“ABSURDISTAN,”
BY GARY SHTEYNGART
Russian Unorthodox
ABSURDISTAN
By Gary Shteyngart.
333 pp. Random House.
$24.95.
Why praise it first?
Just quote from it -- at random. Just unbutton its shirt and let it bare its
chest. Like a victorious wrestler, this novel is so immodestly vigorous, so
burstingly sure of its barbaric excellence, that simply by breathing, sweating
and standing upright it exalts itself.
"I stood there
listening to my father's killers. Oleg and Zhora were of Papa's generation. All
three had been made fatherless by the Great Patriotic War. All three had been
raised by the men who had managed to avoid battle, the violent, dour,
second-tier men their mothers had brought home with them out of brutal
loneliness. Standing before the menfolk of my father's generation, I could do
nothing. Before their rough hands and stale cigarette-vodka smells, I could
only shudder and feel, along with fright and disgust, appeasement and
complicity. These miscreants were our country's rulers. To survive in their
world, one has to wear many hats -- perpetrator, victim, silent bystander. I
could do a little of each."
The young writer
supplying the lines is Gary Shteyngart, who moved to the United States from
Russia when he was 7, while the young bereaved oligarch he's speaking through
is Misha Vainberg, who attended college here but ended up marooned back in St.
Petersburg. Misha is extraordinarily fat, ambivalently Jewish, unapologetically
rich and -- as his homeland's best comic heroes often are -- infinitely
thwarted. During his collegiate heyday, he gorged at the American buffet,
slurping up rap music, psychotherapy and the sky's-the-limit complacent
optimism that we take for granted as a birthright but that Misha sees for what
it is: a glorious geo-historical accident.
All he needs to return
to the party (and to Rouenna, his beloved trash-talking black girlfriend from
the Bronx who asks him, while touring his native city, the grand imperial
center of Czarist tradition, "Where the niggaz at?") is a visa from
our consulate. Tough luck. As the heir to an ill-gotten bloody fortune in
mobbed-up post-Soviet Russia, Misha can have anything he lusts for -- top-shelf
liquor, pharmaceutical sedatives, human pyramids of prostitutes and multiple
alcoholic servants -- but because of his murdered father's global misdeeds he
can't have that stamp on his passport.
He sulks and schemes.
And Russia, in its wretched boom, sulks with him. "Let us be certain: the
cold war was won by one side and lost by another." This epic collapse is
continuing, we sense, inside the circus tent of smutty new money that Misha
has. Shteyngart is a master panoramist who paints in just three tones:
exhausted grays, despairing browns and superficial golds. When he mixes them,
he gets moments like this one, which deserves to be reproduced at its full
scale:
"The windswept
Fontanka River, its crooked 19th-century skyline interrupted by the
postapocalyptic wedge of the Sovietskaya Hotel, the hotel surrounded by
symmetrical rows of yellowing, waterlogged apartment houses; the apartment
houses, in turn, surrounded by corrugated shacks featuring, in no particular
order, a bootleg CD emporium, the ad hoc Mississippi Casino ('America Is Far,
but Mississippi Is Near'), a kiosk selling industrial-sized containers of crab
salad, and the usual Syrian shawarma hut smelling invariably of spilled vodka,
spoiled cabbage and some kind of vague, free-floating inhumanity."
Shteyngart and Misha,
exuberant depressives, don't stint on the syntax or the verbiage when objects
huge and rotten hulk into view. Their thick, overloaded style is what happens,
though, when socialist realism decays into black comedy. This is the prose of
heroic disappointment, faintly labored at moments but fitted to the task of
shoveling up mountains of cultural debris. Hemingway's clean sentences wouldn't
do here. A man needs commas, semicolons, adjectives. He requires linguistic
heavy machinery.
