Source of book: borrowed from the library
Gary Shteyngart is a somewhat unique author. His books vary wildly in setting, but all seem to have the same kind of protagonist: a man who is fundamentally problematic in some way, but who the author manages to humanize and make oddly sympathetic.
In Super Sad True Love Story, which is dystopian science fiction and a wickedly prescient satire of online life that seems even more relevant than it did when I read it in 2012, has Lenny, a salesman at a life-extension company who will never be able to afford its products, so he deals with his mortality by fucking a much younger Korean-American girl.
In Absurdistan, a sendup of the George W. Bush-era foreign policy - Halliburton, “nation-building” and the other stuff that turned out badly - there is Misha, a Russian oligarch and gangster.
For this book, Lake Success, the protagonist - anti-hero really - is Barry Cohen, a hedge fund manager. And yes, the book is, among other things, a razor-sharp takedown of the whole hedge fund culture, finance sector, and the “finding yourself road trip” genre. Oh, and it also is filled with references to The Great Gatsby and Hemingway.
Shteyngart’s writing is hilarious. But dark as hell. It hurts to laugh, but you do. I am also struck by how incredibly spot-on all three of these books are. Shteyngart is incredibly perceptive, and nails the details, and more importantly the spirit of what he satirizes.
At first read, he seems absurd and over-the-top, but here in the Trump Era, I am not sure that is possible. We live in ridiculous times, with casually narcissistic behavior the norm, not the exception.
In this book, written after Trump’s first election, the threat of that event looms over the characters.
Barry Cohen, as I indicated, is a hedge fund manager. He came from working-class roots, with a mother who died young and a father who kind of checked out after that. With pressure from his father to become “successful,” he overcame both his background, and what I would classify as autism spectrum, to rise in his profession and make a shit-ton of money.
And yes, hedge fund stuff is pretty horrible in about every possible way. And Shteyngart knows it, even if Barry (who is a lot like the author in other ways…) doesn’t really.
As a college student, Barry was in a relationship with Layla, a hippie liberal sort. While Barry got along well with her parents, the relationship fizzled, in no small part because of Barry’s commitment to the jet-set lifestyle and socially questionable investments.
So instead, he ends up marrying Seema, a second-generation Indian immigrant. She is a decade younger, a lawyer, and similarly over-achieving. And she is beautiful. They buy an entire floor in New York City, his company swells to billions in value, and they have a son.
All is not well in paradise, however. Their son, Shiva, is non-verbal and is diagnosed with autism. One of Barry’s key investments goes belly-up, cratering the value of his fund. And now the feds are looking into potential insider trading.
After a disastrous dinner party with their slightly less wealthy neighbors (he is a bestselling author, she is a physician), in which Barry gets drunk and goes off the rails, a fight between Barry and Seema leads to a series of decisions on both of their parts.
Barry runs away. And by that, I mean that he takes a suitcase with a few clothes - and a selection of his prize watch collection (because, autistic), and tries to disappear. And, after he finally tosses his cell phone and credit cards, he mostly does.
With Barry completely AWOL, Seema has an affair with the downstairs neighbor, runs back to her parents, and tries to reinvent her life without Barry.
Barry’s journey takes him first to Layla’s parents, where he finds she is divorced and living in New Mexico; then to Atlanta and a quick visit with a former employee; out to New Mexico via Greyhound; and eventually to California, where he tries to find closure at his father’s grave. And yes, this whole sequence is hilarious and a total sendup of a certain genre. Also, of course Barry never comes to a place of self-awareness. Not really. Even years later. But whatever - this is actually more of a true ending than most Shteyngart protagonists get.
Seema’s story is also wicked satire of the “Eat Pray Love” genre. Of course she doesn’t find lasting love in her fling. And running away from her child doesn’t solve anything any more than Barry’s flight does.
It is no surprise, though, that Seema has to eventually do the expected thing as a woman, and return to her child. Albeit with the same nanny raising him, and her parents chipping in. (Her dad is a great character - probably the one character you can love without reservation.)
Barry gets soaked in the divorce from Seema, but gets off with a slap on the wrist for his financial shenanigans, and manages to become a rich fuck once again. To be fair, he eventually leaves the hedge fund management business, but his attempts to reinvent himself are both futile and hilarious. Again, the whole book could be seen as a satire of the upper-middle-class “self-improvement” narrative.
