Lake Success by Gary Shteyngart

Hardcover, 339 pgs, Pub Sept 4th 2018 by Random House, ISBN13: 9780812997415

I listened to this novel months ago—just about the time it came out. I haven’t been able to adequately put into words how I felt about it. This was the first time I’ve partaken of a Shteyngart novel, and it is more in every way than I was expecting. There is a shadow of Pynchon’s frank absurdity there, and some bungee-cord despair—the kind that bounces back, irrepressible.

Shteyngart’s novel is overstuffed with funny, sad, true, caustic, simplistic, derogatory observations about life in America that somehow capture us in all our glory. He is not dismissive; I think he likes us. The main character in this novel, Barry Cohen, is nothing if not representative of what we have taught ourselves to be: money-mad and self-pitying, educated enough to capture our own market but too stupid to see the big picture. What introspection we have is wasted on divining the motivations of others rather than our own triggers.

Barry is a man America loves to hate. He is a successful hedge fund manager who emerged from the economic crisis in fine shape—it was only his clients who suffered. And his clients suffered because the government finally caught on to some irregularities in Barry’s operations that allowed him to win so much. While the SEC investigated, Barry left Seema, his wife and an attorney, with his son Shiva to see if he could find an old flame. Last he’d heard she was living in the South.

Right there Barry made a big mistake. One doesn’t leave an attorney for another woman. I mean, how stupid do you have to be? Barry and Seema had been doing okay marriage-wise, though it turns out Shiva is autistic. Unable to speak and often looking as though he does not even comprehend what words and comments are directed to him, Shiva is unknowable.

Barry wants to love him, but maybe wants Shiva to love Barry himself more. Seema handles most of Shiva's care which means she cannot work. More and more absorbed with nurturing her son’s growth, she recognizes and relishes small victories in understanding Shiva's internal world while her husband languishes.

Barry Cohen’s odyssey from New York by bus to various destinations in the south features a man with a skill set that serves him surprisingly well when traveling by bus on limited cash, no credit, and a roller-board of fancy watches. He can’t be shamed because he’s a bigger crook than anyone. Dragging around his collection of fancy watches turns out not to be very lucrative—who recognizes their value? But they do get him food occasionally, and a little tradable currency.

Barry spends relatively little psychic energy pondering the sources of his Wall Street wealth, but somehow recognizes it’s probably not worth as much as he was getting paid to do it. His long-story-short gives us cameos of American ‘types’: street-wise salesmen, long-suffering nannies, practical mothers, and money managers who believe their work confers some kind of godliness on their financial outcomes. Because we win, we are meant to win. Yes, this all takes place in the first year of the Trump administration.

Barry Cohen is hard to take. “See, this is the thing about America,” he tells his former employee in Atlanta, a man named Park that Barry keeps referring to as Chinese, “You can never guess who’s going to turn out to be a nice person.” 


Well. Barry is not a very nice person, really. He simply is not reflective enough. We can feel twinges at his angst, but ultimately we make our own beds, don’t we? Barry is tiresome, that’s the problem. His adventures are quite something, but we grow weary of his blind spots and slow recognition that he does, in fact, love his imperfect family. It’s all he’s got, the silly doofus, and they are worthy of his love. We’d rather spend time with them.

In an enlightening interview with The Guardian, Shteyngart acknowledges the story is about racism:

"I think racism undergirds all of this, no question. It’s a huge part of it. When we were immigrants and couldn’t speak the language, the one thing this country told us was: ‘You’re white, there’s always somebody lower than you.’"

Shteyngart thought he might add a gender dimension to the story, and was going to make his main character a woman, but the few female hedge fund managers he found were rational and didn’t take such big crazy risks that they end up blowing up the world. Right, I think. Exactly right.





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The Prank: The Best of Young Chekhov by Anton Chekhov translated by Maria Bloshsteyn

This collection of all-new stories by the young Anton Chekhov published this summer by New York Review of Books @nyrb reveals an artist desperate to make a living. He was twenty-two years old and collected these stories hoping to launch his career, but they were never published. Illustrated by Nikolay Chekhov, Anton’s older brother, it was censored before it could come out.

When you read the stories you may be surprised, as I was, at what the censors deemed subversive. The stories are broad comedy, slapstick satires, and absurd parodies of Jules Verne and Victor Hugo. The story “St Peter’s Day” reminds me of Jerome Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat, it is so filled with manly boasting and ridiculously goofy repartee. But there is a razor streak of criticism in there and Chekhov gives no quarter. An old peasant accompanying a hunting party drifts off while the other men, middle class and aspiring, buffoonishly discuss where to avoid other rotters who were meanwhile taking the best spots. I kept expecting the old peasant to show up with a hunting bag full while the others expounded, but he never did. The others just left him there.

