Hedging his bets

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This article was published 29/09/2018 (2585 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Since 2002, when his first novel The Russian Debutante’s Handbook appeared, Gary Shteyngart has been simultaneously America’s funniest and most serious fiction writer. His fourth novel, Lake Success, takes on the election of U.S. President Donald Trump by telling the story of Barry Cohen, a failing hedge-fund manager who acts out his midlife crisis by taking the Greyhound across America to reunite with his college girlfriend, now a Holocaust studies professor in El Paso, Texas.

What is Barry running from? He and his beautiful, brilliant younger wife, an Indian-American named Seema, have one son, Shiva, who is severely autistic and has never made eye contact with them, never mind spoken a word.

The triggering event for Barry’s crisis is a dinner party where Seema accuses him of having no imagination and no soul. Barry gets drunk on extremely expensive Japanese whiskey, scares the wits out of his son and sets out to recover his soul — and his past as a one-time creative writing major — on an epic bus trip.

On the way, he will get first-hand experience of racist, anti-Semitic Trump voters, the “urinary” smell of the American underbelly, hard drugs, unromantic sex and the violent dislocation of being at least temporarily poor (Barry discards his American Express card on the trip).

While Shteyngart’s blurb writers may have barked with laughter, the rest of us will struggle from the shock of recognition that makes the novel’s material blur with the daily bombardment of news about the reality show president. The inter-chapters from Seema’s point of view balance the privileged white male myopia jokes.

Barry is in a state of shock, too, having been coddled in his one-percenter’s life in Manhattan. But America itself has lived in a state of shock since the summer of 2016. The reader identifies with Barry’s estrangement from his own country, helping create empathy for a character who could be completely unsympathetic.

As satire, Lake Success reaches a Dickensian level of entertainment and sharp wit. When Barry stays in Atlanta with a young former colleague from Wall Street, the young man tells him that he keeps a “super granular” spreadsheet on every girl he dates. This impresses Barry, ironically, because he reads it as a sign of “thoughtfulness,” since “the rap on guys in finance was all wrong.”

Barry’s writing heroes from his college days are F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway. His hedge fund is called the “Side of Capital,” a one-word change from a Fitzgerald title, and Lake Success is on Long Island, the setting for The Great Gatsby. Barry’s out-of-date frame of reference is perfectly apt for a novel that combines Jack Kerouac’s On the Road with a comic revisioning of Fitzgerald’s masterpiece about how wealth corrupts America.

Shteyngart’s last book was a memoir whose title, Little Failure, alludes to an insulting, priapic joke made by his father in reference to him. The memoir tells the success story behind Shteyngart’s fiction: he and his Russian-Jewish parents emigrated from the Soviet Union to the United States in 1979. He grew up reading Chekhov in Russian while absorbing English and American popular culture through all his highly perceptive pores. His books have won major awards and been translated into 29 languages.

In a recent Maclean’s interview, Shteyngart said that “America decided to become a kleptocracy, with a news channel like Fox that pretty much mirrors what the government-controlled networks do in Russia today… for me, as an immigrant from the Soviet Union, this is all looking very familiar.” His artistic reaction to that grim reality will make readers weep over an ending both melodramatic and entirely convincing.

Maurice Mierau is writing a non-fiction novel about how fake news drives the war in Ukraine and changes lives in Canada, including his own.