Gary Shteyngart has a knack for capturing the sense of dislocation and loss associated with the immigrant experience, displayed in novels like The Russian Debutante's Handbook (2002), Absurdistan (2006), and most poignantly in his 2014 hilarious memoir Little Failure. Born into Jewish family in Leningrad, the former Soviet Union, Shteyngart moved to Queens with his parents at the age of 7, experiencing what might be charitably described as a rocky start to his new life in the US. Lake Success (Random House, 2018), Shteyngart's latest novel, is a tragicomedy about hedge-fund manager Barry Cohen, who abandons his career and family for a cross-country bus ride to rediscover himself. Think of it as a dystopian On the Road for the Trump era, written by one our greatest satirists at a time when satire itself may be past its prime. Shteyngart and his family split their time between an apartment in Manhattan and a house in northern Dutchess County.
—Brian K. Mahoney
Brian K. Mahoney: You've written about the Hudson Valley in your work a number of times. The first time I noticed it was when you name-checked Stockade Tavern in a New Yorker piece. How did you first come to know the Hudson Valley?
Gary Shtyengart: Does Ellenville count as the Hudson Valley?
BKM: It sure does.
GS: Yeah, then for sure it was, we had a dacha, which is a Russian bungalow. Every summer, we'd go up there. It ended up having a chapter or so in my memoir, Little Failure. We spent a lot of time there, and it was also the happiest time of the year. Getting away from school is always happy for a kid. It was happy also because it was a Russian bungalow colony, and I felt really out of place.
I didn't speak English at first. In this bungalow colony, everybody spoke Russian. All the kids spoke Russian with me, so I felt like I really belonged. It was also really, really beautiful. My whole life, I have this idea of having a place somewhere upstate. Of course, I ended upon the other side of the river. It's just my favorite place in the world. I don't think there's anything more beautiful than the Mid-Hudson Valley.
BKM: I've seen your photos on Instagram documenting Overlook and Huckleberry Point, and other spots. You've taken to the natural world.
GS: Yeah no. I go on a lot of, and to say hikes may be overstating it, but a lot of walks/possible hikes. Almost every week I do something like that. There's just so many places. I love hiking around Lake Taghkanic and Poet's Walk, Mills Mansion, Overlook. The list goes on and on.
BKM: What's a good day for you when you're upstate?
GS: A good day is waking up around nine or 10, taking it easy, then going for a very long swim in the pool, for like an hour or even longer after lunch, and a little bit of work. Then when it gets a little bit cooler, going for a very long hike. The swim and the hike, one can replace the other. Getting in a good hike/walk and a good swim, you really feel great. People say I look much better in the summer because I'm able to do all that. When I'm in the city, I look like crap.
BKM: Lake Success is a bit of a departure from your previous books.
GS: When I was writing Little Failure, the idea was that I would write to such an extent about my past and my childhood, that for my next book, I wouldn't be able to write about Soviet Russian, Jewish immigrants. Barry Cohen is not Russian, but he is Jewish, so baby steps. For me, the only way I could do that departure is to get rid of all the material that I could in Little Failure, which is why there's that progression in Little Failure and Lake Success.
BKM: Little Failure was an exorcism in a way?
GS: In a way, or a fire sale if you will, yeah.
BKM: Okay, sure. That's a better metaphor. Lake Success is more naturalistic in tone and less satirical than your previous books.
GS: I wanted to do something more realistic. I think in some ways, it's hard to write about the times we live in without doing satire because they're such satirical times, but on the other end, if you look at it, what's happening politically is pure satire. Everything is an exaggeration.
Satire, in some ways, is the confluence of evil and stupidity. This is where we are. I think it's very hard for me to outdo what's on CNN. For me, writing more naturalistically is a different approach to understanding where we are right now, because the book is set in 2016. It's not historical fiction, but it almost feels like historical fiction, because so much of it takes place before Trump.
BKM: Sure. There are loads of historical markers that are very contemporaneous. Then let's talk a bit about Barry Cohen. You've always had lovable misfits as protagonists in your previous books. But Barry, boy is he tough to like.
GS: He's tough to like. Whenever I would tell people I'm writing about a hedge fund guy, they'd be like, "Oh my god, how am I going to get into this book?" I've written likable characters, but I want to write a book about a hedge fund guy, and I wanted him not to be redeemed, but I wanted the reader to ask, "Is redemption possible?" It's a huge challenge for me. I don't know if I pulled it off or not, but I really wanted to present a chance for myself, so that the created character would be very difficult to redeem by the end of the book, then see how far I can get with it.
