Willkommen in Lake Success

by Gary Shteyngart

Am Puls des heutigen Amerika - »man möchte schreien, weil dieser Roman so wahr und so unglaublich lustig ist« (Richard Ford)

Eines frühen Morgens entledigt sich Barry Cohen, Master of the Universe, der Fesseln seines allzu perfekten Lebens. Der Sohn eines jüdischen Poolreinigers hat eine traumhafte Karriere gemacht: Seine Hedgefonds spülen ihm Millionen aufs Konto, für ihn zählen nur Status, Ruhm, Prestige und Perfektion. Doch dann kommt der Tag des tiefen Falls: Er begreift, dass sein Sohn niemals in seine Fußstapfen treten wird. Mit nichts als seinen Lieblingsuhren im Gepäck flieht Barry mit einem Greyhound-Bus aus New York. Sein irrwitziger Plan: nach zwanzig Jahren seine College-Liebe Layla in El Paso zu treffen. Ob er mit ihr das echtere Leben von damals wieder aufnehmen kann?

Genres: Fiction, Contemporary, Book Club, Humor, Novels, Audiobook, Literary Fiction

432 pages, Hardcover

First published September 4, 2018

About the author

Gary Shteyngart is an American writer born in Leningrad, USSR (he alternately calls it "St. Leningrad" or "St. Leninsburg"). Much of his work is satirical and relies on the invention of elaborately fictitious yet somehow familiar places and times.

His first novel, The Russian Debutante's Handbook (2002), received the Stephen Crane Award for First Fiction and the National Jewish Book Award.

Reviews

[Emily May · Rating 2 out of 5]

The roof garden was divided into roughly two demographics: capital on one side, and cultural capital on the other. It wasn’t quite as split as a Hasidic wedding, gender-wise, but it was close enough, and Barry worked up the gumption to leave some of his Wall Street bros behind and wade into the more dangerous territory of feminine culture-meisters.

Lake Success contains some interesting themes and I can see why the critics are eating it up. It's also a good candidate for any number of literary awards. That being said, this is just the kind of bland emotionless literary book about obnoxious people that I have never been able to get into.

I've gotten the occasional finger-wagging telling off in the past for daring to suggest that smart literary books that offer some clever satire on our current society should be emotionally engaging. It seems that some people feel that certain books - because they are "literary" and "important" - should be approached by packing up our emotions and caging our boredom. I don't agree. I think many books that fall under the snooty umbrella of "literature" are, in fact, some of the most emotional and compelling books of all time. Whether it be Dostoyevsky, Atwood, Murakami or Morrison.

This is not, in my opinion, one of those books.

One of the many things on his marriage checklist was to marry a woman too ambitious to ever become fat.

Barry Cohen is something of a Trumpian figure-- he has billions of dollars of assets under management, he is married to a young and beautiful daughter of immigrants, and he is largely clueless about what's going on in the America outside of his 24 carat gold bubble. When his three-year-old is diagnosed with autism, he runs away on a cross-country Greyhound bus, leaving his wife to handle their son.

As Barry goes on his journey, buoyed by memories of an old girlfriend from college, his wife, Seema, begins an affair with a Guatemalan writer. Meanwhile, the 2016 presidential campaign and election play out in the background.

It's a book that may be somewhat interesting to analyze but is difficult to enjoy. The characters are virtually all insufferable and I don't feel like Barry's worldview changed much over the course of the novel. Lake Success is evidently supposed to be a satirical look at American capitalism and materialism. It is arguably a book about how the twinkling exterior - of a person, a family or, indeed, a nation - can often mask something broken within. Yet I enjoy this idea of the book far more than I ever enjoyed reading it.

The prose through the eyes of these characters, especially Barry, is deliberately unpleasant and overwritten. It is done to emphasize the ugliness of excess, such as when Barry "eye-sodomized" Seema "over a plate of tuna tataki hors d’oeuvres". Additionally, the weak and - sometimes, it seemed - random plot is often broken up by discussion of Barry's Hedge Fund business, which is as eye-glazingly dull as it sounds.

Occasionally, timely and insightful snippets broke through that made me sit up and take notice. It is very much a book for right here, right now, which is most evident when Barry observes:

It wasn't America that needed to be made great again, it was her listless citizens.

And then Seema wonders:

A man that rich couldn't be stupid. Or, Seema thought now, was that the grand fallacy of twenty-first-century America?

Sadly, though, these moments were few. I'm glad I tried a Shteyngart book, but I think I can conclude his work is not for me.

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[BlackOxford · Rating 5 out of 5]

Compensating For Everything

It’s been about 30 years since Sherman McCoy in Bonfire of the Vanities and Patrick Bateman in American Psycho satirically demonstrated the excesses promoted by wealth in the financial industry of New York City. Both books followed hot on the heels of the real Ivan Boesky’s ‘Greed is Good’ commencement address at UC Berkeley (and, of course Gordon Gekko’s equivalent speech in the film Wall Street). Barry Cohen in Lake Success is a resurrection of the type: insanely arrogant, relationally challenged, acutely brand-conscious, with more class-sensitivity than the most rabid Marxist. So we can be confident of a literary continuity at least in the culture of the American über-rich who are to be found (at the right time of year) in their densest concentration on the island of Manhattan.

But Gary Shteyngart has spotted, I believe, a profound if subtle change in that culture. Three decades ago the protagonists were socially distasteful and morally aberrant but confident. They were, despite their bad behaviour, at ease with the authority of their position in the pecking order of American civilization. Their educational superiority, unfailing dedication to business over family, political acumen, and sheer hours put in to ‘work’ provided a feeling of entitlement which left no psychic space at all for self-doubt. They may have lacked the manners and taste of the Great Gatsby but they did share his personal views-about-self with the conviction of religion. Undoubtedly many still do.

But Barry Cohen is another matter. He is a social and economic ideal of the masses rather than an aberration; and he lacks a stable identity much less one he can be confident about. He has failed, in his own judgment, by succeeding. He is neurotic, unhappy, and a professional as well as human failure. and he knows it. He sits at the top (or more accurately just below the top: Rupert Murdoch owns the three floors above his). But he has a running fantasy about the roads not taken - the college girl friend, the writing career, the comforts of casual, non-predatory friendships. The severe handicap of his autistic infant son is not something that immense wealth can touch. This is not the cause of his regrets but it is their catalyst. Through the intransigence of his son’s condition, Barry is confronted with his fundamental lack of control over existence.

And, an even more significant literary difference over three decades, Shteyngart provides a female perspective. It isn’t just Barry having a knock-out fight with buyer’s remorse about his life-choices. Seema, Barry’s shiksa, non-white, trophy wife is also more than a bit disappointed in the results of her assiduous social climbing and the lack of things that money can’t buy. Her feelings too are catalyzed by her son’s severe autism but for reasons different than Barry’s. She loves the child intensely. She suffers with the child, not because of him. Their wealth for her is mainly just a series of domestic administrative duties that distract her from caring for the boy, as well as stopping her from understanding her own motivations.

References to Trump, mostly perjorative, are frequent throughout Lake Success. I don’t think these are there merely to provide local colour. Trump is significant because he is the authentic face of the contemporary wealth-culture of New York City - gauche, petty, ill-read, and tasteless. There of course have been any number of such wealthy New Yorkers. But it was Trump in his presumption to political office and his constant public exposure of the banality of his thoughts which allowed, required in fact, that the rich see themselves in him. If Trump is the apex of American society and culture, does any of their effort, reputation, and status have any meaning whatsoever? It’s a bit like discovering... oh, I don’t know... that God is an out of work carpenter being supported by a gang of ladies of questionable repute. It takes more faith than most people have to maintain the conviction.

In other words, Shteyngart seems to be suggesting that the cultural scorecard is changing. Barry and Seema haven’t lost their identities so much as discovered that the ones they have aren’t worth having. If I’m reading this right, Shteyngart’s subject is not so much the disaffected rich but the entire culture of compensation of which they are emblematic. According to the mores of this culture personal wealth is appropriate compensation not primarily for one’s talents and efforts but rather as a reward for giving up the other uses to which those talents and uses could have been put - the opportunities for the good life that have been forgone.*

This suggestion about the implicit compensatory theory of personal wealth is made fairly obvious in the case of Barry who recognizes it in his historical self. This is reinforced by his failed attempt to justify his career in finance as having anything at all to do with ‘adding value,’ a standard ideological criterion for ‘wealth creators.’ Barry knows he takes 2 percent from his clients’ assets every year for losing them six percent. His only real skill is the projection of a faux friendliness, a skill he employs over and over with the same unsatisfying result every time. Paradoxically, it is then this additional feeling of professional uselessness that also must be compensated for. He can’t even describe his work as prostitution because no one but him gets any satisfaction.

So the Trump trope (I know, I know; blame Shteyngart) is, I think, central to the book. Does wealth, fabulous wealth far beyond what is useful for reasonable comfort and security, compensate for having to be a Trump (not to mention a Melania!)? He is important because he (and she) makes the costs of a particular kind of success obvious. As Barry says, “You have to train yourself to be wealthy.” That means gradually accepting a life which is not life-promoting. And, conversely, unlearning a great deal to return to an intrinsically rewarding life. Those at the other end of the economic spectrum from Barry or Trump might not understand that simply because they do not approach even minimal standards of comfort and security. But the relatively well-off are at least in a position to ‘get it.’ I can only hope that Shteyngart is as prophetic as I perceive him to be. Perhaps greed is no longer what is was cracked up to be, not even for the .01%.