There are other great satirical moments. The “fitness” obsession. The “magical negro.” The “nerdy people find each other.” Racial politics. Ignorant and uninformed MAGA voters. And yet everyone is humanized in some way. Even Barry, who is mostly a terrible person. He is pretty much the platonic form of the line from Gatsby:
“They were careless people, Tom and Daisy- they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness.”
I laughed through the whole book, but often felt bad about laughing.
While I can’t entirely capture the feel of the book through quotes, there were a number that were too good not to share.
There was a Greyhound counter, but its gate was shuttered and there was no note about when it would reopen. “Socialism,” Barry said aloud, even though he knew that Greyhound Lines was a Dallas-based subsidiary of the Scottish company FirstGroup, and not a service offered by our government. He had drunk twenty thousand dollars’ worth of Karuizawa whiskey that night. He could make mistakes.
Come on, we ALL know people like that. “Socialism” being “anything that inconveniences me.”
Barry began to suspect something about our country. That we were, at heart, heavily regimented and militaristic. Despite our cowboy ethos, we were really all under orders, and anything we said or did in protest could be construed as “talking back,” and we could all be thrown off the bus.
Watching right wingers cower and boot-lick and fawn over Trump certainly raises this issue, doesn’t it?
And this one, which is part of a recurring discussion of Seema’s quitting of her legal job.
Marrying an accomplished woman and taking her off the job market was a way to telegraph success among Barry’s peers.
The book has SO MANY watches in it - Barry is obsessed for most of the book with expensive watches, but no Rolexes, which he considers gauche and common. His favorite seems to be the Nomos company, but I quickly got lost among the weeks of exactly what all of these were. I googled the first few, and then gave up. I have a Seiko that I am fond of, but it was a gift my brother gave the groomsmen at his wedding nearly 20 years ago, and would cost all of $600 or so now. That’s the fanciest one I have ever owned, and likely will ever own. If it quits, I will probably find one very much like it.
[A joke a long since retired legal colleague made in the court hallway was about the convention of naval aviators who got drunk at a conference. The housekeeper called the front desk and complained that the aviators were all drunk and were running around naked. The front desk asked how she knew it was the aviators. She said, “they all have tiny dicks and huge watches.”]
The satire of the ultra-rich is really hilarious. I have to share this exchange.
“I want him to go to Ethical Heritage for K to six,” Seema said. “It’s such a diverse place.”
“Is that true?” the doctor asked.
“Some of the dads aren’t even hedge-fund guys. They’re just doctors or lawyers.”
There is a line in the flashback to when Seema met Barry that is excellent.
A man that rich couldn’t be stupid. Or, Seema thought now, was that the grand fallacy of twenty-first-century America?
Spoiler: Yes, yes, it is. Rich people really are that stupid.
I guffawed at this passage too:
Seema always felt better about being the child of immigrants when she hung out with Mina, her first-year roommate. The girl had no plans before, during, or after Michigan. She world in graphic web design, which these days was simply a catchall category for anything not involving finance or escorting. Then again, her parents were so rich she didn’t even have to grow up Asian.
I shouldn’t forget the hilarious account of Barry (and the other students) in the creative writing class, and the way their stories were entirely predictable.
“So does that make the stories good?” She positioned her pen for the answer.
“In a sense,” the professor said. “The best fiction is the fiction of self-delusion. It contrasts the banality of our self-made fictions against the hopelessness of the world as it really is.”
The jabs at American culture hit home every time too.
Barry hated gun violence, but felt it was a cost priced into living in America. There was a chance - a small but not-insignificant chance, a “three-sigma event,” as the quants in the office would say - that if you lived in our country, someone would shoot you or your family. Japan had earthquakes, Australia brush fires. America had guns and people willing to use them on one another.
And this one, about Barry’s father, who eventually goes total MAGA:
Barry was a moderate Republican, and his father was a moderate Nazi. They were a moderate family. That’s how it went.
That one hit really close to home. I was for years a “moderate Republican,” I guess. I listened to Rush Limbaugh, but didn’t really buy into the worst of it. I left the party when they shut down the government because they wanted to cut millions of people from health coverage under the Affordable Care Act. After that, I was able to detox better from my political upbringing and embrace a more empathetic way of thinking. My dad went the other direction, and “moderate Nazi” isn’t an inaccurate way to put it.
Later in the book, Shteyngart captures the essence of Trumpism in Barry’s dad and his new wife:
“I’m so sorry about your son getting autism,” Neta had said. “Did you give him vaccines? I’m sure that’s what did it.”
“I told him not to get the vaccines!” his father hollered from his perch beneath a plum tree. “I sent him the link about how the Somalian Muslims were spreading it through their doctors in Minnesota.”
