The Great Russian-American Snow Job
Review by  Paul Lembersky

Absurdistan by Gary Shteyngart
Hardcover: 352 pages
Publisher: Random House (May 2, 2006)

Maybe I’m just like my uncle Pinchik, formerly of No Big Deal Books and Accessories, who prefers his absurd inspired, his comedy light-footed (as opposed to heavy-handed), and his Borshcht Belt kitsch delivered in small servings. 

Call me picky, but I think Russian-flavored American-cooked kitsch has seen better days. Take early Woody Allen’s silly but memorable Love and Death, a re-imagined Tolstoy for the poor with a pinch of Bergman for the dumb. Say what you will, but that was a funny movie. Still makes you giggle like it’s 1975. Who knows? Maybe it takes a natural born, non-naturalized wit to turn another culture — or his own culture — into mush with verve (and impunity). Maybe the latter will always be judged more harshly by his heavy-accented peers. Or maybe it’s just harder to get away with aesthetic murder if biculturalism happens to be your racket.    

Enter Gary Shteyngart, the Leningrad-born, Queens-raised 34-year-old boy genius and heir apparent to Nikolai Gogol, Vladimir Nabokov, Saul Bellow and Woody Allen, or so the dust jacket encourages you to think. Flattering comparisons by the blurb-friendly journalists aside, Shteyngart’s forced and unfunny novel Absurdistan succeeds in insulting your intelligence in more ways than one, the lesser of its offenses being the deliberate and repeated trashing of every ethnic group imaginable. This should come as no surprise. The fact is that Russians, be they international authors or everybody else, don’t take kindly to the dogmas of political correctness. For better or worse, 70 years in a very correct, very suffocating Soviet political climate turned PC-bashing into a favorite Russian pastime on both sides of the Atlantic.    

The book’s far graver fault, however, stems from the author’s over-the-top, anything-for-a-laugh sensibility, his cavalier indifference to Russian culture on the one hand and calculated pandering to the Western literati’s tastes on the other. You can sprinkle your pages with names like Chekhov, Mandelstam, Nabokov, Hawthorne and Melville all you want; you can deliver knowing winks to the Russian Lit. 101 crowd by making your protagonist throw shoes at his manservant or have the manservant call the protagonist batiushka (little father); you can cram your novel with perfunctory – and tasteless — jokes (i.e. “Stalin had killed half my family. Arguably the wrong half”), but as my uncle Pinchik would say: “That still don’t make you no stand-up Kafka or cut-rate Goncharov, dorogoi tovarishch i drug” (dear comrade and friend).   

The book’s unlikely and unlikable narrator is Misha Borisovich Vainberg, the 30-year-old, 325 pound son of Russia’s 1,238th richest man, who gets killed by Oleg the Moose and his crony whose name escapes me (as it well should, what with 40 or so two-dimensional characters scattered throughout the book) while the video camera-toting German tourist who likes to crawl on all fours… but wait a minute. If you really care about Misha’s vital statistics, or what transpires in the course of his 318 page long quest for a U.S. visa, or his relationship with his voluptuous Bronx girlfriend Rouenna, or his other flame, Nana, or the assorted Russian criminals, prostitutes and other stereotypes who fail to bring Shteyngart’s much-hyped second novel to life — stop right here and rush to a Barnes & Noble near you. I don’t want to spoil your fun. 

Just remember one thing before you go: when around page 50 it hits you like a sledgehammer that this ailing whale of a novel averaging two plot twists and as many italicized Russian obscenities per page is going nowhere or, more accurately, about to go belly up any paragraph now, the ingenious author in a postmodernist feat of self-parody pulls out of the hat his own alter ego, Jerry Shteynfarb, a purveyor of sub-literary hogwash that he spoon feeds to the ever-gullible American reading public. Mark my words: As moments of truth go, you can’t beat that. As a sort of literary safety device, though, it does little to help deflect accusations that the author is culpable of doing just that. Just like that museum exhibit called The Death of the Novel and the Birth of Sitcom (another example of Shteyngart’s many lame witticisms), the device merely points at a problem that the author fails to tackle.         

The exclusive club of postwar Jewish American comic novelists that includes Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth, and even that closet half-Jew J.D. Salinger, whose talent, in the words of Alfred Kazin, was primarily comedic, is indeed a coveted place to be. However, to get in you have to pay your membership dues. Gary Shteyngart has yet to do that.        

Call me a snob – I know my uncle Pinchik sometimes does – but, as a rule, I shy away from debut novels. Handbook, Hand Job, Snow Job — it’s all hand-me-downs to me. Turns out sophomore efforts, either side of the slump, leave me cold too. Give me your third novel, you not-so-poor, you multicultural darlings of the literary establishment you... Show me whatcha got other than that stale joke of a khui (or is it khui of a joke?) waiting to be serviced by the ever-ready, well-oiled media machine. The night is still young, and so are you. Go ahead then, make me laugh, make me cry, make me feel OK that we are all in the same boat, or just off it. But don’t make me yawn my way through that ill-conceived The Death of Literature and the Birth of the Sitcom exhibit. I’m still waiting.