Gary Shteyngart, Super Sad True Love Story

In many respects, Gary Shteyngart’s third novel, Super Sad True Love Story, is very similar to The Russian Debutante’s Handbook and Absurdistan. Once again, Shteyngart’s main protagonist, Lenny Abramov, is a nebbish who seems pitifully underequipped to deal with the world around him. As with his earlier novels, Shteyngart describes that world with what has become his trademark combination of exaggerated humor, absurdity, and biting political satire, a combination that often threatens to exceed the author’s control, but which he in fact pulls off beautifully. And once more, the novel is something of a bildungsroman, as the protagonist, who in many ways is painfully immature (despite being in his late 30s), struggles to grow up and achieve a measure of success, independence, and happiness. With all this said, there are a couple of aspects of this novel that make it a major departure for Shteyngart. For example, locating the novel in a near future where America has been reduced to a virtual subsidiary of China, the only global superpower left on the planet, allows the potential targets of Shteyngart’s satire to grow exponentially: consumerism, our addiction to networked information, the way that information defines who we are and how we relate to other people, the dominance of global corporations, the violence that underpins social order, and our overweening narcissism all come in for their fair share of criticism.Typically for the incurably romantic Shteyngart, the one potential bulwark against the escalating chaos that he portrays so vividly might seem to be love, but this is where he makes another major innovation in his writing. In his previous novels, Shteyngart’s protagonists hog the entire stage in first person narratives that reduce everyone else (even their love interests) to bit parts. In Super Sad, however, Lenny must share the stage with Eunice Park, his Korean girlfriend, as the novel alternates between Lenny’s diary entries and Eunice’s social media outpourings to her friends and family. This gives the reader a distance from the male protagonist that Shteyngart's other novels do not possess (or not to the same extent), thus lending a very interesting new dimension to his work. Some readers may feel that Shteyngart is more successful at realizing one character than the other (no prizes for guessing which!), but doubling the narrative voice in this way makes this novel, at least for this reader, the most enjoyable and ambitious undertaking of Shteyngart’s career thus far.

Jackie Chan, Dragon Lord

Jackie Chan’s 1982 Hong Kong martial arts movie Dragon Lord is strictly for the aficionados. When it works, Chan’s trademark blend of comedy and action is a welcome change from the overheated melodrama of Bruce Lee, but the comedy elements of this film are so puerile as to be embarrassing. There are a couple of stand-out fight sequences, as you might expect, and fans looking for a transition film between Chan’s early kung fu comedies and his later action-oriented movies might find it interesting. On the whole, though, this film is memorable for two pieces of movie nerd trivia: the opening scene (involving a pyramid fight) set a new world record for the number of takes needed for a single scene (2900!!) and this is the first of Chan’s films to feature a ‘blooper reel’ at the end (an idea Chan supposedly took from The Cannonball Run). The trailer features some interesting behind the scenes glimpses of Chan at work.

Gary Shteyngart, Absurdistan

One of my favorite moments in Gary Shteyngart’s second novel, Absurdistan (2006), comes when he makes fun of himself and his first novel, The Russian Debutante’s Handbook: “Let me give you an idea of this Jerry Shteynfarb. He had been a schoolmate of mine at Accidental College, a perfectly Americanized Russian émigré (he came to the States as a seven-year-old) who managed to use his dubious Russian credentials to rise through the ranks of the Accidental creative writing department and to sleep with half the campus in the process. After graduation, he made good on his threat to write a novel, a sad little dirge about his immigrant life, which seems to me the luckiest kind of life imaginable. I think it was called The Russian Arriviste’s Hand Job or something of the sort. The Americans, naturally, lapped it up.” The joke is funny partly because the two novels have so much in common: a schlemiel as a protagonist; over-the-top humor; larger-than-life characters, and an obsessive concern with the various meanings of Jewishness in both multicultural America and a thoroughly globalized 21^st century. With all this said, there are significant differences between the two novels, too. Whereas the subject of Shteyngart’s first novel was, to a large extent, America, and its problematic and overdetermined embrace of the immigrant, this novel’s protagonist, Misha Vainberg, is in a state of exile from the United States, even though he yearns to return. Given this fact, the type of fictional central Asian republic that formed only part of the setting of Debutante’s is front and center in this novel. Through the titular Absurdistan, Shteyngart conveys his complex feelings about Russia, his country of origin, the experience of displacement from both one’s home and adopted cultures, and the murky depths of realpolitik, a subject that is explored with an uneasy combination of pathos and comedy. I say ‘uneasy,’ because initially the move from comedy to violence, as the situation in Absurdistan worsens rapidly, seems awkward and jarring. But this is where the concept of ‘absurdity’ does such important work for Shteyngart and it’s in this respect that I kept thinking of Chester Himes as I was reading Absurdistan. Although they’re very different writers, both use absurdity to achieve similar ends: to combine comedy and violence in such a way that their readers can feel what it means to be buffeted by history and randomness in a way that’s both tragic and ridiculous at the same time. It’s this paradoxical combination of emotions that Shteyngart makes his own.