*Barry takes great care to dismiss inherited wealth as at best irrelevant and at worst, paradoxically, ‘socialist.’ This is a cultural inversion which occurred starting in the 1950’s in New York City and is chronicled in the novels of Louis Auchincloss. See for example: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show.... This is a more academic analysis of the same phenomenon: https://www.goodreads.com/review/list...


A biographical footnote: I was raised from infancy in the same New York suburb and in a similar family background to Barry’s (There is a real if minute Lake Success close by). I consequently can recognize many of the same drives and aversions which Shteyngart ascribes to Barry in my own personality. And, more important, I also identify with the way youthful ideals can become distorted into their opposites through the desire to ‘achieve’. I too ended up on Wall Street and the international finance gig. This phenomenon of corrupted idealism is, I suspect, particularly common in the finance industry in which thought itself is the only real commodity. Even more so than in academia, in order to succeed, thought must be sold, not merely presented. The effects are often devastating, not only for the quality of the thought but also for the character of the thinker.

[Chris · Rating 5 out of 5]

"We've all gone to look for America." Okay, not all of us. But Barry Cohen, the spectacularly wealthy -- and self-made -- hedge fund manager Barry Cohen has. He leaves his beautiful young wife, Seema, the daughter of immigrants, and his young son who is on the spectrum, and disappears on a Greyhound bus to see if he can rediscover the man he once was or (perhaps) the man he wanted someday to be. Barry and Seema are delusional, self-absorbed, and utterly perfect. Each is a mess, and I cared deeply about them and their son, and Seema's parents -- and virtually everyone Barry meets on his journey. Gary Shteyngart is a satirist, but like a lot of satirists, his heart is big and his soul is kind. I loved this novel. (Bonus? I was fascinated by Barry's watch collection and googled a LOT of wristwatches.)

[Liz · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars

Let me start off by saying the main character, Barry, is a total and complete asshole. If you don’t like books where you dislike the main characters, this is one to steer clear of. Barry, to me, was fingers on the blackboard grating. I mean, what is it with the bloody watches? This is someone you want to feel something for, in a positive way, but I couldn’t. His son is on the severe end of the autism spectrum. All those dreams of a normal family have gone away. He’s incapable of even telling people his son isn’t normal. And he’s an investor in the mold of Martin Shrekeli, making money off other people’s problems.

I had mixed feelings about this book. There are some great points made, some thoughts that I totally understood. “But Shiva would be a permanent immigrant. His encounters with the world would always contain the unexpected. Even his young mother’s love would need subtitles.” But I struggled with it. It’s like the author was trying to have a private joke between himself and the reader about a rich guy trying to leave his life behind to go find himself but still couldn’t jettison the outward accoutrements of that life. I knew when it was attempting to be humorous, but I didn’t find it funny. More pathetic. This is bitter humor. Although I did find the epilogue humorous, especially when it pertains to folks believing he had learned his lesson. That reminded me all to much of those banks that gave Trump loan after loan despite all his bankruptcies.

I am definitely in the minority in not loving this one. But that’s not to say I didn’t appreciate it. I found myself thinking about it. A lot. And it definitely grew on me as it went on.

My thanks to netgalley and Random House for an advance copy of this book.

[Jill · Rating 5 out of 5]

There has been a lot of talk about what constitutes the American novel but for my money, Success Lake is the American novel for these times.

Although the Trump election is not front and center it pervades everything; it’s a time when amorality and greediness are “punished” by a slap on the wrist. Into this poisonous atmosphere leaps Barry Cohen, a hedge fund manager of a This Side of Capital (lifted from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise.)

By all outward appearances, Barry lives the American dream: a beautiful immigrant wife, an adorable 3-year-old son, billions of assets under management and more. But scratch the surface and it’s all a mirage: his wife fancies someone else, his son is severely autistic, and the SEC is breathing down his back.

So Barry takes off on a Greyhound bus journey to discover the “real America.” He believes he is having authentic experiences but in fact, the “real America” is severely divided, hopelessly lost and struggling to survive. And, much as Barry wants it to, it is not a mirror to his past or future.

Alternating between satire and poignancy, Gary Shteyngart never makes the mistakes of throwing his characters under the proverbial bus. The yearning and emptiness redeem Barry and his wife Seema to some extent. This accurate portrayal of America on the brakes—a faulty America that confuses capitalism with success and possessions with meaning—is spot-on. And, the ever-present wristwatches that Barry collects and hoards is tangible evidence that time is marching on and cannot be possessed

[Ron Charles · Rating 4 out of 5]

Adjust your expectations when you pick up Gary Shteyngart’s “Lake Success.” His new book is not insanely funny nor hilariously absurd.

It’s better than that. A mature blending of the author’s signature wit and melancholy, “Lake Success” feels timely but not fleeting. Its bold ambition to capture the nation and the era is enriched by its shrewd attention to the challenges and sorrows of parenthood.

Barry Cohen, the glad-handing protagonist of “Lake Success,” repels our sympathy even while laying claim to it. Barry is a 40-something hedge-fund manager who lives high in the clouds of his own narcissism. He sips $20,000-a-glass whiskey and imagines that his palatial Manhattan existence is well deserved. The very incarnation of white male privilege, Barry is the “friendliest dude,” made all the more exasperating by his misimpression that he’s a man of deep moral wisdom and empathy, despite the vampiric nature of. . . .

To read the rest of this review, go to The Washington Post:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/entert...

To watch the Totally Hip Video Book Review of 'Lake Success,' click here:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/video/...

[Barbara · Rating 5 out of 5]

A long time ago, I read Gary Shteyngart’s “Super Sad True Love Story” and LOVED it. He writes thought provoking novels about our culture and society. Shteyngart writes with incredible wit and satire. As a reader, I wanted to pay exceptional attention to each word, situation, and theme because his best work is in the minutia.

In “Lake Success” Shteyngart uses protagonist Barry Cohen as an utterly ridiculous, self absorbed, egotistic, unmonitored, and narcissistic individual. Barry is a hedge-fund manager who loses over a billion dollars in his fund, and doesn’t break a sweat. He feels no remorse that he lost peoples hard earned money. The story begins when he realizes the SEC and the Feds are in the midst of investigating him for insider trading. His wife doesn’t love him anymore (why? She has everything she needs. What’s not to love??). His toddler son has been diagnosed with severe autism. What’s a man to do? He goes on the lam. His mode of transportation is a Greyhound Bus. Why the bus? His wife accused him of having no imagination and no soul. Well, he’ll show her!

In most novels I’ve read, if someone goes on the lam, it’s usually a woman. I liked the idea of a man of this incredible self-delusion to take the reader on a ride from the hoity-toity of Manhattan to the heartland of America.

The novel takes place during the 2016 presidential election. Barry keeps his eye on the primaries through his escapade. His allegiance is with Hillary and is dumfounded with the south and Middle America’s political views. This is the backdrop of the narrative. Mostly, we are following Barry and his unreal Bus rides.

While Barry is undergoing his bus trip, his wife is at home with their autistic son. Yes, she has plenty of money that provides her with help and services. Shteyngart takes the reader on the heart-wrenching ride of a parent trying to do the best thing for their child with considerable needs.

In normal fiction, Barry would seem over-the-top in character. Shteyngart cleverly uses Trump to make Barry plausible. Shteyngart also does a fabulous job of voicing the political views of the heartland, the non New York, Massachusetts, California States. In interviews, he provided that he did take a Greyhound bus as Barry did and he noted the various views.

I loved this novel for its timeliness. America is conflicted and divided; both sides are perplexed with differing views than their own. Shteyngart shows the chaos of our nation. He also shows the staggering differences in wealth and American life. This one will garner awards.

[Darwin8u · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Like your first ankle monitor bracelet or your fourth divorce, the occasional break with reality was an important part of any hedge-fund titan's biography"
- Gary Shteyngart, "Lake Success"



Like great Indian food, I'm not exactly sure why this novel works for me, but GOD this book was delicious. OK, so I know SORTA why it works. It is brilliantly absurd, and sharp enough to almost immediately, and almost painlessly, draw blood. I kept thinking that this novel was like a mirror presenting this ridiculous reflection that seems a bit freaky, distorted, and ugly. You think it is funhouse mirror from a carnival, but there is a moment of clarity when you realize the mirror is FINE. The reality is just that you ARE a bit freaky, distorted, and ugly. Shteyngart's novel arcs like Bellow's The Adventures of Augie March mixed with a bit of Kurt Vonnegut and Paul Beatty. While I can't say it was as literary or timeless as Bellow's Great American Novel of exploration and identity, it still hummed with some of that same wild, kinetic energy.

'Lake Success' contained only a few characters to love (Shiva, Jonah, Seema's father, and a couple others), but many, many to learn from. The obvious two are the protagonists (Seema and Barry). They are the super-rich, .01%, Lucy and Ricky, of America in the 21st Century. They aren't the protagonists we need, but the protagonists we deserve.