BKM: One of the central conceits of the story is that Barry leaves his comfortable life and gets on a Greyhound bus. In the acknowledgements of the book, you thank Greyhound from ferrying you from one coast to the other. You actually road coast-to-coast on a bus?
GS: Yeah, I did it. I did it. I started out in June, and ended about September in 2016. I went home at a number of points during the trip.
BKM: What was that like for you?
GS: It's less horrifying than you would imagine, although I grew up in the Soviet Union, so my horror level is pretty high. It's interesting that the whole premise now of Greyhound is we have power outlets. The whole idea is you plug in your phone and you zone out of the Greyhound experience. It's all about the power outlet. You get on the Greyhound and the first thing the driver will say is, "Everybody needs to check their power outlet." Everyone plugs in their phone and see if the phone works. He's like, "If it doesn't work, you have to change your seat," or something like that. It's a funny kind of conceit, is that you plug into the electronic world so much, you don't notice you're in a bus where the bathroom really stinks.
BKM: Can electronics overcome Greyhound bathrooms, that's the question.
GS: Yeah. You learned really quickly to sit as far away from the bathroom as possible, so you sit up front. I have to say, that in terms of understanding America, in terms of getting a good idea of what the center's like, nothing beats the Greyhound. You leave the coast behind, if you take a cross-country trip you do. You see what things are. During this trip, I kept meeting people. The bus trip was primarily through the South.
Throughout the trip, people would tell me, "Hilary's not going to win." It was the first time I'd ever heard anything like that. People would say, "Well, she's not going to win. She's going to lose Ohio and Pennsylvania," which I thought was ridiculous. I thought Ohio perhaps, but Pennsylvania, come on. That was crazy. These people seemed to know more than I did about the state of the country.
It was a real shock. So much of what happens in Lake Success is journalistic in nature. The white supremacists that Barry meets in Louisiana, that really happened. That was pretty much the dialogue that I heard. All this stuff is out there. Again, I knew there were white supremacists in the country, but what was different I think was that, during the first summer of Trump, they were able to talk so loudly about how they felt on a bus comprised mostly of African American passengers.
BKM: On the bus trip in the book, Barry witnesses and experiences drug use, sexual experimentation, and food insecurity, as well as meeting all kinds of people. You say your trip was journalistic, so I imagine you saw a lot of behavior like this on the bus.
GS: Yeah. We all know this stuff is out there. It's not a surprise exactly, but it's still interesting to see it up close, and sometimes shocking to see it up front. America's a strange country. America's a rich country, but there's two kinds of rich. There's rich where you average it out, so many markers of convergence running around that it becomes true per capita. The mean seems like it's up there, but we also have a lot of very poor people. I mean poor by almost any standard imaginable. We not only are not addressing the issue, it's getting worse and worse.
In a way, the existence of people like Barry Cohen is what leads us to the kind of inequality that then leads us down the path to all kinds of horrible other things as well. The precariousness of people's lives allows them to stand up and voice the horrible things that they never voiced before. There's a feeling I think among people that the whole country is going off the rails in some ways. Many people think that their children aren't going to do any better than they are, but there's a feeling I think that we live in a kind of plutocracy or kleptocracy where people like Barry Cohen, who was on the run from the SEC, are the ones that hold the cards. Not to give away to the reader what happens at the end, but in the end, he gets a slap on the wrist. I think that's what does happen, and that's almost what people expect. They live in a country where all the rules are different for wealthier people than they are for people on the Greyhounds.
BKM: You fled the Soviet Union with your parents when you were a kid. What's it like watching your adopted country possibly falling under the sphere of Russian influence?
GS: It's insane. It's insane. I always thought after the collapse of the Soviet Union, that things would go quite in the opposite direction, that Russia would try to adapt some of America's civil society, democracy, free market, etc., but what happened was that America adapted to Russia, the kleptocracy, authoritarianism, hatred of the media, independent media.
Now, with Fox News, we have essentially a state channel, a channel that defends the state, produces lies on behalf of the state, or the one person who's in charge of the state, Trump. It's truly remarkable that it's been a complete turnaround from what I expected. As a Russian American, how do I not address that in future novels? I think in future books that's obviously a thing that's going to come up.
Buy Lake Success at Oblong Books »
