The Beet Generation
In modern fiction, Russian-born Americans are all the rage. And if that requires a bit of "Slav-face," so be it

By Emily Gould

In a sun-dappled café on Manhattan's Lower East Side, it’s getting toward the end of my lunch with author Gary Shteyngart and I still haven’t gotten up the nerve to ask him what I think is my most important question, mostly because I can’t figure out how not to make it sound like an insult.  I want to know whether he has noticed that Russian immigrant authors—especially writers who, like him, write explicitly about Russia and Russianness—are So Hot Right Now, and why he thinks that is. I take another bite of the brownie sundae we’re sharing (he’d insisted on dessert, even though, he says, “my cholesterol is something out of science fiction”) and just put it out there.  He pauses, but only momentarily. “There might be an overkill now,” he hazards. He mimes the action of someone picking up a book—“Another Russian writer!” and putting it down in disgust.

Overkill or no, the fact is that a generation of Russian-American writers have come of age and begun to document their experiences in fiction, much of which contains autobiographical elements. And if their work currently constitutes a publishing trendlet, Shteyngart has only himself to blame. The success of his 2002 debut, The Russian Debutante’s Handbook, which has sold (per Nielsen Bookscan, which tracks about 70 percent of booksellers) more than 100,000 copies—inaugurated a flurry of book deals for young Russian writers, several of whom (Lara Vapnyar, Anya Ulinich) he has since penned blurbs for. Like the spate of South Asian novels that appeared on Barnes & Noble tables and on book club reading lists after the success of Jhumpa Lahiri’s The God of Small Things in 1997, deals for books by young Russians continue to close. In the past year alone, Publishers Marketplace reported deals for Mark Budman’s My Life at First Try, an “autobiographical debut novel that details the Russian Jewish immigrant experience” and Irina Reyn's What Happened to Anna K, “a modern-day take on Tolstoy's classic tragedy, set among a community of Russian-Jewish immigrants in New York City struggling with issues of identity, fidelity, and community,” Ilana Ozernoy’s On Patriarch’s Ponds, “a chronicle of the interior lives of ordinary Russians in the Putin era intertwined with the author's personal story as the daughter of Soviet dissidents,” Sofka Zinovieff's Red Princess, about her Communist princess grandmother, and Sana Krasikov's One More Year, a collection of stories mostly about Russian and Georgian women.

What’s driving this trend? Well, Americans have two enduring literary fascinations: the outsider who can bring a fresh perspective to America, and (as the native fiction scene grows increasingly cosseted and academic) the writer with a sellable life story. What's better, in that case, than a witty, suffering exotic with Chekhov and Dostoyevsky in his bloodstream, or an underdog whose very completion of a book in English represents a triumph? “We’ve been released into American culture,” is how Keith Gessen, another Russian-born novelist debuting in 2008, puts it. There’s also a yearning to be educated by an exotic authority: Much the same way The Kite Runner became a bestseller because people were curious about contemporary Afghanistan in a way that couldn’t be sated by reading the front page of the newspaper, American readers are looking to fiction to inform them about what’s going on in Russia without wading through reams of analysis.

Gary Shteyngart and Keith Gessen came to this country as children, while Lara Vapnyar and Anya Ulinich arrived early in their adulthoods.  All four are, to borrow a phrase from Shteyngart, “equally at home on both sides of the Atlantic,” although Shteyngart likes to adopt a bewildered tone when writing about modern-day Russia (see his New Yorker essay on the pop duo tATu) and Vapnyar reserves a somewhat similar pitch for her descriptions of America. To differing extents, their work inevitably deals with ethnic stereotypes, and contains some commonalities of style and theme: a wry, fatalistic humor, a sense of being connected to historical force majeure, and characters with an unhealthy dependence on vodka. Whether or not they feel themselves to be part of a literary trend or a literary tradition, their Russianness has become a marketing tool for their publishers. Shteyngart talks about how the paperback of Absurdistan was consciously marketed as an “accessory book” that “dudes on the [Williamsburg-bound] L train will be reading to show that they can read.”  “A touching and very funny novel in the tradition of Russian realism,” reads the back cover copy of Vapnyar’s Memoirs of a Muse—whatever that’s supposed to mean.

But how do these writers feel about the fact that their biographies or their last names automatically make them members of a club? Ulinich, for one, resists categorization. She came to America in her late teens—a back story she shares with the protagonist of her debut novel, Petropolis. “I'm 34 years old. Seventeen years of my life were spent in Moscow, and the next seventeen in the U.S. I enjoy this symmetry.” She is bemused—and not exactly thrilled—that a reading event she’s participating in at the Eldridge Street Synagogue (with Lara Vapnyar and Sana Krasikov) is called “Rocking the Gulag.” The event’s description proclaims that it’s a celebration of “Jewish fiction” and promises “musical interludes … and vodka.”