And then there are the watches, and the pimp juice, and the crack, and the maps, and the sadness. So so much sadness. If I say anymore, I'll just f-it up and ruin the surprise and melancholy joy (No, no. Not joy really. Pleasure? Hell no. experience? trip? Maybe) that this novel was. Thank you Mehrsa for recommending it.

[Lisa (NY) · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is not a novel to read if you need likable characters. Barry Cohen is mostly despicable, living in a bubble of privilege and delusion. And his wife Seema isn't much better. Their worst flaw is that neither has figured out how to fit their autistic son, Shiva, into their glossy lives. Lake Success is about how both of them evolve- at least a little. Shteyngart's genius is how he manages to combine biting satire with big-hearted warmth. In the end, I found myself rooting for each of them.

[Susan Kennedy · Rating 1 out of 5]

Nope, I can't do it; I can't continue to try to read this book that I hate. I despise the characters and the story isn't captivating at all. I've tried to give it a chance, but when I look at the book and try to read another page it is painful to think about. Definitely not the book for me. Maybe for someone else.

I don't get them at all. Rich and snobby? Completely withdrawn from their child because he is Autistic? They are shallow and nothing is making any kind of sense at all. I'm just not sure there is a point.

[Drew · Rating 2 out of 5]

Hmm. It's either a brilliant Candide-esque satire of the clueless wealthy idiots who got us into our current mess (maybe they didn't vote for Trump but they thought about it!, etc) or it's a tone-deaf straight white liberal male asking questions about how we got here. And if you finish a book and wonder which one it is... chances are the answer isn't going to be positive.

Gary Shteyngart is the first of his cohort to bang out a proper Trump-responding novel - although this only tangentially connects to our 45th President, mainly taking place over the 6 or so months leading up to the 2016 election - and while the book displays everything you'd expect from a Shteyngart novel (humor, pathos, lovely sentences), it just feels misguided. Barry, the main character, is too dumb and too naive to truly be engaging and the supporting cast is almost universally reduced to a single if-not-stereotype-then-pretty-damn-close. And everything about Barry's journey reeks of the "how did this happen" series of questions that clueless liberals over the age of 40 have been asking for the last 18 months.

I wish I could've loved this book more - and I'll bet that it'll get a great run of reviews in all the right places, not to mention commercial acclaim. But this was a misguided novel from start to finish and here's hoping it's the only one we have to deal with - because, so help me, once Franzen and Eugenides et al get into the game, we'll deserve everything coming to us.

[Dan · Rating 4 out of 5]

In Lake Success, Gary Shteyngart channels what Philip Roth called “the indigenous American berserk” with sympathy, humor, and pathos. Always funny, Shteyngart encapsulates his deep understanding of contemporary America into the lives, loves, and failures of Barry and Seema Cohen ”during the year 2016, at the start of the First Summer of Trump.” Barry and Seema live in rarefied Manhattan in which the mother of a three-year-old boy worries that ”’If he doesn’t do well, forget Hunter, forget Ethical Heritage, we’re talking maybe Bright and Happy Schoolhouse. And their HYPMS is what?’ ‘PMS?’ Seema asked innocently. ‘HYPMS. Harvard, Yale, Princeton, MIT, Stanford. The good schools can already tell you what percentage of their kindergarten class get into one of those five. Brearley’s is thirty-seven percent.’”

Barry’s a ”a man with 2.4 billion dollars of assets under management” , an owner of ”a batch of the forty-eight-year-old Karuizawa single cask whiskey. . . thirty-three thousand dollars a bottle, if you can find it,”, and he’s a veritable market basket of obsessions. He’s from a modest middle-class background, Princeton-educated, and self-made due to a combination of his obsessive determination to learn how to make friends and his obsessive mathematical skills. Barry’s no natural with other people: referring to the Hong Kong-born physician who invited Barry and his wife to dinner, ”in the five hours they would spend together, Barry would never remember her name; he never remembered women’s names”. He takes pride in mentoring the bros who work for him in his hedge fund, perhaps even more than in his hedge fund’s once outstanding AUM and RoI’s. He seeks solace in his obsessive collection of unimaginably expensive wrist watches: his Universal Genève Tri-Compax from the early 1940s, his Nomos Minimatik, his Audemars Piguet pink-gold Royal Oak, his Patek Philippe Calatrava 570, his F. P. Journe, and his Bao Dai Rolex. Unfortunately for Barry, the IWC Pilot’s Watch that he yearns for just isn’t for him, because despite his ”wide swimmer’s build, his thick shoulders” he has ”his two feminine wrists, a liability at any point in history, but never more so than during the year 2016”. Kicked out of his home, injured, bleeding, Barry wanders to Manhattan’s Port Authority bus terminal in the middle of the night—I mean, who in their right mind would go there in the middle of the night? Barry’s falling apart and knows it: ”Like your first ankle monitor bracelet or your fourth divorce, the occasional break with reality was an important part of any hedge-fund titan’s biography”. Barry embarks on a 2016 road trip like none other, from New York City to Baltimore, Richmond, Raleigh, Atlanta, El Paso, and then to Phoenix and finally San Diego, all on the omnipresent Greyhound buses, surviving ”on pork rinds and off-brand coffee” and ”learning about America” all the way. Until the very end of Lake Success, Barry finds more comfort trying to recreate his memories of the past than forging a new life.

Barry’s an interesting and nuanced character, with his obsessions, his rigid rules for making friends, his touching desire to connect with his son and his former girlfriend’s lonely son by teaching them to swim, and his cockamamie idea to start an ”Urban Watch Fund for inner-city kids morphing into ”a map-drawing program for shy suburban kids.” But Shteyngart’s true triumph in Lake Success is Barry’s wife Seema, her parents, their relationships with each other, and with Seema and Barry’s son Shiva, a boy who’s ”not just ‘on the spectrum’ but on the ‘severe’ end of it”. Seema’s a Yale Law School graduate, clerking for the Eastern District: ”Unlike white wives, she could wear many grams of gold around her neck, the miraculous hue of her skin catching its glow. She was, Barry sometimes noted in disbelief, a twenty-nine year old beauty with whom only one person in the universe had failed to fall desperately in love, that person being himself.”

Seema’s mother, an immigrant from south India like her husband, displays the ethnic status hyperawareness so typical of striving immigrant and first generation parents: ”Freshman year in high school she had drawn Seema a chart of the social acceptability of her friends. Jews and WASPs fared at the very top, one had ‘money (increasing)’ and the other ‘social power (decreasing).’ The Asians were separated into several tranches, with the Japanese—who had bought up so much of our country just the previous decade—leading the pack. Tamils hovered several blank spaces above Hispanics, who themselves rested on the shoulders of blacks. Her mother circled ‘Jews’ times and wrote ‘accessible,’ ‘liberal,’ ‘emotional,’ and ‘sober’ next to it.” Seema ”loved her mother just enough; she loved her father ninefold.” In Lake Success, Seema’s father—with his innate ability to relate to Shiva and understand his totally Americanized daughter—may be the father that we all yearn for and the father that we want to be. And Seema’s mother represents the mother so familiar to many of us: ”’Oh, Mommy,’ Seema said, ‘I wish you could say a nice thing right now.’ ‘Try to be a better daughter,’ her mother said. ‘That’s not a nice thing.’ ‘Nice is not my specialty. Call your father if you want to hear something nice.’” And then there’s Seema herself who, after Trump’s elected, finds that ”With her country dying, she found herself wanting to be a little less American and a little more Indian, to search for her roots the way her mother had her whole life. She needed to nail down who she was. Barry wasn’t the only one who could pursue that privilege. She tried to learn Sanskrit for the millionth time, attempted to memorize her father’s favorite slokas, and took a car service out to Flushing once a week to feast on upma at the Ganesh Temple Canteen.”

Lake Success is full of wonderful bits, some comic, some perfectly reflective of today’s America. Barry’s relieved when he discovers that Seema’s lover the novelist has an ”Amazon ranking—1,123,340—and after reading one page of his novel, Barry could see how the ranking came to be”. And here’s an exchange in Atlanta between Jeff Park, Barry’s hedge fund colleague, and Barry: ”’That guy didn’t even care about ogling my car in front of his girlfriend. I wasn’t a threat to him, because I’m an Asian man.’ It took a while for Barry to unpack that statement. ‘In this town, you’re either black or you’re white,’ Jeff Park said.”

With Lake Success, Gary Shteyngart has created a memorable and uncategorizable novel well-suited to the contemporary U.S., part satire, part comedy, part acute social observation, and all compelling and affecting.

I would like to thank NetGalley and Random House for providing me with an e-copy of Lake Success in exchange for an honest review.

PS: I was fortunate to attend Shteyngart's reading to a full and appreciative audience from Lake Success. The event started with screening of the Random House book trailer featuring Shteyngart and Ben Stiller. Both the trailer, which I highly recommend, and Shteyngart's reading and discussion featured the comedic aspects of Lake Success. It is an uniquely novel, but the pathos, sadness, and insight into the dynamics of two very different families that I remember best from my reading of it. Shteyngart was charming and generous in his comments, responses to questions, and his signing. Shteyngart and I share an unlikely academic background, so it was especially enjoyable for me.

