2018-09-20 Entertainment Weekly

BY
Gary Shteyngart

PAGES

335

GENRE

Fiction

REVIEW BY

David Canfield @davidcanfield97

Books

Lake Success

64 EW.COM SEPTEMBER 14, 2018

HARRY’S 2OTH B-DAY Head to EW.com for full coverage of the 20th anniversary ofHarry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stonein the U.S.

flair, fun, and bits of melancholy.

So we reachLake Success—Shteyngart’s

crack at the Great American Novel and his

commentary on Trump’s America. His hero

is Barry Cohen, a hedge-fund millionaire

married to a lawyer named Seema. The

book opens on Barry wandering New York’s

Port Authority Bus Terminal, his face

bloodied. He’s escaping his life: his autistic

son with whom he can’t connect, his wife

whose brilliance is matched only by her

resentments, his money. He stumbles onto

a Greyhound and sets out on a cross-coun-

try journey—to find his college love,

theoretically, but really to reclaim himself.

The backdrop, naturally, is Trump coun-

try—elites (like Seema) discussing the

election with pretentious indifference back

in New York; average Americans illuminat-

ing the president’s appeal in the heartland.

Shteyngart is jumpy but curious here.Lake

Success is based on the author’s own road

trip, and each city stop in the novel is pep-

pered with stranger-than-fiction detail.

The book untangles major themes, with

a wicked feel for modern life’s aimless chat-

ter (“They continued to talk about Trump

on autopilot, the way people were doing

that summer”), but it’s lacking in soul.

Each person Barry meets, like an impres-

sionable young drug dealer, is reduced to a

type, an idea in human form. Even Shteyn-

gart’s edge—aimed at the 0.1 percent—is a

bit dulled. Why? Perhaps it’s the nature of

what feels fresh, sharp, and needed in this

bizarre new world. For what can yet another

entitled, delusional, wealthy white man tell

us about where we’ve gone wrong?B

THE TIMING IS RIGHT FOR GARY SHTEYNGART’S BIG

swing. Having completed a trio of ingeniously satirical

novels, most recently his 2010 dystopiaSuper Sad True

Love Story, as well as an innovative memoir, his literary

prowess has long been undeniable. Over his career, he’s

singularly rendered American culture’s absurdities with

Edited By | KEVIN P. SULLIVAN @KPSULL

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