Sarah Weinman (ed), Troubled Daughters, Twisted Wives

Sarah Weinman’s anthology Troubled Daughters, Twisted Wives: Stories from the Trailblazers of Domestic Suspense is one of the best collections of short stories I’ve read in years and an absolute must-read for anyone interested in mystery and suspense fiction. Featuring stories by Charlotte Armstrong, Barbara Callahan,Vera Caspary, Dorothy Salisbury Davis, Miriam Allen DeFord, Celia Fremlin, Joyce Harrington, Patricia Highsmith, Elisabeth Saxnay Holding, Dorothy B. Hughes, Shirley Jackson, Margaret Millar, Helen Nielsen, and Nedra Tyre, the book focuses on tales originally published between the 1940s and 1970s that are all examples of domestic suspense, i.e., stories that are located in that liminal space between the two extremes of the hard-boiled and the cozy mystery. Weinman’s introduction explains why this type of mystery has fallen from favor, and their reappearance in print is truly a cause for celebration. You’ll find neither private eyes nor female investigators of the Miss Marple type here. Instead, we’re presented with a range of young, middle-aged, and older women (Weinman makes a fascinating decision to order the stories by the age of their protagonist) who all confront examples of violence and conflict, sometimes as witness, sometimes as victim, sometimes as perpetrator, and sometimes as a mixture of all the above. The composite picture that emerges of women’s lives that most other writers would regard as too trivial to write about is gloriously complex in its ambiguity, ambivalence, and open-endedness. Never has the quotidian appeared more vividly than in this collection. Highlights for me included Patricia Highsmith’s first published story, “The Heroine” which demonstrates just how good she was right from the beginning of her career, and “The Purple Shroud,” by Joyce Harrington, a writer I’m embarrassed to say I had never read before but whose work I will be seeking out immediately. And that is another of the pleasures of this book: it opens up a new world of reading even for those who consider themselves aficionados of suspense fiction. We are all in Sarah Weinman’s debt and she is to be congratulated on a magnificent achievement.

56 Up (2012)

There is so much one can say about the Up series of documentaries, but in this post I’ll confine myself to a few observations about the latest installment, 56 Up (2012). This film was the first in the series for quite a while to vary the order in which the participants appeared. For a long time, Neil appeared last while Tony appeared first, and now they are switched. I’m not quite sure what impact these changes have on our perceptions of the participants and their relation to each other (if any), but I liked the change of format. One of my favorite things about the series as a whole is how much the original intention of the series (to show the continued dominance of the class system in contemporary British society) has changed, partly because the nature of class privilege (and the manner in which it is expressed) has changed so much since 1964, but mostly because the series’ participants have insistently talked back to Michael Apted and have resisted his attempts to make them personify one tidy category or another. The self-referential dimensions of the series have increased with each episode, to the point that many of the participants now spend a lot of their time talking about their feelings about participating in this project. 56 Up embraces this fact more than previous episodes, as we see when Suzy and Nick are brought together and talk about their experiences with the show. My favorite moment in this particular episode comes right at the end when Apted remarks that Tony seems quite racist, something that Tony vehemently denies. It’s such a symptomatic moment because race is so rarely mentioned in the series at any time. The sea change in Britain’s population since the 1960s, the extent to which it’s become a multicultural society, is what has blindsided the Up series most since it began (even though it was underway in 1964). In that respect, this series is, in many ways, increasingly a memorial to a Britain that was, rather than the Britain that exists today.

Gary Shteyngart, The Russian Debutante's Handbook

In a few weeks, I’ll be hosting a conversation with writer Gary Shteyngart as part of the Buffalo Humanities Festival. In preparation for that event, I'm rereading his work, beginning with his first novel The Russian Debutante's Handbook, published in 2003. Shteyngart is an amazingly inventive and original winter and this coming of age story featuring his unprepossessing protagonist, Vladimir Girshkin, showcases the full range of his talents. It's a big book in every way--over 400 pages long, with multiple locations, and a dizzying array of characters--and yet at its heart the book's concerns are quite simple: what does it mean to be an American for an immigrant? Can an immigrant ever feel at home in America? Or anywhere else, for that matter? Of course, these are deceptively simple questions that have been tackled by dozens upon dozens of writers and Shteyngart does justice to the complexity of his themes. What's most original about the book is his use of humor; this, combined with his incredible eye for detail, make him a master satirist. And yet he's also capable of writing without sentimentality and with genuine pathos about the need to be loved and to belong and in this regard, there's something curiously old-fashioned about his writing. Although the novel maintains a running dialog with the American tradition of immigrant fiction, trying more often than not to make fun of it, the overall impact of RDH is to remind us of the timelessness of the problems and challenges that the expatriate faces when trying to understand her or his adopted country. It's inevitable that in this 'kitchen sink' of a book, into which Shteyngart throws everything, some parts work better than others, but on the whole it's an extraordinary first novel and should encourage anyone to read more of his work.

As you can tell from the gap between this post and the previous one, the reality principle showed up and kicked me in the head! With everything else going on in my life, posting every day is clearly not going to happen, so I will confine myself to posting whenever I can. Hopefully, this will prevent further kicks to the head. I've decided to keep the original blog title and description as a reminder of the temptations and dangers of hubris!