4.5 stars

[switterbug (Betsey) · Rating 5 out of 5]

SUPER SAD TRUE LOVE STORY, Shteyngart’s 2010 dystopian masterpiece, will remain one of my 50 favorite books of all time. Its haunting prescience convinced me that technology and social media had already dominated and intruded on our lives to chilling, sinister effect. Some of it is already dawning—the way we can destroy lives with Facebook or Twitter is just one example of the way we live now. LAKE SUCCESS isn’t quite as epic, and although there is a nod to the dystopian—just a sprinkle--this is largely a story of the divisive present.

A wealthy, educated, but severely dysfunctional couple splits up. Barry Cohen is a successful investor, a secular Jew who made it rich through his adamancy and timing, but right now his wealth is being challenged by an SEC investigation. His wife, Seema, a beautiful first generation American, was a law school grad who gave it all up. Their three-year-old son, Shiva, has recently been diagnosed with autism and is on the extreme end of the spectrum—-non-verbal; poor eye contact; displays no affection; unable to play with others; and barely plays at all.

Shiva (which means destroyer) essentially cleaved their perfect family fantasy. Three children, three high-end separate sinks—that was Barry’s dream. And Seema insists that nobody know about Shiva’s diagnosis—not even her parents or their closest friends. They sequester Shiva away from everyone and keep the truth locked up with the childcare assistant they hired and all the professionals that the government will provide.

Barry decides, in an impulsive moment of desperation, to abandon his credit cards, iPhone, business, and family to take a Greyhound across the country and find his college ex-girlfriend. He decides to live like a pauper and make it on his resources of contrived charm and canny goodwill. The author’s absurdist portrait of Barry’s fundamental blind spots (of which there are many) had me laughing, squirming, and wanting to slap him upside the head. But, on the other hand, Barry’s recessed humanity eked out in some of the most surprising moments, like helping a socially awkward but genius young boy come out of his shell. Barry may be too self-deluded, egotistic, and self-indulgent to be authentic with himself and others at this point, but there are disarming moments when his fury and pathos collided and touched me truly, madly, deeply. Like when he tried to help others he thought less fortunate, even if his moves were calculated and self-centered. Shteyngart’s finesse of human comedy and tragedy slips sideways with absurdity, and shimmies in a calypso odyssey, while Barry lurches toward his darker nature and the bus chugs and rattles across the dustier parts of America.

In the meantime, Seema embarks on an affair that Shteyngart brilliantly portrayed to squeamish an awkward effect. Her downstairs neighbor, a published poet and novelist, steps in to capture Seema’s heart, even while his wife makes a surprising and heartfelt transformation to Seema’s life. As Barry and his estranged wife continue on separately, we wait tensely for the penny to drop. Along the way, a vivid cast of drop-in and secondary characters kept me hooked to the narrative. I wasn’t installed and engulfed like I was during Super Sad. I wanted to feel like a passenger on the bus or contained in Seema’s apartment and New York streets, but I was nevertheless on board for the ride of the Cohen’s lives. Moreover, the author has done his research on autism; Shiva was flawlessly credible.

In lesser hands, this “Trump World” backdrop would shriek its cautionary tale counter-message. But, Shteyngart is a master of turning tirades into sensibility, and existential dread into wisdom. The characters, not the author, own their political rants and righteous indignation. The themes don’t pontificate on politics. It’s all about Barry and Seema, and how “the best fiction is the fiction of self-delusion. It contrasts the banality of our self-made fiction against the hopelessness of the world as it really is.” But still, there may be hope. And, by the way, Lake Success is a real place! 4.5 rounded up

[Ilana (illi69) · Rating 1 out of 5]

From November 2018: I finished it. I consider that an accomplishment in itself, considering how little I liked this book. Looking over the reviews on GR, I see plenty of people enjoyed this book, or at least thought it was deserving of awards, or found it meaningful, or that it represented the times we are currently living in, or that it spoke to them, or that it was very readable, or relatable and so on. I can't say I agree with any of that. Instead, I'll say why I hated this book.

1. The only reason I read this book was because I read Shteyngart's previous book, Super Sad True Love Story which was gifted to me, and found it to be an odd bird full of surprises which stretched my boundaries and left me thinking I should read whatever Shteyngart came up with next. I disliked this novel from the first page. But I thought I should soldier on and see where the author was going with it. I don't usually force myself to finish books, Life's too short, too many great books, etc, but kept thinking maybe the author would delight and surprise me with the next chapter, the way he did with his previous book.

2. When the surprise came, I wanted to hurl. Really I did. Maybe there were a lot of surprising things to other readers in this story. Probably there were, come to think of it. But I've been called an Honorary New Yorker many times in my life, and everyone knows New Yorkers are used to all kinds of craziness, so not much surprises me. But the surprise was more in the details than in the actual thing. Now I'm stuck with that image for life. I'm thinking of suing Shteyngart for that.

3. From the publisher's description now, describing the protagonist Barry Cohen: "Myopic, narcissistic, hilariously self-deluded and divorced from the real world as most of us know it...":
Myopic: Yes.
Nacissistic: Definitely.
Hilarious: What? Did I miss something? I must've been reading a different book. At no point did I smile or ever lift a corner of my mouth and DEFINITELY did NOT chuckle at ANY point. This was NOT a funny affair. Hilarious???? Ok maybe, see the following.
Divorced from the real world as most of us know it: that he is, and painfully so, and I guess many people would find that hilarious in itself? I just found it very painful and very sad... I just wanted it to end. In fact, I just wanted Barry to die. I kept thinking: just kill yourself Barry, because this book and everyone in it and I the reader will be much better off without you. Something I don't usually think about when it comes to book characters, however unlikeable they are. With a few rare exceptions. Barry obviously being one of them.

4. "Hedge fund manager Barry Cohen oversees $2.4 billion in assets...":
Reading about hedge funds when you aren't interested in the world of finance is about as interesting as you'd expect it to be. Only even less so.

5. "Deeply stressed by an SEC investigation and by his 3 year-old-son’s diagnosis of autism, he flees New York on a Greyhound bus...":
Barry is SO narcissistic, that he can't tolerate that his 3 year-old-son, who in fact has one of the most severe forms of autism and is physically unable to communicate verbally, won't speak a word to him (never mind that he can't) and won't look him in the eye or communicate to him that he loves him. So of course the solution is to run away. Barry is a true mensch, right? [Deep sarcasm, in case you haven't picked up on it]. You learn all this right at the start of the novel, so it’s not exactly a spoiler or anything.

7. Barry is obsessed with watches. Very expensive watches that you could buy a house with, that only other people obsessed with very expensive watches can recognize. In fact, half a dozen of his favourite watches are his travel companions on the Greyhound bus. This is definitely not a spoiler either because it's one of the first things we learn as the story begins. In fact, I've wondered if the watches weren't the actual protagonists of the story and everything else was just an excuse to talk about... watches. I'll have to do a little search and see if watches aren't in fact an obsession of Shteyngart's. If you're not interested in watches, they are as interesting to read about as... oh, say... hedge funds, for example.

8. "...he flees New York on a Greyhound bus in search of a simpler, more romantic life with his old college sweetheart...":
I guess we're supposed to give Barry a break because he's going through some kind of mid-life crisis? Just him and his watches, looking for his college sweetheart. What a story eh? That has all the makings of a bestseller for sure. It'll probably win a bunch of awards too. Just to spite me.

9. Barry Cohen is a Jewish man. So is Gary Shteyngart. I think it's outright stupid of the author to write a book about such a deeply unlikeable Jewish character set in Trumpian times when prejudice of all kinds and Antisemitism are stronger than ever here in the real world, but hey, maybe that's just me! Maybe because I've read this book just two weeks after a synagogue shooting in which 11 Jews died for no good reason at all other than—hatred of Jewish people because of other bigoted people thinking ALL Jews are... definitely unlikeable. Good going Gary! Way to go for reinforcing stereotypes! 👍

10. Most of the story is set in 2016, while the presidential campaign was running its ill-fated course. Barry is among those responsible for the unbridled, lawless capitalism that Trump and his buddies have made their fortunes on. Are we supposed to have sympathy for Barry? Are we supposed to have sympathy for his soon to be ex-wife, to which alternate chapters are devoted? Why in heaven's name would anyone want to immortalize the year 2016, when a sociopath became the leader of the free world? Is this novel really considered to be in line the best American Novel today as some reviewers are saying? Something this ugly and depressing? With such a creep of an antihero as a protagonist? With an ending that is supposed to be a... what? To me, it meant absolutely nothing. I suppose many readers will find it meaningful. It just meant I'd finally be able to start reading something else. I'll never make an effort like that for Shteyngart again! Lesson learned! Lol.

*****
Edit: just read another review which prompted me to add the following comment which I’d abstained from to avoid spoilers, but it occurs to me it will serve as a trigger warning and as such may be of public service:

I’m not easily shocked by weird sex or gay sex scenes, but I briefly considered suing Shteyngart for inserting a gratuitous and truly disgusting fellatio scene between Barry and a crackhead into my brain with no trigger warning. Thankfully trauma has done its job and has slowly erased the most unsavoury pieces of information about this sordid scene and its every explicit, appallingly unhygienic, extreme close-up specifics from my memory. Cheap shock value like that is one of the reasons I now actively dislike Shteyngart as a writer.