Which Shteyngart
operates with a light touch as his story gains speed, leaving behind the rubble
of the past for the about-to-be rubble of the near-future. After being foiled
in dull St. Petersburg, Misha lights out for flashy Absurdsvanï, an oil-blessed
former Soviet republic where he hopes to finesse his visa problem. He flies
there, accompanied by the only servant he hasn't pensioned off with petty cash
and by an American college buddy who now runs a DVD business in Russia called ExcessHollywood
(a name that, in another novel, would indicate a playful author but which, in
this one, suggests a playful author and a numb society).
Quartered in a
gleaming Hyatt, Misha is just days from freedom when Shteyngart starts turning
back the hands on Absurdsvanï's political clock. Dictatorship looms like a thug
in a cheap suit. The spirit of democracy strikes back with its hand-lettered
cardboard sign. There are billions of petro-dollars at stake, which liquefy and
ooze corruption on everyone. Misha is mired. As a Russian, that's his lot.
Borders can be crossed, regimes replaced, economic systems re-engineered, but
-- for Shteyngart -- identity persists. It's that frustrating last 10 pounds of
history that folks can't seem to shed, no matter how much they modernize their
diets.
And it's a weight
people cling to, the novel hints, to keep their souls from floating off into
the bewildering thin air of purely notional internationalism. Misha is stuck
with his inborn inertia as surely as if he'd sat down in wet cement. He's no
match for the nimble, more Asiatic locals who can outfox him in their sleep.
Meanwhile, over in the land of progress, his plucky ghetto girl is moving on up
-- and into the clutches of her lecherous writing teacher. Misha's Nabokovian
nemesis is an émigré poseur with a name resembling Shteyngart's and a novel on
his résumé whose title pornographically alludes to Shteyngart's first effort,
"The Russian Debutante's Handbook." He's a naturalized monster who
trades on his own foreignness (or the aura of what's left of it) to scoop up
chicks and critical attention.
There are a lot of
stereotypes here and plenty of intellectually incorrect exercises in racial and
group determinism. Shteyngart, via Misha, thinks in peoples, not just individuals.
He jokes in peoples, too, and not only about Jews and Russians, as his heritage
entitles him to, but about Muslims, Germans, Brooklynites and every other
in-group he can outrage. One envies his sense of entitlement to biases, and his
frank understanding of the fact that such crude distinctions make the world go
round. Especially these days, when they're not supposed to. When, ostensibly,
we're all United Nations blue.
It's
self-consciousness that defines our species, though, and Shteyngart is hilariously
aware that the selves we invent in order to be conscious of them can be based
on almost any difference. Ours is the species that insists it's not one. How
else could we justify warring for common resources? Absurdsvanï, for example,
is divided between two ancient Christian traditions. The schismatic distinction
is the tiny line that the sects draw through the bottoms of their crosses. One
party's line slants up from left to right, the other's is angled in reverse.
Sometimes the Absurdis laugh off the split, sometimes they fight about it.
Almost always, though, some ambitious profiteer or maniac is plotting new ways
to use it to his advantage.
Despite being jammed
with charged references to Halliburton, Bechtel and other big-name players in
the latest round of the great game, "Absurdistan" isn't a book of
social issues or geopolitical controversies. It rides on top of them much as
Huckleberry Finn rode atop his raft. Not surprisingly, considering the times,
it rides them straight downstream, tugged by a bubbling current of worldly
pessimism. Misha can't make much headway against such suction. He's sluggish.
Obese. He's consumed his way into a corner. Shteyngart has built an apt hero in
this respect: a self-defeating fatso globalist. His appetites drive the strife
and fuel the tensions that provoke him to keep eating.
Compared with most
young novelists his age, who tend toward cutesy involution, Shteyngart is a
giant mounted on horseback. He ranges more widely, sees more sweepingly and
gets where he's going with far more aplomb. His Absurdistan, to Americans, may
seem amusingly far away at first, but the longer one spends there, hunkered
down with Misha in a hotel room high above the rocket fire, the closer and more
recognizable it gets. Absurdsvanï is far, but Absurdistan is near.
'Absurdistan,' by Gary
Shteyngart Walter Kirn is a regular contributor to the Book Review. His most
recent novel is "Mission to America."
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