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.