An excerpt from Gary Shteyngar's novel Absurdistan published a few months back in the New Yorker made me watch out for the book. The first half of it is the funniest fiction I have read in a long time. The second half is also frequently very funny, though mixed with a sort of thriller plot.
The novel's narrator, Misha Vainberg, is a very obese Russian Jew who attended Accidental College in Ohio and longs to return to his Blatino girlfriend Rouenna Sales in the Bronx. At the start of the book, he is in his native Saint Petersburg, unable to get back to the USA, because his father, the 1238th-richest man in Russia has killed an Oklahoman with connections. The "generals" on the INS will not let him return to his beloved Bronx and beloved Rouenna. Misha considers himself "an American impounded in a Russian body" —a jumbo-sized Russian body that requires a lot of food and vodka to stagger through life.
The most hilarious chapter in the book is Misha's recollection of his arrival in the US and the circumcision his father had arranged by some Brooklyn Hassidim (apparently Jews were not circumcised during the Soviet era). While in the US, Misha became dependent on a psychoanalyst who continues to (mis)treat Misha by long-distance telephone. At Accidental College, Misha formed a friendship with an assured American named Bob, who is in the Russian Republic voluntarily and has become Alyosha-Bob.
Alyosha-Bob is also there for Misha when Misha travels to a former Soviet republic, Absurdistan, to buy Belgian citizenship from a debauched official there. Absurdistan has two ethnic groups, divided about which side the footrest on Christ's cross went. The country—based on Azerbaijan as Occidental College is on Oberlin—is run by "Golly Burton," which is how the locals mispronounce Halliburton. What the Golly Burton contractors are up to is nefarious in more ways than in exacerbating the animosity for the two "ethnic" groups in Absurdistan. (The Absurdsivanis have fond memories of Misha's father, in part because he managed to profit in his own dealings with Golly Burton, literally "screwing" those metaphorically screwing over Absurdistan.)
Misha puts his multiculturalism major from Accidental to work, being appointed as the Minister of Multicultural Affairs in Absurdistan (though he expresses many very politically incorrect stereotypes about multiple kinds of human groups). He thought he was a globalist as well as a beneficiary of the transformation of the Soviet Union from communism to very corrupt laissez-faire thuggery, but is far out of his depths, not having his father's ruthlessness or the network of criminals his father met when imprisoned by the old regime. (Along with forerunners in Russian literature, Misha has more than a little of Candide and Gargantua, and of Ignatius J. Reilly from Confederacy of Dunces, albeit at a far higher level of affluence.)
I think there is too much plot in the part set in imploding Absurdistan, but the novel is not a tidy, focused portrait of dissatisfied American suburbanites. It is inventive in the Gogol/Nabokov tradition, with some of the love for wordplay of Nabokov (and a hero who recognizes his spiritual kinship with Oblomov). Excess Hollywood, Alyosha-Bob's DVD business is only one of many excesses in nomenclature (and other things) in the book.
Meanwhile, back in New York (Hunter College to be exact) Rouenna is being seduced by a Quilty figure named Jerry Shteynfarb, a creative writing teacher whose book title (The Russian Arriviste's Hand Job parodies that of Shteyngart's own first novel, The Russian Debutante's Handbook. Concerned as Misha is about that unwelcome development, surviving the increasing chaos in Absurdistan usually takes all of his limited supply of energy.
Although some of the jokes are flogged (like dead horses?), there is a plentiful supply of jokes, wordplay, absurdities of modern life and attitudes (and old-fashioned cupidity), and graphic writing about his bloated body and mutilated genitalia. Misha grosses himself out, so it is only to be expected that he will gross out some readers with un-Rabelesian literary appetites.
©2006, Stephen O. Murray
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