“In the most broad sense, the term Gulag refers to Soviet prison camps between 1917 and 1991,” Ulinich explains. “What I, or anyone of my generation, has to do with ‘rocking’ it, I don't know. I was intending to read a story that wasn't in any way Russia-related. Also, what is ‘Jewish fiction’? Is there also ‘Jewish math,’ ‘Jewish sculpture?’ Or is it inadvertent, like having a big nose and curly hair—as long as one is Jewish, one's fiction is Jewish, just as one's nose is large, and one's hair is curly? Ethnically, I'm a Jew (as was stated in my parents' Soviet passports). I was also raised culturally Soviet, with minimal exposure to the Jewish tradition beyond the stories of my wonderful grandparents. I'm also an atheist. I'd like to think that I just write fiction. But this designation, plus the ‘Rocking the Gulag,’ plus the vodka, is there in order to sell tickets to the event.”

Ulinich concedes that as long as those tickets get sold, though, she’s not protesting. “I'll wear a kokoshnik and dance with a bear if that will sell a million copies of my book and pay for my kids' college,” she says. (The latter might, or might not, be a dig at Shteyngart, who shares a park bench with a bear in one of his press photos).

Vapnyar is a more interesting case. She is the most authentically Russian member of the club for the simple reason that her spoken English is still somewhat wobbly. She's been able to distill that linguistic insecurity into an emphatically plain, nearly featureless writing style the New Yorker fell in love with. It gave her a career: "I had never written fiction before, in any language, and I spoke English with a monstrous accent and tons of grammatical mistakes," she reminisces in a recent essay. It also made her a few enemies. “When my first story appeared in the New Yorker… one of my American friends said, ‘What should I do to get published in the New Yorker? Screw up my English?’” (This magazine's editor once opined in a public forum that Vapnyar's fiction “gets published for the same reason Thai elephants' paintings get exhibited in galleries”; he has since recanted, and even translated one of Vapnyar's short stories into Russian).

Gessen, for his part, resists being interviewed as a Russian writer, claiming that his semiautobiographical first novel—which features two Russian immigrants and a sustained riff on the October Revolution—isn’t enough to lump him in with this group. “My outsiderness is pretty thin,” he says. But this kind of measured response quickly gives way to something more complicated. “I do think that Russian culture is the best culture in the world,” he proclaims, after talking about how he spent his childhood “very embarrassed by my immigrant parents" who didn’t speak English very well. “I’ve spent a lot of my life trying to squeeze the Russian out of myself,” he finally admits.

Shteyngart, on the other hand, would squeeze more Russian into himself if he could.  Like his fictional protagonists, he attended a small Midwestern college where, for the first time, his Russianness gave him a plausible claim to being special. “Suddenly, being an immigrant was the coolest thing imaginable. ‘Ask me about my other ethnicity!’ I wanted to write a musical—‘I am ethnic, hear me roar!’” he riffs, sounding more like Robin Williams on an improv tear than, say, Nabokov. Still, his immigrant status—and the poverty that came with it—had been a source of shame growing up. He says he had only two shirts, both of which were identical, prompting the secretary of his Hebrew school to take up a collection among other students. He spent the rest of the year in their hand-me-downs. This, compounded by the fact that he didn’t lose his accent until age 14, and didn’t start watching TV until age 12, made him something of an outcast. Books saved him; the subsequent success has perhaps even turned him into a sex symbol of sorts. Early in his bestselling second novel Absurdistan, one character counsels another on acting too Russian. “If you want to be a Russian, you have to think of what kind of image you want to project. Everyone already thinks we’re bandits and whores. We’ve got to rebrand ourselves.”

This is satire, of course, but it made me wonder whether émigré writers worry that their characters’ behavior—and their own—reflects broad-stroke caricatures of how Russians are supposed to act. Is Shteyngart, like his characters, a maudlin, gluttonous alcoholic? “I’m trying not to drink as much, because I’ve been getting sick a lot” he tells me with surprising candor, adding that he’s restricting himself to only three or four nights of “being social” per week, and that on these nights he limits himself to four drinks. Abstemious! Gessen also cops to a “drinking problem.” And during the meals I share with them, Shteyngart and Gessen evince a clear love of eating: the former pushes a slice of prosciutto onto my plate while reminiscing about smuggling kielbasa into his Hebrew school as a child, while the latter tries to coax me into ordering a po’ boy sandwich even though I tell him I’ve already eaten a slice of pizza. (“That’s not really eating. Sometimes I eat a slice of pizza because I’m bored.”)

And what about Ulinich, whose first novel’s protagonist comes to America as a mail-order bride from an industrial town called Asbestos 2? “I'm an equal-opportunity stereotype enforcer and shatterer,” she says. “I have no national allegiance when I write. I don't like national allegiances in general. I don't let my kid pledge allegiance in school. It's not my role to give my readers some kind of rounded, objective, and definitive view of Russia and Russians. I only represent my characters to my readers.” 

Ulinich is about to make good on her word: her next book isn’t Russia-related at all. It’s about a high school teacher named Washington Spinach. Shteyngart’s next novel is also a bit of a departure; it's set in near-future New York and is “a comedy about the collapse of America. I’d already done the collapse of Russia.” (The protagonist will still be of Russian origin: baby steps). As the Beet Generation, as Ulinich's husband jokingly calls the group, cement their reputations, their subject pool begins to gradually, cautiously transcend the authors' origins. It will be interesting to see whether this triggers a change in the way these writers are marketed. Perhaps, by that time, we’ll have found a new culture to make exotic.