In other words, I think Shteyngart is a total schmuck.
👎👎👎


Find my writing at: TotallySurreal.com

_____

26 October 2025:
Here’s are links to two of my latest blog posts, as I’m about to face a judge this week to defend my right to keeping my bodily autonomy and my mind intact after getting into trouble with my immediate family and current treating psychiatrist for publishing chapters of my upcoming memoirs.

I’ll bet you didn’t know “Grandiose delusions of being highly intelligent” is the DSM synonym for “intellectual”, nor that “grandiose delusions of being a professional-level artist” is what you get labeled if your artwork isn’t being shown in museums or art galleries.

And finally, “thinks she’s immortal”, is what they write about you when you survive and overdose sufficient to kill a racehorse and beat impossible odds and say “I have no intention of trying to take my life again because apparently I don’t get to decide when I die, but I’d appreciate you stop treating me like a lab rat and forcing meds on me as I’d like to be formally evaluated as having complex post traumatic disorder (CPTSD) as well as autism spectrum considering my mother was diagnosed as being autistic, as I found out around 2021. Believe it or not, that request, and daring to request a bipolar diagnosis be revised is, in and of itself considered to be a sign of psychosis and a “complete detachment from reality”.

George Orwell was off by about 41 years when he named his novel “1984” because it turns out THOUGHT CRIMES are severely punished in Canada in 2025.

totallysurreal.com/2025/10/21/making-...

totallysurreal.com/2025/10/16/regardi...

[Enrique · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ni mucho menos la puntuación media que tiene en GR le hace justicia. Creo que es un 4 alto.

Es una novela de lo mejor que he leído en los últimos tiempos en cuanto a escritores norteamericanos actuales. Se asemeja un poco al mejor Franzen. Un intento de abarcar la sociedad heterogénea norteamericana, esa búsqueda por la gran novela americana.

Religión, conflicto racial y social, desigualdades económicas, culturales...y sobre todo esa búsqueda de la realización del sueño americano, muchas veces a cualquier precio, narrado de una forma actual, en la turbulenta y contradictoria "Era Trump" es de lo que habla este libro.

"Vivían en un país que premiaba a las peores personas. Vivían en un sociedad que permitía ganar a los delincuentes. Había una relación directa en entre el hecho de que B. lo hubieran dejado marcharse con un simple tirón de orejas y la victoria de Trump ".

El protagonista de esta historia arranca un viaje al más puro estilo Kerouak "En la carretera " que comienza en N. York para finalizar en San Diego, o sea, USA de costa a costa en la línea de autobuses Greyhound. ¿Cual es su Itaca?¿ Es un viaje interior? ¿Al estilo Camino se Santiago?¿Qué pecados debe purgar? Esas son algunas de las preguntas que surgen durante la lectura, llegando a sacar ciertas conclusiones ilustradoras para los admiradores de la cultura ultracapitalista. Buena lectura.

Olvidaba decir que por momentos es muy divertido...

[Trish · Rating 4 out of 5]

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 her son’s care, she recognizes and relishes small victories of understanding his 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 almost 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 queer decision-making 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.

[Perry · Rating 2 out of 5]

Shteyngart Blew It; Phallacies Come to be Too Much to Swallow

A quite humorous story about a hedge fund manager married to a gorgeous (and pregnant) Indian attorney who now stays at home in their highrise Manhattan condo to raise their autistic son.

Mr. Drexel-Burnham cracks from stress at work, experiences an existential crisis and goes on a bus trip to see his college flame/fiancee' in Texas.

Seemed great. More than halfway through the novel unfortunately, Gary Shteyngart shattered my delicate suspension of disbelief with dual implausible scenes--one set during a stop outside a Greyhound bus station, in which Drexel, without any homoerotic experience, desires or curiosity or even the least hint of provocation, but purely out of boredom, inserted a smelly homeless crackhead's penis into his mouth, made a limp effort at fellatio, while coldly describing the phallic feel and flavor of the junkie's schlong as it inched toward flaccidity.

In the second, set about the same time, the abandoned wife's rising ennui bakes up a phallic soufflé of her own; yet here, unlike with hubby, she gives more than just lip service to the sweaty, hairy loser of a neighbor.

In the end, these became too hard for a reader to swallow.
Shteyngart blew it.
Which really sucks....



PS: Not for readers desiring a Happy Ending.

[Meike · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a witty book about how we define success, and how we might strife for what the term commonly entails instead of asking ourselves what makes us happy. Protagonist Barry Cohen is a wealthy hedge fund manager in New York, but when his 3-year-old son is diagnosed with autism, his marriage becomes strained. As he then also is confronted with an SEC investigation, Barry boards a Greyhound to flee his life and search for his college sweetheart.

Shteyngart plays with the classic American trope of travelling westward, not only hinting at the settlers who pushed the frontier, but also at literary works like On the Road. While the settlers and Kerouac's characters are (different kinds of) explorers, Barry's travels have a regressive streak: Yes, he does leave his old life behind, he sees much of the country and meets many people, but he does so to avoid reality, not to embrace it. Still, his outer movement corresponds with his inner movement, and his experiences shape him and push the narrative forward.

An interesting and recurring theme in the text are expensive watches, which are works of art and stand for beauty, but also signal wealth and status as well as passing time. So pay attention regarding what happens to Barry's watches over the course of the story! :-) On top of that, it's pretty intriguing to compare the standards for success in which the Indian family of Barry's wife believes with those of Barry.

I liked how Shteyngart discusses how Barry lost track of himself, how he started chasing status and wealth and gets terrified when it turns out that his son is not fitting the norm, that he can't compare his kid's achievements with those of other children. The value of his son is not defined in comparison to others, he has to be seen him for who he is as an individual, as a person with many qualities who defies being evaluated by the superficial standards Barry has always adhered to.

All in all, I have to say that the idea and the ambition of the novel were better than the execution: While Shteyngart certainly is an excellent, smart and funny writer, I found the book a little lengthy. Still, I defintely want to read more of his books.

[Bonnie G. · Rating 5 out of 5]

A few weeks back I read Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine and was terribly bothered by all the comments indicating Eleanor was on the autism spectrum. There is nothing in the book that would indicate to anyone who knows anything about autism they haven't learned from a very special episode of Law and Order that Eleanor was autistic. People seem to think that anyone withdrawn, anyone with difficulty interacting with others, is autistic. It makes me crazy. So, it is ironic that Lake Success and the comments here have made me angry because people display not one iota of empathy when reading about Barry, a character who almost certainly does have autism on the less severe part of the spectrum. This man is not acknowledged by readers as having an ASD even though it is clear and actually telegraphed several times (a doctor who is an autism expert working with Barry's son says as much, though by then there is little doubt the man is on the spectrum) and the character is reviled as a terrible person.

Most of us who know young people with autism can see behaviors in at least one parent which, though more severe in the offspring, were clearly passed down. In Lake Success, Barry flashes his behaviors characteristic of autism like a police siren. His obsession with watches, and with knowing every ridiculous detail about their construction and history, his revelation that he is the "friendliest guy on the Street" because he learned the rules of how to interact in a friendly way and follows them slavishly, the fact that the man has no actual friends and is devastated when the people he does interact with do not stick to the scripts he has assigned them in his head, these are all consistent with ASD. Barry found a world that provided him with simple and clear rules for success, and that was comforting. So he lived by those rules, made the money that was the singular indicator of success in that world, and he is baffled and terrified when despite following all the rules he has a blooming SEC investigation, a son with severe autism who cannot stick to an assigned script, a wife whose sole focus is their child, and a house in Rhinebeck where he can't get the damn sinks he wants. For people who can only deal with a world where sticking to routines and following rules absolutely is the only thing that tethers them, finding out that rule-following won't always lead to an expected result can be shattering. And Barry shatters. Much like many Americans shattered when the script for what makes a president was shot to hell on November 9th 2016. He was adrift, filled with love and longing he could not express or reduce to rules.

Don't get me wrong, Barry is a shallow greedy man, but also one with goodness within, goodness that grew over time. Compare the Barry of the "Billionaire Trading Cards" for Black kids plan with the Barry who partied with the ASD crowd and avoided the neurotypicals at his son's bar mitzvah if you doubt his growth. He didn't become a good man, but he absolutely became a better man over the course of the story, and that is more than many people can say. (It is also the opposite of what his father did, and that is important too.) After spending a long read with Barry Cohen, I don't like him, wouldn't want to spend time with him in the real world, but I do maybe love him a little.

