Understanding Gary Shteyngart

Geoff Hamilton

Description

A survey of the Russian-born American author's work and themes questioning identity, politics, and multiculturalism

Understanding Gary Shteyngart, the first comprehensive examination of Shteyngart's novels and memoir, introduces readers to one of the most critically acclaimed and commercially successful contemporary American authors. Born in Leningrad in 1972, Shteyngart immigrated to the United States in 1979, attended Oberlin College and the City University of New York, and currently teaches in the Writing Program at Columbia University. His novels include Super Sad True Love Story, winner of the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize; Absurdistan, chosen as one of the ten best books of the year by the New York Times Book Review and Time magazine; and The Russian Debutante's Handbook, winner of the Stephen Crane Award for First Fiction and the National Jewish Book Award for Fiction.

Geoff Hamilton studies three broad, overlapping elements of Shteyngart's work: his construction of Russian-Jewish identity in the United States, his appraisal of communism's imaginative legacy for the wider East European diaspora and former Soviet republics, and his representation of the deadening effects of late capitalism. Focusing on Shteyngart's themes of the fracturing and decay of ethnic identities, the limits and pitfalls of multiculturalism, and the decline of privacy and civility against the creeping power of technological mediation, Hamilton also tracks the author's playful manipulation of literary traditions and his incisive revision of seminal mythologies of Russian, Jewish, and American selfhood. Although Shteyngart has sometimes been pigeon holed as an immigrant author working a rather marginal ethnic shtick, Hamilton demonstrates that Shteyngart's work deserves attention for its remarkable centrality, that is, its relevance to core questions of identity formation and beliefs common to globalized societies.

Sujets

• Ethnic Studies
• Literary Criticism
• Jewish
• Una modesta proposición
• Jews
• Superiority (short story)
• True Identity
• Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan
• Family resemblance
• Andy Borowitz
• Milo Minderbinder
• Portnoy's Complaint
• General officer
• Individualism
• A Modest Proposal
• Gary Shteyngart
• Waldman
• Modeste Proposition
• General
• Jonathan Safran Foer
• Borat
• Pasternak
• Christopher Hitchens
• Holden Caulfield
• Hunter S. Thompson
• Allen Ginsberg
• Jonathan Franzen
• Lolita

Informations

• Publié par: University of South Carolina Press
• Date de parution: 15 avril 2017
• Nombre de lectures: 2
• EAN13: 9781611177657
• Langue: English

Extrait

UNDERSTANDING GARY SHTEYNGART
UNDERSTANDING CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN LITERATURE
Matthew J. Bruccoli, Founding Editor
Linda Wagner-Martin, Series Editor
UNDERSTANDING
GARY SHTEYNGART
Geoff Hamilton

