic bond," says the author. "They recognize something in each that relates to their Jewishness," yet Pastan says she can't articulate exactly what it is.

But she feels close to her character and her Jewishness is part of that feeling. Although she is not observant religiously, the author says being Jewish is an important part of her identity.

Born in D.C. in 1965, Pastan grew up in Rockville and Potomac and always wanted to be a writer. She explained that she "was introduced to the idea that being a writer is a normal thing to do" by her mother, Linda, who is a poet.

"I love reading. I wanted to immerse myself in a fictional world and not come out. Now, I get to do that every day."

After graduating from Sidwell Friends School, she studied English literature at Harvard and then received a Master of Fine Arts in fiction writing from the University of Iowa's Writers' Workshop.

She is an adjunct professor at Swarthmore College and also teaches in the Bennington Writing Seminars.

Pastan's first book was This Side of Marriage, and her short fiction has earned a PEN Syndicated Fiction Prize.

Lady of the Snakes focuses on Levitsky's study of Grigory Karkov's novels and the diaries of his wife, Masha. When the young professor decides to capitalize on her discovery of Karkov's plagiarism, she inadvertantly endangers both her marriage and career.

The setting for the novel is 19th-century Russian literature, not a field in which the author has any experience.

As research for this book, she read Leo Tolstoy's biographies, as well as his wife's diaries.

Despite her lack of expertise, Pastan says it felt "natural" to her to be writing about that field.

In any case, as a fiction writer, the author says "it's easier to portray a world you imagine than the world you live in because this forces you to concentrate and invent the details, without taking them for granted."

Rachel Pastan will discuss her book at Politics & Prose in the District on Sunday at 5 p.m.