Lake Success is a really great satire, filled with big ideas, humor, pathos, and Shteyngart's nearly perfect prose. I can't overstate the greatness of the writing. I nearly cried with envy. Shteyngart also has a sharp eye, his descriptions of the cities Barry visits are funny and spot on (I have been to every city he visits, and have lived in NYC and Atlanta.) The Atlanta sections were particularly fun for me. When he talked about all the $2 hair plug and Models and Actors for Christ billboards coming into town I laughed in delight; so few people notice this weird ATL phenomenon. So too the comment about people calling out and whistling at passing Lambos and Bentleys the way NY construction workers call out to attractive women. Brilliant. And its not just place descriptors Shteyngart nails. His portrait of the ridiculous "immigrant" author (who writes about the beauty of being the common man while drinking $30,000 scotch in his $10 million apartment paid for with $20,000 speaking fees to read to non-existent audiences), the hilarious Asian financier and life coach (these guys all think they are Steve Jobs, and they all think that is actually a good thing), the Holocaust Studies professor who sees the rise of Nazism when everyone else turns a blind eye, the Jewish father who turns his dedication to Israel into an excuse for racism, these characters though discussed only briefly are authentic and fully drawn. His writing is magical. The book has been (appropriately) compared to On the Road, but I kept thinking of Steinbeck's Travels with Charley. Steinbeck is humbled and comforted by what he finds as he sets off across the country, and though the tone of Charley is quite different from this book, it is still the tale of a man feeling lost and who then finds at least part of himself by actually losing himself for a time.

In the end, this book is a blistering indictment of America. Not just of the Trump followers, who are so easy to ridicule, but of the people living lives that led to the followers’ hatred of America. The person the Trumpites chose as their leader is the living embodiment of everything that is holding them down, but Shteyngart doesn't explore that bit of weirdness.

The book is not perfect, its close, but there are holes. It is smart and very funny, and I can't stop thinking or talking about it. I always say if a book makes me look at the world in a slightly different way it is a success, and this did that in spades.

[Kasa Cotugno · Rating 5 out of 5]

We meet Barry Cohen in the summer of 2016, an early middle aged hedge fund manager. His life is about to implode, and actually has EXploded in a less than civilized way as he flees his enviable digs in the Flatiron District sporting scratch marks on his face, headed for the Port Authority and a Greyhound that will deliver him, he hopes, to a simpler, cleaner, more fulfilling life with his college girlfriend. The fact that the suitcase he has hastily packed doesn't contain changes of clothing, but a prized array of wristwatches costing upwards of $70,000 is an indication of how ill-thought-out this odyssey is.

Gary Shteyngart amps the action with each stop along the way. Barry's encounters on his road to hopeful redemption provide him increasing insight that in some cases is hilariously skewed, kind of like what the country is experiencing as it lurches toward November of that year. Alternating with shorter chapters that follow Seema, Barry's wife, and how her life progresses during his disappearance, the novel brilliantly illuminates the era just before the Trump Administration takes the reins. Exception could be made that their extreme wealth make it possible for these two to forge their paths (e.g., a saintly Philippina nanny sees to their severely autistic three year old son). But Barry deliberately rids himself of the accoutrements of his privileged existence starting with his phone and then his black Amex, attempting to lose himself in "real" America. With mixed results. While I couldn't exactly root for any of the characters, I didn't wish them ill either. Shteyngart's prose carries his trademark wit and snap ("The woman in the mesh ears was talking to a trans woman eating a bag of Lay's with a lot of emphasis." "The best fiction is the fiction of self-delusion. It contrasts the banality of our self-made fictions." "It took a while for Barry to unpack that statement." ".... he looked like he was renting space within his own body.")

In an epilogue that takes Barry and Seema 10 years into the future, Shteyngart wisely does not address the consequences of the Trump era, but does slyly slip in a result of climate change.

[Rebecca · Rating 3 out of 5]

(2.75) I’ve rarely felt so conflicted about a book. When I started writing up my Pittsburgh Post-Gazette review (published here this past Sunday), I had little idea of what arguments I was going to make. (You can tell me whether you think I succeeded in making them!) I could almost have written the whole thing as a series of questions. What did I actually think of Lake Success?

I could appreciate that it was a satire on the emptiness of the American Dream – Shteyngart has many cutting lines about how money doesn’t reward intelligence or goodness – but that doesn’t make up for just how disagreeable it is to spend time with these characters.

It would be easier to sympathize with Barry’s professional crisis were he not so chauvinistic towards women and condescending towards minorities. And if there’s a smug ‘how the mighty have fallen’ satisfaction at what he’s driven to during his bus tour of the real America, that fizzles later in 2016 and on into the epilogue, when it’s clear that the Trump era is dawning and Barry’s not going to experience true or lasting punishment. Seema makes dubious choices, too.

I particularly took issue with the metaphorical use of Barry and Seema’s severely autistic, nonverbal son, Shiva. He seems to be meant as a symbol of the voiceless in America. Then, on another issue, Seema is always confused for an immigrant even though she was born in Ohio. Luis Goodman, the Guatemalan-American novelist she starts sleeping with after Barry leaves, is also second-generation. What’s the argument here? That everyone is an immigrant, or no one is? Or are such distinctions immaterial in the post-truth landscape? It’s unclear to what extent Shteyngart is in control of his themes. Are they just so unruly they shot out in all directions?

(It’s always dangerous to equate a protagonist with his creator, but Barry rhymes with Gary, and the date stamp and acknowledgments reveal that Gary did indeed take a six-month Greyhound bus tour of America in the months surrounding the 2016 election.)

Despite my misgivings, this is an accessible novel. The title refers to a Long Island town Barry has been obsessed with since childhood; it’s now nothing but a crummy strip mall. What better symbol of the emptiness of wealth? I’d say this is a pretty solid read for Jonathan Safran Foer and Tom Perrotta fans. It’s packed full of noteworthy quotes and talking points that could keep book clubs busy for hours, and it will fizz in the brain for weeks more.

A couple of favorite passages:

“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. The Greyhound was like a branch of our armed forces. And Barry was a buck private.”

“Even his dreams of crossing our country by bus were supplemented with the possibility of one day setting his journeys down on paper. On the Road but in thoughtful middle-aged prose.”

[Patricija || book.duo · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 (toks labiau geranoriškas, nei stiprus)/5

Sūnus autistas, kuris nekalba ir turbūt niekada nebeprabils. Žmona, kurios niekada nemylėjai. Universitetas, kuriame išmokai visiems patikti ir mėgti Hemingvėjų ir Fitzgeraldą. Amerika, kurios apatiją keičianti isterija pykdo taip pat labai, kaip ir sūnus, darantis tą patį, ką ir šalis, kurią vienu metu ir idealizuoji, ir niekini. Ar niekini todėl, kad visai neprisidedi prie to, jog Amerika būtų didi? O gal dėl to, kad ji tobulai atspindi tavo paties vidinę tuštumą, tokią neišsemiamą, kad nepripildytų joks sėkmės ežeras? Ar iš tiesų nori Ameriką pažinti? Ar iš tiesų nori pažinti savo sūnų, kai bijai, kad jame nėra nieko, su kuo būtų verta pažindintis? O tavyje ar yra?

Istorija, pakaitomis pasakojama vienodai nesimpatiškų veikėjų, nuo pat pirmojo puslapio nėra nei maloni, nei lengva, nors iš pirmo žvilgsnio ir atrodo absurdiškai paprasta ir milijonus kartų girdėta. Tekstas, nepaprastai sodrus ir perpildytas nuorodų į Amerikos kultūrą, kartais balansuoja ant surrealizmo ribos, vienu metu ir pykdo, ir masina – labiausiai baisiai stipriu absurdo pojūčiu. Bet ar ne tokia ir yra Amerika, kai žiūri į ją iš šono? Vis dėlto, kiek pikta tai, kad labiausiai įtraukia ne pagrindinio veikėjo, o jo žmonos naratyvas: kiek gali jaustis amerikiete, kai visų esi laikoma imigrante? Kiek gali būti gera motina sūnui, kuriam nelabai svarbu ar su juo mama, ar viena iš dešimties jo terapeučių? Ar jas samdai tik tam, kad nesijaustum tokia kalta? Ar jos vaikui lemta ją taip pat netinkamai interpretuoti, kaip interpretuoja visi kiti? Ar jos meilei, visai kaip jos tėvams, net jei atsikračiusiems 83% savo akcento, visada reikės subtitrų? Ar atsiras kalba, į kurią savo sūnui tuos subtitrus galėtum išversti, kad jis tave suprastų? Ar jis klausosi? Jei klausosi, ar girdi? O kiti?

Knyga vietomis primena slogų sapną, vietomis įtraukia, o tuoj pagauni galvodamas apie šitos kelionės prasmę – ar tokia iš viso yra? Vietomis atrodo nereikalingai snobiška, melancholiška, lėta, klampi, o vietomis per daug akivaizdi, tarsi jau girdėta, pritempta, stereotipiška ne tik iš idėjos. Bet tikriausiai tuo amerikietiškoji svajonė ir yra ypatinga: kad ir kokia nuvalkiota, vis dar masina taip pat stipriai, kaip bet kada anksčiau. Vis dėlto, jei pirmajai knygos pusei galėčiau skirti aukščiausią įvertinimą, antroji kėlė daug nuobodulio ir pasimetimo: ar turiu ieškoti logikos, ar viskas tik metafora? Kiek knygos erzinimo „iš idėjos“ gali pakelti? Ir kiek satyros apie šiandieninę Ameriką man norisi į save sugerti? Įdomus skaitinys, ypač prezidentinių pasikeitimų fone, bet, deja, apart kelių LABAI gerų minčių ir kokybiškos literatūros paliekamo pojūčio, nieko labai sensacingo.

