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Lake Success

by Gary Shteyngart (Goodreads Author)

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read in August 2018

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Gene said: " 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 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. ...more "

Aug 04, 2018 06:42PM · see review