Gary Shteyngart, Little Failure

Can I be perfectly honest? Halfway through Gary Shteyngart's memoir, Little Failure, I realized that I much preferred his novels. The wildness of the comic imagination that defines his fiction was largely missing here, even though this book is often very funny (as we might expect from one of the funniest writers working today). And in case you think comparing fiction and memoir is like comparing apples and oranges (which of course it is, at least to some extent) I should mention that one of the things the reader who is familiar with Shteyngart's novels takes away from Little Failure is something we suspected all along, namely, that he is the ultimate subject of his fiction and he has mined his own life extensively for raw materials that he sometimes transforms and sometimes hardly changes at all. Consequently, a feeling of déjà vu haunts the reader until we get to the parts of Shteyngart's life that are not covered in as much detail in his fiction: his time at Oberlin College, his life after graduation, and how he got started as a writer. He treats these times with the same combination of self-effacing humor and uncomfortable honesty that defines the book as a whole, but he saves the best for last. The book concludes with a description of a trip back to St. Petersburg, the city of his birth, that Shteyngart took with his parents in 2011. It's at this point that one realizes that Little Failure, again like his fiction, has always been as much about his parents and his relationship with them as it is about Shteyngart. That balance between humor and pathos, that wonderful ability to write about emotions, above all love, without sentimentality that appears so often in his fiction works to great effect here. As this interview indicates, Little Failure was a huge success and it will hopefully bring even more readers to his fiction. Will this success spoil the 'little failure' Shteyngart? That's the first question I'll ask him when I meet him later this month.