By Gary Shteyngart, Hamish Hamilton, 352 pages, £16.99
US President Donald Trump’s 20 months in office have been rancorous and divisive, but a bonanza for pundits and writers of non-fiction. Now fiction writers are turning up to the party, led by the American comic author Gary Shteyngart. His latest book is an ambitious state-of-the-nation novel about the miasma of discontents that produced the astonishing election result of 2016. Its central character is Barry Cohen, a hedge fund manager on the edge of a nervous breakdown. As the novel opens, his jittery mood parallels that of the country as a whole: envy and self-loathing exist side by side with a delusional love of an America that never really existed.
Barry has run off in a drunken funk, heading to New York’s Port Authority bus terminal with not much more than a case of vintage watches and a vague notion of finding personal redemption in the heartland of the US. He’s had a fight with his wife and his plan is to head to El Paso, Texas, and rekindle a love affair with his college sweetheart. It’s 2016, and the journey ahead of him will be shot through with encounters that reflect on the divided state of the country.
This kind of picaresque adventure — a wounded hero heading off on a journey of self-discovery — is older than writing itself. Before he steps on to the Greyhound bus, Barry imagines that somewhere along the way he’ll encounter a thickset woman consoling him with a plate of pork and beans and telling him: “Hush, child. Don’t be so hard on yourself. Everyone gets to start over again. This America, hon. One dream dies, you get another.”
Another writer might land these lines as words of sincere wisdom in a climactic scene. But beneath the humour, Shteyngart’s spin is caustic and angry. The reader soon understands that this imagined consolation is not to be taken at face value. It’s the fantasy of a venal narcissist who exploits the vulnerable and is evading his personal responsibility.
Barry, it turns out, is running away because he can’t face the fact that his young son, Shiva, has been diagnosed with autism. For Barry, whose god is success or at least, what success looks like to a 21st century Manhattanite, the revelation that his son is imperfect is shattering. It’s a form of personal failure. So instead of addressing his Shiva’s problems, he attempts to lose himself in a series of comic encounters on the road. These give the book its basic form: a master of the universe adrift in the country he helped take to the cleaners.Barry’s journey cross-country is rooted, one suspects, in Shteyngart’s own travels. Scraps of overheard dialogue read like they’ve been recorded in the field. “The PA system screeched to life. ‘Tuscaloosa,’ the driver sighed, as if he had had his heart broken there.”
In Baltimore, Barry finds a group of German fans of The Wire doing a walking tour of the city. Obliging locals cease drug-dealing and pose for photographs at $20 a time. “Omar comin’!” says one. “Ich bin ein Drogendealer! Woop woop!” A reunion with an ex-employee in Atlanta causes Barry some wonderment that the man only earns a couple of million dollars a year. “And he could live on it. And be happy.”
These encounters are vivid and funny. In another kind of book, they might even lead to change and insight, but Barry’s stunted inner life makes this impossible. The book teems with his damning, authoritative judgments about people based on their attainments and net worth. Here’s an example of his status calculator in action: “The doctor was at least a decade older, but her looks had kept. If she got tired of the writer, she could probably marry a short, heavyset man on the middle rungs of private equity.” Both Barry and his trophy wife Seema are obsessed with the ranking of people, possessions, food and real estate. It’s why Shiva’s autism is such a blow to them. But it also makes them poisonous company. This chilly theme — idolatry disguised as clear-sighted pragmatism — feels like the most truly Trumpian aspect of the book.
While Barry is riding buses across the country, Seema is left to sort out their son’s medical care. The chapters alternate: longer ones on Barry’s travels; shorter ones on Seema, her Indian heritage, and her growing closeness to the Guatemalan writer Luis, who is smug, amoral and annoying in an entirely different way from Barry. Luis, like Shteyngart, is writing a book about hedge fund managers and his rationale is perhaps Shteyngart’s own: “If aliens invaded and took over the earth, wouldn’t you want to know who your new overlords were?”
Lake Success is spiky, timely and true, but also absolutely comfortless. That’s perhaps not surprising, given the times, but it’s also something to do with its choice of central character. The book contains many homages to The Great Gatsby, but it resembles a version of that novel where the lunkish proto-fascist Tom Buchanan is the hero. Gradually, it also becomes clear that Barry himself has some degree of autism. His most passionate attachment is to his watches. One is left wondering whether he can’t face his son’s diagnosis because it would mean acknowledging his own.
Shteyngart manages to pull off a rather lovely denouement that elegantly weaves together some of the main thematic threads in a small act of reparation. But it’s so tiny and belated that it resembles one of those travel sweets people used to keep in the glove compartment: never sufficient to quell the queasy discomfort of journeying too long in the company of awful people.
–Guardian News & Media Ltd