Translator Maria Bloshsteyn in the Introduction puts these early stories into a perspective that includes Chekhov’s later works. The old peasant left by the hunting party, Bloshsteyn tells us, appears again in Chekhov’s last play The Cherry Orchard. And the social critique of marriage, Russian life, and social strictures that appears in “Artists’ Wives” and “The Temperaments” foreshadows all of Chekhov’s work. A quick look through The Complete Plays by Chekhov, translated and annotated by Laurence Senelick (2006), shows only the late plays of Chekhov not to be “comedic anarchy.” When Chekhov dropped the broad humor for his late plays, his work still had bite but was even more damaging than his humor. “Uncle Vanya,” for instance, exhibits many of the broad categories of personality shown in his early stories but seems almost despairing.

A quote of Chekhov’s chosen for the cover of the above-mentioned collected plays shows his resistance to government interference in daily life:

”My holy of holies is the human body, health, intelligence, talent, inspiration, love, and the most absolute freedom imaginable, freedom from violence and lies, no matter what form the latter two take.”

Chekhov trained as a doctor in the 1880s. During his residency he began publishing short humorous pieces in magazines as he was the economic mainstay of his extended family. Knowing of his extensive education adds to our enjoyment of his snide observations, and may explain the quote in which he expresses "the human body" and "health" first among his holy of holies.

In “Artists’ Wives,” a short story in The Prank, Chekhov takes a swipe at those living the bohemian life, which included himself:

”Madam Tanner’s vice consisted of eating like a normal human being. This vice of his wife’s struck Tanner to his very heart. 'I will reeducate her!' he said. Once he set himself that goal, he got to work on Madame Tanner. First he weaned her off breakfasts and suppers, and then off tea, A year after her marriage, Madame Tanner was preparing one course for dinner instead of four. Two years after her marriage, she learned to be satisfied with unbelievably small amounts of food. Namely, during the course of twenty-four hours, she would ingest the following quantities of nourishing substances:
1 gram of salts
5 grams of protein
2 grams of fat
7 grams of water (distilled)
1 1/23 grams of Hungarian wine
Total: 16 1/23 grams
We do not include gases here because science is not yet able to determine accurately the quantities of gases that we take in."

In “The Temperaments (Based on the Latest Scientific Findings)” Chekhov describes the “humours” of man, that is to say, how the “Sanguine Temperament in a Male” exhibits:

“The Sanguine male is readily influenced by all his experiences, which is the cause…of his frivolity…he is rude to teachers, doesn’t get haircuts, doesn’t shave, wears glasses, and scribbles on walls. He is a bad student but manages to graduate…”

We read on for two pages and then get the description of “Sanguine Temperament in a Female.”

“The sanguine female is the most bearable of women, at least when not stupid.”

That’s all. We learn about the “Choleric Temperament” ("the choleric man is bilious with a yellow-gray face…" and “the choleric female is a devil in a skirt…”), the “Phlegmatic Temperament” ("the phlegmatic male is a likable man…He is always serious because he is too lazy to laugh."), and the “Melancholic Temperament,” none of which reassure us that human life is worth the resources needed to sustain it.

In “Papa,” the mother of a son failing in school sounds remarkably current:

”Papa, go to the math teacher and tell him to give the boy a good grade. Tell him that he knows his math but that his health is poor. That’s why he can’t cater to everyone’s whims. Force him to do it!”

In “Before the Wedding,” a father speaks with his daughter, the bride to be:

”And, my daughter…European civilization got women thinking that the more children a woman has, the worse for her. How wrong! It’s a lie! The more children, the merrier! No, wait! It’s just the opposite! My mistake, sweetie. Less children—that’s what it is. I read it in some journal the other day—something someone named Malthus came up with.”

Anyway, this is Chekhov unbound, young, exuberant, and silly. His parody of Jules Verne is classic while the one of Victor Hugo sounds more like Chekhov than Hugo. It may have been the translation he had, no? This is Chekhov’s take:

”Then thunder rolled. She fell upon my chest. A man’s chest—it is a woman’s fortress. I clasped her in my embrace. Both of us cried out. Her bones cracked. A galvanic current ran through our bodies. A passionate kiss…”

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The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov

This novel is considered by many to be Bulgakov’s masterpiece. The translation copyrighted by Mirra Ginsburg in 1995 is quite modern enough for today’s readers to get a sense of the arc of Bulgakov’s life (1891-1940), for it is there, thinly disguised. Bulgakov trained & worked as a doctor in provincial towns, but since childhood was enraptured with literature--with words. And words were the cause of his joy and anguish, for his whole life he was never allowed to publish or produce anything without severe rancor from government censors.

