Absurdistan
Gary Shteyngart
Random House, $13.95
As a satirist working in 21st century America, Gary Shteyngart has a problem: competition from the U.S. government. “How do I keep up with this?” cries the 34-year-old novelist recently, brandishing a copy of The New York Times. On the cover, above the fold, is a large story about President George W. Bush with the title, “GEORGE BUSH: ALBANIAN IDOL.”
Shteyngart, who is short and compact, and wears a thick, full beard flecked with gray, laughs unmirthfully and shakes his furry head at Bush, whose approval ratings hover around 30 percent. “What is it Tony Soprano once said? ‘We’re going to straight to hell on the shit-bird express!’”
That—in a nutshell—is the theme of Shteyngart’s hilarious second novel (recently out in paperback), Absurdistan, a rip-snorting, muscle-flexing satire about Misha Vainberg, the 325-pound (and growing) son of Russia’s 1,238th most wealthy man. When his father is killed, Misha winds up in the former Soviet Republic of Absurdistan, where he hopes to secure himself a fake Belgian passport.
What happens from there is one of most unusual character evolutions in American literature. Misha is desperate to return to the U.S., where his girlfriend lives, but he gets a bit side-tracked. Recently discovered oil fields mean phalanxes of U.S. contractors have made Absurdistan their new home, too. “Golly Burton,” say the prostitutes, mangling the name of prominent Iraq War contractor Halliburton.
With contractor abuse and corporate gluttony in the news every third day, it’s hard to think of a satire quite as timely as Absurdistan, but Shteyngart says these conditions have existed for years. “You could see this coming from miles away,” he says. “All the things happening in Iraq with contractors and Bechtel and Halliburton making so much money off that war were happening before 2001.”
In Shteyngart’s eyes, the rise of a kind of super-capitalism has changed everything about the U.S., and he sees those changes at work in the world at large after the fall of communism, especially in the former USSR, where he was born in 1972. Former Soviet republics sell off their public infrastructure to private industry; oligarchs become semi-legitimate financiers.
Absurdistan doesn’t just send up this fiscal binge—it swallows it whole, literally. Misha is stuffing some sort of edible thing in his mouth on every page of the book. One of the longest scenes in the book is a banquet which goes on for hours. “I wrote that scene after coming back from Georgia,” says Shteyngart, “where they have this tradition of eating for hours at a time.”
Shteyngart came to the U.S. as a child, but he has been home a lot in recent years, and his eyes have been opened by what he saw. “As a Russian growing up, the Caucasus were always this mythical, fascinating place,” he says. “And so I finally went there, and because of the oil, Halliburton is there and every third woman is a prostitute saying ‘Golly Burton.’ I came back with 300 pages of notes.”
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Shteyngart began Absurdistan two months before 9/11, not long before his debut novel, The Russian Debutante’s Handbook, was published. That novel had taken him seven years to write. “It’s a long story why,” Shteyngart says, one full of odd jobs and fitful starts, and poor times.
“I was once living on Seventh Avenue, and I got so sick of it I stuffed the novel in the trash, but I was so poor I had these really cheap garbage bags, which ripped when they were loading them into the truck. I got up, and my novel was pasted all up and down the block like a blizzard, with my name there on every other page.”
Shteyngart spent the day retrieving it, and in the end, thanks to some help from novelist Chang-Rae Lee—his professor at Hunter College’s MFA program—the book was bought and published, making Shteyngart a kind of ethnic first in a country that prizes its variety of coming-of-age (coming-to-America) stories.
“There were all these other kinds of stories about the immigrant experience by great writers—Junot Diaz, Jhumpa Lahiri. But there hadn’t been anything about being Russian.”
The novel landed to ecstatic reviews but not tremendous sales. The legendarily harsh critic Michiko Kakutani, of the New York Times, praised the book for its energy and wit and a brilliant use of language and compared Shteyngart to one of his early heroes, Saul Bellow. “At the time I was writing that, I was just discovering Bellow and Roth and Nabokov,” Shteyngart says.
Absurdistan, however, it would be fair to say, was an event when it was published in hardback last year. The book was reviewed on the cover of the New York Times Book Review and in nearly every paper in the country. The Times chose it as one of their editor’s picks for the year. The book has already sold some 200,000 copies. Shteyngart is flattered but a little perplexed. “Who are these people? They must be incredibly rich to have time to just sit around and read.”
In addition to the increasing number of white hairs in his beard and climate change, the thing Shteyngart worries about the most is what’s happening to literary culture in the U.S.
“People don’t read the way they do anymore.” Shteyngart just got back from Korea, where his book is being published. “If people want to see what happens when you’re connected to a screen all the time, go to Korea. Wow, there are 29 hours in that day. Kids are falling asleep on the subway. And when they’re not asleep they’re not reading, they’re looking at a TV screen.”
As a result, Shteyngart sees a world in which writers are becoming absorbed by pop culture and expected to keep up. “Writers are becoming like celebrities,” he says. “But it’s not quite like that because we aren’t celebrities, and we aren’t obscure anymore.” He predicts that writers will become more and more attractive. “In Korea I thought about getting some cheap plastic surgery done,” he jokes, “maybe get my chin back!” The night before our conversation, he had been invited on a PEN benefit organized by former London journalist Tina Brown for people who stutter. I wait for a punch-line. “I’m not kidding,” he says.
Shteyngart will tackle all these issues and a few others in his new novel, which he is hard at work on. The book imagines a world where books don’t exist anymore, and the U.S. has defaulted on its debt to China. It sounds pretty far-fetched, but so did some of the events described in Absurdistan when Shteyngart began to write it six years ago. “It makes me a little calmer to write this stuff,” Shteyngart says, with the sad big eyes of a born truth-teller, “but then it happens.”