Here is another perceptive line, from Barry:
“You want to know the first rule of running a billion-dollar-plus hedge fund? Don’t sweat the metrics. We’re not really about the numbers. Do you know what we are? We are a story. Hedge funds are a story about how we’re going to make money. They’re about being smart, gaining access, associating with something great. You. You are smart enough to make others feel smart. You are bringing your investors something far more elusive than a metric. You’re bringing them the story of how great you’ll be together.”
Substitute “hedge fund” with politics, and you have Trump’s appeal to MAGA voters. It has nothing to do with reality, or anything measurable that Trump has done or can do for them. It is all about the story, the “you will be great because I am great.” For his base, this is why no amount of disappointment in the results shakes their worship of him.
I have also come to understand that this is at the heart of Evangelicalism too. “You are great because God is great.” It sells a good story, even as it fails to provide any benefit to society.
Although much of the book is humor and satire, there are some dead serious moments, and some that are achingly true and sad and human. One of these is when Seema has the perfectly normal feelings about having a profoundly disabled autistic child. She feels terrible because she feels a deep loss.
Seema knew she had to let go of the idea of a perfect, “normal” child. To find strength. To develop, as one book urged her, a sense of adventure and wonder. But what if she wasn’t qualified to be the parent of an autistic child? What if the fact that her nanny almost lost an eye did not inspire adventure and wonder, but anger, helplessness, and shame? What if she was, in some horrible, selfish way, just not a great person?
Another one of those moments comes between Seema and her parents. It turns out her dad is really good with Shiva, which is both a relief and a source of jealousy for Seema.
“Dad,” Seema said.
“I know,” her father said.
“You’re reinforcing stereotyped behaviors.”
“Shhh,” her father said. “Look at him.”
“Okay, but some of his therapists will object. I’m just saying. We put a lot of time and thought into this. And he’s the one who has to live in the world. It’s fine at home, but how does it look to others?”
Her father picked up Shiva, the child docile and happy in his arms. “I never told you how much of myself I had to give up when I came to this country,” her father said to her.
“That’s different,” Seema said. “Being Indian is not a
disability”
“I’m glad you were born in 1987 so that you can say that.”
That’s fantastic writing. In general, I think Shteyngart captures the awkwardness of conversations, particularly in families.
Here is another bit that I really liked:
His mother-in-law sat on a little stool in front of the fireplace, staring down at a patch of herringbone floor pattern as if she herself had the diagnosis. The hatred she felt for him was comical. Barry had never hated another person as much as she hated him. He probably couldn’t even muster that much dislike. His whole life had been about making friends.
I hate to end on a downer, but the last line I noted was in the aftermath of the Trump election. Shteyngart captures perfectly what I felt that day. We are now 10 years into the Trump Era, and my kids have had a decade of their lives - their formative years - dominated by this disgusting, evil, destructive man.
He sat on a Union Square Park bench next to some high-school kids wearing all black and eating burritos. They reeked of hormones, onions, and pot. They were white and Asian and a little alternative, maybe goth. All of them had buds in their ears and were both present and not, which seemed like a good place to be on November 9, 2016. Barry imagined them growing older like siblings, being there for one another. Who would do the same for Shiva? Would Barry?
These kids would already be in college by the time Trump left office. If he left office. No matter what they did or whom they loved or who they became, Donald Trump would dominate at least a part of their lives. He would try to drag them down to his level. That’s what he did.
It makes me furious that a decade of my own life has been so dominated by this horrible piece of shit. Why we gave him so much power is unfathomable to me. But it comes down to that ability to sell a story.
“Vote for me and you will be great, because we will together brutalize those people you hate so much already.”
I guess that’s all it takes. I really thought we were better than that, but we really aren’t. We sold our children’s future for a bit of masturbatory brutality against brown people, immigrants, women, and LGBTQ people.
Perhaps the most depressing part about this book - and the world we live in - is that the wicked do indeed prosper. There are some consequences for Barry he loses his marriage and becomes a spectator in his son’s life - but there are far fewer consequences for the Trumps of the world. They can destroy and shatter and brutalize, and they will likely go to their graves without ever truly experiencing any consequences for their actions. That sucks. I wish it were different. I hope to do what I can to make it different in the future.
Even with that downer of an ending, this book is really a good read, and is excellent satire of the world we inhabit, even when - particularly when - it sucks.
***
This blog is written by a real human person, not a plagiarism-fueled AI bullshit generator.
No comments:
Post a Comment