[Gene · Rating 2 out of 5]

Some unique, puzzling aspects of this book:

Virtually every character is identified, immediately, by their race or ethnicity. The narrator is whatever the opposite of colourblind is: colour comes first, then everything else. I’m unsure of the purpose of this.

Objects, on the other hand, are assigned dollar values. This actually makes sense much of the time as Barry, the protagonist, has a limited amount of cash on him on his trip, but it’s still jarring. It reminded me of the end of each episode of the repulsive show 2 Broke Girls, where they ran what was ostensibly a running tally of their savings.

This novel goes about assigning race to characters according to old stereotypes: there’s a Chinese doctor, a Filipina nanny, a Tamil lawyer, a black crack dealer, a Jewish hedge fund manager (Barry), and a Latino gardener. I could be wrong but I believe 100% of the wasps in the book (I counted four) are aging hippies. I mean come on. All this is possible but what’s striking is the near complete lack of characters who don't fit crude stereotypes. I’m not sure what the point of this is, or if it’s even intentional, but if it’s supposed to be subversive it did succeed in making me cringe.

More broadly, I’d say that the novel lacks in characters drawn empirically from real people; rather, the characters seem to be patched together to fill a role in the plot. This would include Barry. Seema, Barry’s wife, is an exception, she’s a well-rounded, conflicted, complicated character. She’s also, to me, probably for that reason, the only character who could be described as human, and the only one I find sympathetic.

I found Barry to be an unconvincing character. He's a hedge fund manager in the way Ross on Friends is a paleontologist: you keep being told he is one, but you never see him actually doing it. You’re also told that Barry excelled at swimming and lacrosse in college, which is similarly unconvincing given that he’s a 44-year-old guy who passes out from a trip on the Greyhound, and who never actually plays a sport or gets any exercise in the book, even in flashbacks, apart from a few laps in a pool when he’s teaching children to swim, this while wearing “swim trunks”. The latter reminded me of a phrase in an Alice Munro story, “athletic outfit”, which struck me as a dead giveaway that Alice Munro has never played a sport in her life.

The book’s writing style may be described as ninth grade level. This isn’t necessarily bad - Picasso painted in a childlike way as they say. There’s a hint toward the end of the novel that’s it’s intended to be in the style of Hemingway, but come on. Hemingway used simple language to tell simple stories. Shteyngart uses simplistic language to describe a juvenile story about a very rich man who loves expensive watches and sexy girls who takes a Greyhound bus ride across America during which he meets super poor people. If this book’s style is reminiscent of any writer it would be Donald Trump.

One final point, this time in the book’s favour: I was expecting that given the sloppy writing and flimsy plot, I’d find lots of continuity problems. For instance, a massage parlour from Barry’s past is called “Seoul Cycle”, which I assume is an unfunny pun on “SoulCycle”. I thought that he’d slipped there, as SoulCycle is relatively new, but it turns out that while the timeline of the book would have put him at Seoul Cycle sometime before 2010, SoulCycle actually dates back to 2006. Also, I found it potentially inconsistent that Barry as a kid had begged his father to take him to the R-rated Wall Street, as I figured he’d have been over 18 when it came out, but no, he would have been around 15. I also thought it potentially anachronistic that Barry listened to Aphex Twin in college (roughly 1990-94), but it turns out Aphex Twin has been around since 1985. Who knew? Wow … Aphex Twin really was before his time! Anyway, I couldn’t find any errors of this nature.

Despite the general negativity above, I actually had a good time reading this book. Honestly, I turned against this book around halfway through and hate-read the rest, which was frankly more enjoyable than reading, say, the novels of George Eliot or Proust, which I greatly admire but find too boring to get through. Basically I liked this book in the same way I love watching Donald Trump rallies and reading the YouTube comments section afterward.

[Alex · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.5 rounded down

Gary Shteynghart’s Lake Success has been much hyped as one of the first works of literary fiction directly delving into the months leading up to the election of Donald Trump as President of the United States. Despite having the occasional glimpse of well crafted satire and a lead character written to endear, Shteynghart has grossly missed the mark, attempting to redeem the individuals largely responsible for the political calamity we find ourselves in and asking us to have empathy for those undeserving of it.

Lake Success largely follows Barry Cohen, a moderate Republican, hedge fund manager whose marriage and business venture appear on the verge of collapse, the former under the weight of a disabled child and the latter embroiled in shady business practices that Barry refuses to acknowledge are morally and legally questionable.

On the verge of financial and personal collapse, Barry sets out on a personal journey of self-discovery, taking a Greyhound bus across the southern United States to find his former college sweetheart to show her that he is not the cynical money hungry banker she refused to marry. Meeting various personalities on the way, until finally reconnecting and rekindling something with his ex and discovering through her son the desire to be a better father.

As Barry has this journey, his wife Seema, must also confront her frustrations in marriage and the difficulties raising a low functioning autistic boy, releasing these frustrations in a torrid love affair and potentially giving up her husband to investigating authorities.

In the backdrop is the 2016 US Presidential election, with the moderate Republican Barry disgusted by Trump’s mocking of a disabled person but positive Trump will lose (although he repeatedly notes his and his colleagues support of Trump’s tax position) and Seema terrified of what the world will look like if he were to win.

Although well written and engaging, Lake Success never figures out what it wants to be. On the one hand there is a streak of satire, offering a finance tycoon whose naïveté is beyond credulity and who indignantly refuses to acknowledge how his actions have played in creating not only his personal circumstances but also those of Trump, how his gross amounts of wealth and his financing of Republican efforts have laid the groundwork of the ugliness that the 2016 campaign laid bear.

On the other hand, Shteynghart’s story comes off as way too sincere, with the author eagerly wanting the likes of Barry to find redemption for their wrong doings, even if never recognizing how harmful those crimes in fact are and never facing consequences of any significance.

This book begs the question of what role literature plays in understanding our political zeitgeist, how stories like Lake Success help create or deny social license for behaviours and help assign judgement for those who have caused harm. In 2018, with the United States seeing a worsening of economic inequality, where the ramifications of the 2008 financial crisis continue to reverberate, and where bankers have still not faced much of any penalty, I question why we need a story where a wealthy hedge fund manager finds redemption; I question why we need a story that seeks to wash the hands of finance in the Trump world they have largely created.

There will be many works of literature that seek to provide insight into this absurdist political climate that will resonate and offer the stories we need to hear. Lake Success, unfortunately, is not such a work.

[Jan Rice · Rating 4 out of 5]

For a satire, this is a sad book. Barry -- I wanted to write Gary -- is all about control but has reached the limits of the controllable.

Turns out the process of confronting the uncontrollable started way back in childhood when he used his prodigious mental capacity to offset introversion by teaching himself "friend moves," literally by reprogramming himself. It seemed like a good idea at the time! Daily he practiced ten conversational opening lines, then ten counter-responses he might receive to each of those, and then ten potential responses from him for each of those ten. He did it to teach himself small talk, and it worked; he became "friendly."

Thus he became equipped to escape his sadly lacking family and adapt to a current reality: to enter the world of finance, to make a mint, and to further signal his success by "marrying an accomplished woman and taking her off the job market" -- like a trophy wife the first time around. Moreover, and once again conforming to some peculiar prescriptive advice of the times, a wife from another culture.

But something to do with the available bandwidth had been exhausted. Something gained, but something lost. Then adversity strikes in the form of an autistic son, destabilizing the whole precariously assembled house of cards.

At first I thought the book was going to consist of an extended downhill tumble as in Bonfire of the Vanities, but although it's not quite that predictable, redemption is in limited supply for the protagonist.

Hence the sadness.

The book is quite readable.

There is lots of sex, but the overall effect is not erotic. Nor could I understand why all the women are jumping into bed with the protagonist. You shouldn't think it's his money; not at the point in time of the book.

Barry did not come in clear to me. I mixed him up with Gary.

This is my second book recently in which the outcome of a presidential election settles what happens with a relationship (the first being Americanah and the Obama win). In each case the relationship is one that doesn't have enough going for it on its own.

3 1/2 stars rounded up to 4

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

I don't quite know what this novel wants to say about ourselves and our times, but I can say that my Kindle told me I was 44% of the way through the book (about 145 pages) before I looked up from this novel and said “Why I am actually concerned about the fate of all these loathsome people?” I think that is a sign that this book can be read for the sheer love of good story-telling, no matter what you think about the book's characters, or its message. I also laughed sometimes, which redeems almost any other fault a book might have, in my sight.

I say this because I noticed that someone wrote here that she couldn't read this book because the main character abandons this autistic son (that's absolutely true, he does), which is a behavior so repellent that she could not bear to continue. I think that abandoning books simply because the hero engages in non-admirable behavior means that you are going to deprive yourself of the company of a lot of great stories, which is your loss, really. However, I also sympathize with the person who says, in effect, if I wanted to spend a long time in the company of repulsively selfish behavior, it'd turn on the news.