The University of South Carolina Press
2017 University of South Carolina
Published by the University of South Carolina Press
Columbia, South Carolina 29208
www.sc.edu/uscpress
26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data can be found at http://catalog.loc.gov/
ISBN: 978-1-61117-764-0 (hardcover)
ISBN: 978-1-61117-765-7 (ebook)
Front cover photograph: Ulf Anderson
www.ulfanderson.photoshelter.com
For Sharlyn
CONTENTS
Series Editor s Preface
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1
Understanding Gary Shteyngart
Chapter 2
The Russian Debutante s Handbook
Chapter 3
Absurdistan
Chapter 4
Super Sad True Love Story
Chapter 5
Little Failure
Chapter 6
Gary Shteyngart and American Literary Celebrity
Notes
Bibliography
Index
SERIES EDITOR S PREFACE
The Understanding Contemporary American Literature series was founded by the estimable Matthew J. Bruccoli (1931-2008), who envisioned these volumes as guides or companions for students as well as good nonacademic readers, a legacy that will continue as new volumes are developed to fill in gaps among the nearly one hundred series volumes published to date and to embrace a host of new writers only now making their marks on our literature.
As Professor Bruccoli explained in his preface to the volumes he edited, because much influential contemporary literature makes special demands, the word understanding in the titles was chosen deliberately. Many willing readers lack an adequate understanding of how contemporary literature works; that is, of what the author is attempting to express and the means by which it is conveyed. Aimed at fostering this understanding of good literature and good writers, the criticism and analysis in the series provide instruction in how to read certain contemporary writers-explicating their material, language, structures, themes, and perspectives-and facilitate a more profitable experience of the works under discussion.
In the twenty-first century Professor Bruccoli s prescience gives us an avenue to publish expert critiques of significant contemporary American writing. The series continues to map the literary landscape and to provide both instruction and enjoyment. Future volumes will seek to introduce new voices alongside canonized favorites, to chronicle the changing literature of our times, and to remain, as Professor Bruccoli conceived, contemporary in the best sense of the word.
Linda Wagner-Martin, Series Editor
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Many thanks go to Tony Fong, Brian Jones, Simon Rogers, Anton Titov, and Tom Venetis for their invaluable help in reading and strengthening drafts of this book.
CHAPTER 1
Understanding Gary Shteyngart
Few contemporary authors have met with the combination of critical and commercial success enjoyed by Gary Shteyngart. He arrived as a literary star in 2002 with The Russian Debutante s Handbook -a novel largely responsible for propelling an enduring surge of Russian American writing-and confirmed his place on the American literary scene with two more novels, Absurdistan (2006) and Super Sad True Love Story (2010), and a memoir, Little Failure (2014), each of which has garnered prestigious prizes and become a national bestseller. Shteyngart s oeuvre also includes acclaimed travel writing for the New York Times , the New Yorker , and Travel + Leisure; YouTube videos featuring Hollywood stars such as James Franco and Paul Giamatti; and a stunning number of blurbs for others works (endorsements that are themselves the source of a cult following on Tumblr and a documentary by the author and television writer Jonathan Ames). No longer just a literary name, Shteyngart is by now well established as a literary personality, and he engages much of his current readership (and future readers) online, as a celebrity known for his comic persona: a not-quite-assimilated Russian Jewish immigrant, amusingly dishevelled and blundering, part Slavic clown, part schlemiel.
One obvious attraction of Shteyngart as an author is his brilliance as a comic writer. Michiko Kakutani, reviewing Little Failure in the New York Times , has put it well: Of the many enormously gifted authors now writing about the immigrant experience-including Jhumpa Lahiri, Edwidge Danticat, Dinaw Mengestu, Chang-rae Lee, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Gish Jen-Gary Shteyngart is undoubtedly the funniest (with Junot D az a close runner-up). 1 Shteyngart s voice has evolved since his literary debut-a manic, sprawling farce that the author himself now seems interested in disavowing 2 -but all his work is distinguished by a delightful exuberance and ingenuity, a playfulness that often moves arrestingly into the grotesque.
Shteyngart is also an exceptionally astute observer and satirist of contemporary life. He has deftly explored the intricacies of identity politics in the twenty-first century, and his manipulation of multiple literary traditions has revised seminal mythologies of racial and ethnic belonging in cannily playful ways. Often characterized as a Russian American author (and, less commonly, a Jewish American one), he has particularly illuminated the exilic conditions of Russian Jewish identities in the United States, as well as across the global diaspora of Russians and Jews. With the publication of Super Sad True Love Story , which presents a near-future American dystopia, Shteyngart has broadened his thematic foci by engaging some of the most profound and rapidly developing social transformations of the modern era. The novel-his most ambitious and significant work thus far-provides insights into the (sur) reality of hyper-technologized, globally-networked life, and vivid depictions of the impact of social networking culture on privacy, civility, literacy, sexual expression, and material consumption. Though he has sometimes been dismissed as simply an immigrant author performing a rather marginal ethnic shtick, Shteyngart s work deserves analysis for its remarkable centrality: its relevance to core questions of identity-formation and belonging, and of tradition and the conditions of belief, common to globalized societies.
Shteyngart, an only child, was born Igor Semyonovich Shteyngart in 1972, in what was then Leningrad in the Soviet Union. His parents were relatively prosperous: his mother taught piano at a kindergarten, and his father pursued a generally uninspiring career engineering large telescopes at the famous LOMO photography factory. 3 They apparently were not well matched-his father s village origins clashed with his mother s big-city background-and much of their relationship seems to have been acrimonious. Shteyngart recalls his Russian childhood as being marked by both emotional and physical stresses: he suffered from severe asthma and had to endure his parents painful and ineffectual folk remedies. This affliction perhaps contributed to a lifelong sense of spiritual suffocation, linked for him with familial discord and personal suffering. As he described one particularly traumatic episode in his memoir: My breathing goes shallow . I take off my pajamas and dutifully lie down on my stomach. My parents, still screaming at each other in two languages [Russian and Yiddish], prepare the cupping kit, getting the rubbing alcohol ready to feed the flames. A mere decade later I will find a new space to fill with alcohol. 4
In 1978 the Shteyngarts took advantage of an opportunity to leave their homeland, joining a large and growing Jewish emigration from the Soviet Union, made possible by a deal struck between President Carter and General Secretary Brezhnev (by the end of the twentieth century, approximately six hundred thousand Soviet Jews had arrived in North America). 5 After stopping for several months in Austria and Italy as they worked out their passage west, the family finally settled in Queens, New York, beginning life as impoverished and deracinated-but optimistic and energetic-Americans. Shteyngart s father sought to deepen the family s religious identity in the United States, and so he enrolled his son in the Solomon Schechter School, an institution devoted to conservative Judaism. Shteyngart knew as little Hebrew as he did English, however, and his experience at the school thus compounded his disorientation in the United States. A difficult process of acculturation followed as Shteyngart s parents struggled to find gainful employment and he puzzled out his identity as a Russian-speaking Jew, an oddly dressed, heavily accented Stinky Russian Bear 6 in the eyes and noses of his young classmates. A particularly harrowing episode during this period was his botched circumcision at eight years of age, an event he would fictionalize in Absurdistan: the procedure at the public hospital did not go well . There will be creatures in horror movies in my near future, the softshell crabs of Ridley Scott s Alien the most visually accomplished ones, but this baroque chiaroscuro of dried blood and thread will never find equal. 7 Shteyngart s keen sense of being an outsider, and of having to work hard to understand, and somehow meet, the expectations of his social milieu, began with this difficult assumption of a Russian Jewish American identity.
So strong was cold-war hysteria in Reagan s America, Shteyngart has recalled, that it made sense to him to assume-or attempt to assume-an ostensibly less threatening ethnicity among his young peers:
one day after one Commie comment too many, I tell my fellow pupil