And it is drop dead funny, lie in bed in the morning reading more even though you should be rising to start your day engaging. Russian. Jewish. 1993 American. So encompassing that as I was sitting out in the California June sun this afternoon, I felt only partly present; another part of me was in a lower east side office dealing with psychotic Russian fathers of mafiya Russian sons named The Groundhog. Or in a fictional Eastern European former Soviet nation, Stolovaya (Russian for cafeteria) and its down at the medieval heels capital Prava (part Praha/Prague in the go go 90s, part Pravda meets the National Enquirer).
I simply wanted to take a moment to do something that "Housekeeping vs The Dirt" did: try to represent, not "the text" and its meanings and successes/failures, but instead a record of my own reading of it. And so: I begin reading it on a whim, finding it on my wife's nightstand, and wondering what it was doing there. Not that my wife isn't a voracious reader; she is. But for a moment I wondered if this book slipped in undercover, a wild and wooly Philip Roth meets V Nabokov, Evelyn Waugh and Martin Amis with an accent that gets more pronounced as it imbibes more alcohol (of which there is a stunning amount). I am not sure why it is named as it is, unless Vladimir Girshkin, the main character, is said debutante...more likely it is one of those "how can we sell more of these? let's get a chick lit title and surprise the hell out of all those beach blanket readers from the Hamptons!
Vladimir's story is "part P. T. Barnum, part V. I. Lenin." It takes aim at the new immigrant experience, as well as the American and Wester ex-pat experience (again, I kept seeing Czech Republic, and all those Americans descending on the New Place to Be). It sends up the weird Bohemia of Manhattan in the early '90s, and the weirder Bohemia of Eastern Europe after the wall fall. So much of the language is comic, you don't expect the accumulation of comic moments to end up serio-comic, with quite a lot to think about after all.
One moment worth considering. At the beginning Mr Rybakov, the "fan man" who cheerfully introduces himself as psychotic, is trying to get our hero to help him gain his U.S. citizenship. (He almost got it but failed the citizenship ceremony; when it came to the part about protecting the US from enemies domestic and foreign, Mr. R began to beat an enemy-appearing hapless Turkish man with his crutches). When Vladimir says that there is nothing he can do to influence the INS, "ten hundred-dollar bills, ten portraits of purse-lipped Benjamin Franklin, were unfurled on the table to form a paper fan."
First, instinct: Vlad grabs the hundreds and stuffs them in his shirt. Then, American reflex: "What are you doing? You cannot give me money. This is not Russia!"
And the response: "Everywhere is Russia," said Mr. Rybakov philosophically. Everywhere you go...Russia."
This turns out to be way truer than the reader can possibly predict. For a Russian, and especially for a Russian Jew...and an immigrant at that...Russia is everywhere, and what is happening in post-Communist Russia is, indeed, happening in other places as well.
What that means exactly is the burden of the book, and the sum total of the many many spot-on details of psychology and economics in this novel. Let's just say mafiya, Ponzi schemes, glossy brochures advertising nonexistent industries, uncertain allegiances of former security forces, and the kinds of ethical and personal quandaries such things are likely to engender, flourish in places like New York City and Miami.
I wonder if Bernie Madoff is reading this novel in prison. Hey Bernie, did you like the part where the mafiya Groundhog gets beaten by Slavic airport guards? Oh that side splitting comic sense of justice...
PS Here is the picture of Gary Shteyngart on the back, which partly made me want to read this:
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