Bulgakov saw war. He was sent to the front by the Red Cross just out of medical school in 1913, when he was twenty-two years old. He was badly injured, twice, and suffered such pain that, after a stint as a provincial doctor after the war, he became a morphine addict for a two-year period. The horror of that addiction is recalled in his short fictional monograph, Morphine, which is also immortalized in the BBC 2012 TV series A Young Doctor’s Notebook now playing on Netflix, starring Daniel Radcliffe of Harry Potter fame and John Hamm, who starred in Mad Men.

What would Bulgakov think now, that so long after this death his work is exciting audiences around the world? He would be pleased, though sorry it took so long, I’m sure. He was writing for those suffering through the reign of Stalin, writing to bring them joy and to urge perseverance. It never happened. Many of his works were unable to be published, and he was reduced to writing screenplays or librettos for opera. Even these came under attack.

His work on The Master and Margarita commenced in 1928, but because of the vitriolic reaction to his work, he burned the work in the 1930s in despair. As a medical man, he became aware he had an inherited kidney disease (his uncle had died of it), and began rewriting his great novel, knowing he would never see its publication.

Bulgakov’s parents and grandparents were Christian. His father was a clergyman. The Master and Margarita is a novel imbued with a Christian mentality and perspective. The scenes that riveted me the most were those in which Bulgakov imagines the sentencing of Jesus by Pontius Pilate. Pilate had a migraine, and couldn’t focus on his task: to sentence four men to death, and to reprieve one. What enormous arrogance, intellect, empathy, and knowledge of humanity it takes to imagine a scene two thousand years earlier, if it took place at all. All is shrouded in myth, and we feel that, palpably, in this novel filled with humor and tragedy.

Bulgakov’s great gift was to see clearly, and to speak truth to power. This work is a humorous fiction, but no less searing for that. Dante wrote about man’s weaknesses and Bulgakov parallels him in another century. It is said this work is modeled on Goethe’s Faust. The devil seduces Moscovites and plays on the delights of human desire, and then strips it all away in the most caustic way possible.

The novel references important events or experiences in Bulgakov’s life and can be read as a philosophy, an allegory, a stinging indictment of the Soviet state, or simply as a humorous play on words. Gogol’s Dead Souls is named explicitly, as is Dostoyevsky. Bulgakov wrote contemporaneously with another playwright whose work also couldn’t be published, the Jewish writer Isaac Babel. Soviet intelligentsia in the 1920s and 1930s must have kept the censors very busy and made the public very canny. It was a fantastically fruitful environment for satire. At one point in this novel, terrorized artists make casual reference to “they are coming to arrest us” as they sit at the dining room table finishing breakfast. One man replies, “Ah…well, well…” When a Mauser appears from under the goon’s coat, it sets off a scene of comedic slapstick, ending with a Browning in the hands of a demon cat.

Pontius Pilate returns at the end of the novel and we are treated to Bulgakov imagining Pilate’s discomfiture over the death and disappearance of Christ. The Master is a writer who wrote a novel on the imagined meeting of Pontius Pilate and Jesus Christ. He is confined to a mental institution where he meets a poet imprisoned there for imagining he’d heard just such a story.

Margarita is a lusty, outspoken woman married to a man who was “young, handsome, good, honest, and [who] adored his wife.” But Margarita loves the Master and tries to find him when he disappears, but cannot. “She often cried bitterly and long in secret. She did not know if she loved a living man or a dead one.” She blamed herself for allowing the Master to write about Pontius Pilate.

One of the most remarkable things about the story is how period Moscow comes so vibrantly to life. There is so much intellect, passion, love, and yes, absurdity in the prejudices and manners exposed. Bulgakov names a character with a patronymic matching his given name, Archibald Archibaldovich; shares the mores of drinking houses and artists’ clubs; stages a grand ball; exposes apartment-house living and lust: the uncle of a murdered man tries to secure his nephew's Moscow apartment before handling the details of his funeral. It is a marvelous parade of woe and fury.

We cannot mourn Bulgakov. We can only read him. His work is the result of the pressures in his life. But he does need to be celebrated for the great humanist that he was. Ah, humankind!


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