Hamilton, Geoff Understanding Gary Shteyngart (review)

Abstract

SEER, 96, 4, OCTOBER 2018 772 Hamilton, Geoff. Understanding Gary Shteyngart. Understanding Contemporary American Literature. The University of South Carolina Press, Columbia, SC, 2017. xi + 142 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $39.99. Of the third wave of Russian immigrant writers currently residing in the United States, only Gary Shteyngart can be said to have achieved true celebrity status. Thisisperhapsbecause,asGeoffHamiltonelucidatesinhisengagingstudyforthe University of South Carolina Press’s ‘Understanding Contemporary American Literature’ series, Shteyngart stands apart from many of his contemporaries as an émigré of the Soviet, rather than the post-Soviet era. Arriving in New York in 1979 at the age of 7, Shteyngart had to assimilate fast, but it was not an easy process. Not because his parents resisted becoming American citizens — quite the opposite, in fact — but because of the extent to which finding his place in late Cold War American society meant that Shteyngart had to revoke the heritage that had so briefly but intensely defined him. Shteyngart’s predicament has drawn many comparisons with that of his predecessor, Vladimir Nabokov, who like Shteyngart was forced to abandon his homeland and negotiate a new identity, first as an émigré in interwar Europe, andultimatelyasaRussianinAmericawritinginEnglish.MuchofShteyngart’s work is about this problem of negotiating identity — in his case a triad of Russian, American and Jewish personae — and the impossibility of shaking off the formative influences of a Russia that has been similarly lost to history. In an early New York Times interview, following the publication of his first novel, The Russian Debutante’s Handbook, Shteyngart is described as perhaps ‘the only Soviet émigré in history who had no desire to leave’ (‘From Russia With Tsoris’, New York Times Magazine, 2 June 2002). ‘It sounds weird, but I loved my Soviet childhood. […] The Communist life suited me just great. I loved the Red Army and everything. It only became horrible once you were an adult’ (ibid.; p. 7). Shteyngart’s response to this dilemma is to deploy a combination of self-irony and satire, each serving as a kind of leveller such that he is able to construct a public persona that is carefully mediated —through his fictional, autobiographical, press and online incarnations — as well as versions of the United States and Russia in the post-Cold War world that are remorselessly and equally bleak. In the same New York Times interview, Shteyngart declared that ‘it was his duty to capture the aching desperation of modern Russian life, whether in Brighton Beach or in Moscow’, whilst the ‘rankly overripe and miserably discordant America’ of his third novel, Super Sad True Love Story (2010), offers a dystopian vision in which ‘capitalism and totalitarianism [merge] to produce a society that is at once open […] yet definitively closed’, as the ‘nearly unlimited freedoms [it offers] can be expressed only within an environment of relentless public exposure and punitive control’ (p. 66). REVIEWS 773 Not necessarily despite, but possibly because of his success as a RussianAmerican writer of celebrity status and universal acclaim in the West, he has, as Hamilton points out, been ‘disinherited by Russia’. A reviewer for TimeOut Moskva accused Shteyngart of ‘masquerading as a Russian’ because ‘his style and his jokes are always completely American’ (p. 19). What they failed to appreciate was that, although he may have given up his native language (‘he does not have a Russian keyboard at home’), the formative influence of classic Russian literature shares an equal significance in his fiction to the work of American writers, from Gogol´ to Chekhov, Mark Twain to Joseph Heller. Hamilton’s study is structured in the form of a chronological survey of Shteyngart’s career, detailing the critical reception of and offering in-depth commentaries on the memoir and three novels published between 2002 and 2014, as well as a concluding chapter on his status as an American literary celebrity. Shortly after the publication of his memoir, Little Failure, at the beginning of 2014, Shteyngart embarked on a new novel, Hotel Solitaire, pegged as ‘an international thriller’ by the New York Times (25 March 2014), in which his preoccupation with ‘the agency individuals might claim in abandoning one identityandassuminganother’(p.109)stillappearedtobeatitsheart.Theresult, Lake Success, published in September 2018, which...