In any event, this book starts off at a great gallop and continues that way for quite a way, so I didn't fret too much about whether or not it was supposed to be to the Trump era what Tom Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities was to the Reagan era, or alternately a book whose message is: “If F. Scott Fitzgerald were alive today, he'd turn over in his grave.” Both of those are possible readings.

Like Wolfe's Sherman McCoy, Barry Cohen is an inexplicably big deal in the investment world, even though we, the reader, can see he is a dolt. I give the author some credit for not giving into a Wolfe-like hidden sympathy for either his rich knucklehead hero or his wife, who turns out to be almost Barry's equal in the production of grievance and self-regard. Brand-names-as-social-identifiers, which I also associate with Wolfe, come hot and heavy throughout the book, especially brands of watches, about which Barry has quite a lot to say (usually to himself in his interior monologues).

As for Fitzgerald, the hero also waxes nostalgic about reading same, before and while attending Princeton in his long-ago youth, but I think the difference between the two books can be adequately summarized by contrasting the following quotes:

Gatsby: “Just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had.”

Lake Success: “All I know is I never had any advantages. I wasn’t even lucky enough to be born to immigrant parents.”

A satirical detail I enjoyed: Baltimore (the first city that Barry takes to on the lam) being overrun by German tourists eager to photograph scenes of urban degradation they've seen on the TV series The Wire.

Finally, I want to discuss something that is the most spoilery spoiler of all, dealing as it does with the absolutely final sentence of the novel. You have been warned. Toward the end of the book, the hero acquires the nickname “Bird Daddy.” The final line of this novel is: “And the Bird Daddy watched over all of it, satisfied with the remains of the world, before he, too, picked himself up, washed the oil and dirt off his steady hands, closed up his light-filled mausoleum, and flew home for good.” I said to myself: I guess that means he died. I consulted the Long-Suffering Wife, and she confirmed that this was probably what the writer intended to say. I ask: why not say so? The rest of the novel has been pleasantly free of incomprehensible flourishes, why go all goopy in the last sentence? For example, when the author wants to let you know that Barry is getting off a bus, he writes something like “Barry got off the bus.” I guess just saying “He died” is considered insufficiently profound, but it seems like, my whole reading life, I've been looking up from the end of novels and saying, “Did he just croak, or I am once again missing something that is painfully obvious to everybody else?”

I received a free electronic advance review copy of this book via Netgalley and Penguin Random House.

[Neale · Rating 3 out of 5]

I don’t think Barry puts much, or any thought, in his decision to just, suddenly on the spur of the moment, leave his pregnant wife and autistic child. Bleeding from scratches administered by the nanny and his wife. the only thing he takes with him are a bunch of watches. Not just any watches mind you, very expensive watches. Barry has a sort of fetish for watches. Is this just a fetish or is Barry autistic like his son? Maybe on a lower level of the spectrum. Again, I don’t think he is thinking too far ahead when he decides to throw his phone in the bin and later his credit cards. This is a guy whose existence relies on his phone and credit cards. Barry was/is a hedge fund manager. Successful? Not really, but that has not changed the fact that he is filthy rich. Barry has amassed his fortune with charm and storytelling rather than skill. However Barry is going to start over from scratch, rediscover the “real” America. One that does not contain mobile phones or credit cards apparently. He jumps on a bus, which proves an exceedingly difficult and painful process for someone like Barry, and decides to go and see his ex-girlfriend from his college days with an unrealistic view of rekindling the ancient relationship. Barry is not the only one who feels a need for change. His wife Seema is slowly drowning in her interminable battle with raising Shiva, and Barry has been gone for less than a day when Seema hardly struggles to fend off an advance from Luis, a writer who lives many floors below her in their building. The chapters alternate between both characters perspective as the narrative unfolds. The underlining theme in the background seems to be Trump and the state America has risen, or fallen to, depending on your political view, and for me this book is a satire on America’s political state, and Trump. I believe Barry to be a representation of Trump. A man who at heart, really doesn’t know what he is doing and yet controls billions of dollars with the accounts he manages. He uses confidence as a form of shield and his bravado is a façade. I found this novel to be quite funny at times. It contained characters you love to hate and was well written and an enjoyable read. 3.5 stars.

[Donna Davis · Rating 4 out of 5]

“’All I know is I never had any advantages,’ Barry said. ‘I wasn’t even lucky enough to be born to immigrant parents.’”

Schteyngart’s wry new novel takes a swift kick at the funny bone of the American ruling class. My thanks go to Net Galley and Random House for the review copy.

Barry grew up as the son of the pool guy, the man that serviced the swimming pools of the wealthy. Now between one trade and another—some of it inside, some of it legal—he has become one of the wealthiest men in Manhattan. His entitlement and vast privilege rubs up against his flimsy social conscience; meanwhile he tries to avoid coming to terms with his two-year-old son’s Autism. (When the children of the very rich are Autistic, it’s referred to as “on the Spectrum.”) His midlife crisis comes to a head when rumblings suggest he may be held accountable for his dubious business practices, and with his marriage teetering on the brink and the law breathing heavily down his collar, Barry flings himself onto a Greyhound bus and rubs elbows with the hoi polloi. Obsessed with becoming a mentor to someone with brown skin, Barry takes his rolling case of impossibly expensive wristwatches and embarks on a series of failed friendships and romances as he hurls himself due south and then west to San Diego. Who knows? Maybe he will even start an urban watch fund so that children that live in poverty can learn to appreciate fine timepieces.

Humor is a hard field for many authors. Some get stuck on a single joke, which is funny at the outset but tired by the end of an entire novel; others simply bomb, and unlike stand-up comics, the bad humor is enshrined forever in published form. So I approach humorous novels cautiously; but Schteyngart is no novice, though he is new to me, he has a good sized body of humorous work before this. The result is smooth and professional, but also original and at times laugh-out-loud funny.

The ending is brilliant.

This book will be available September 5, 2018.

[Faith · Rating 2 out of 5]

I kept going, hoping for some sharp satire or insight about our society, but if it’s there I missed it. Frankly, the description of the hedge fund manager protagonist seemed too realistic to be satirical. Perhaps I would have liked the book more if I had never met any hedge fund managers. Just because a book mentions Trump a lot of times doesn’t mean it illuminates our times. After reading a third of the book I didn’t want to spend any more time with these people. I received a free copy of this book from the publisher.

[Dorothy · Rating 5 out of 5]

I know people who say they can't abide reading books that don't have characters that they can empathize or identify with. It's easy to understand that instinctual need to feel good about the characters that populate the book one has committed to reading. But I would argue that sometimes there is much to be learned from reading about unsympathetic characters; characters who, not to put too fine a point on it, are complete and total jerks. Barry Cohen is such a character.

Barry is everyone's stereotype of the narcissistic Wall Street hedge fund manager, who lives in his own self-deluded fantasy world and persuades others to trust him with their money and then loses it while amassing his own personal fortune. Investigated by the SEC, he skates free by paying a large fine but never spends any time in jail and never gets banned from further trading and so he continues to do the same thing over and over again. Sound like a story you might have heard in the news?

There is, of course, more to Barry. He has a wife named Seema, who is a first-generation American of Tamil Indian parents. She is an extremely smart non-practicing lawyer who gave up her career to stay home with their autistic son. Yes, the tragedy of the otherwise dream life that Barry and Seema live is that their three-year-old son, Shiva, is profoundly autistic - or "on the spectrum" in current terminology. He cannot speak and is unresponsive to his parents. He has a full-time nanny, a Philippine immigrant, who actually cares for him, and he has an entire team of therapists who work with him weekly to try to bring him into a functioning relationship with the world around him. This is all very expensive. Lucky that his parents are billionaires.

When the walls begin to close in on Barry - his hedge fund fails; the SEC investigators are getting closer; he can't deal with the fact of his son's autism; his marriage is failing - he flees. He takes a Greyhound bus to go and "look for America," as Paul Simon once wrote. (He can leave because he knows that Seema will stay, that she will not abandon their son as he is doing.)

"Like your first ankle monitor bracelet or your fourth divorce, the occasional break with reality was an important part of any hedge-fund titan's biography."

In fact, Barry is looking for the simpler life that he once lived as a college student with his first love. He goes in search of that woman, hoping to reclaim the magic of that time in his life.

His college love was from Richmond but now lives in El Paso. He heads south. Through Baltimore, then Richmond to stop at his girlfriend's old home and visit her parents, south to Atlanta, then west through Birmingham, Jackson, Dallas, and finally on to El Paso. At each stop along the way, Shteyngart gives us quick portraits of communities and people all of which reveal another layer of Barry's self-absorbed and egotistical personality. Essentially, it is self-obsession all the way down.

Meanwhile, back in New York, Seema is facing her own demons, beginning an affair with a neighbor, and finally taking her own trip west, to the Midwest in her case, to visit her parents and perhaps reclaim her own personhood.

These are, in short, two imperfect characters flailing around in a world of self-deluded chaos of their own making, and the background of the whole thing is the presidential campaign of 2016 which just lends further impetus to the descent into entropy.

I thought the novel was brilliant. I didn't like Barry one little bit, although in the end I did have the faintest bit of sympathy for him and a bit more for Seema. I think if we are honest we can concede that there may just be the tiniest particle of Barry/Seema lurking in all of us.