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a humorous spin around the immigrant experience . . .
Welcome to America. Enjoy the Free Napkins and Straws.
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
LITTLE FAILURE
A Memoir
By Gary Shteyngart
Illustrated. 349 pages. Random House. $27.
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 Díaz a close runner-up).
His delightful debut novel, “The Russian Debutante’s Handbook” (2002) — which recounts the bumbling efforts of a Russian émigré trying to buy himself a slice of the American Dream — showcased his antic sense of humor and his ebullient, idiomatic prose, while his futuristic 2010 novel, “Super Sad True Love Story,” revealed his ability to combine sharp-edged satire with deeper, more heartfelt meditations on love and loss and mortality.
Mr. Shteyngart’s evocative new memoir, “Little Failure,” is as entertaining as it’s moving, and it underscores the autobiographical sources of his fiction. His heroes tend to share not only his self-esteem issues and biting wit, but also his appreciation of the absurdities of life on both sides of the former Iron Curtain. He gives us a visceral sense of what it was like to be uprooted as a child from the monochromatic world of the U.S.S.R. and plunked down in 1979, in the perplexing and gloriously Technicolor world of the U.S. of A. In doing so, he poignantly conveys his parents’ hard-fought efforts to make new lives for themselves in America, while using humor to chronicle his own difficulties in trying to bridge the dislocations of two cultures.
Mr. Shteyngart tells us how he and his parents obtained exit visas from the Soviet Union, packed their possessions into two green sacks and three orange suitcases and made their way to New York. He also makes us understand the strict ground rules of his parents’ frugal, cautious existence in the States:
“My parents don’t spend money,” he observes, “because they live with the idea that disaster is close at hand, that a liver-function test will come back marked with a doctor’s urgent scrawl, that they will be fired from their jobs because their English does not suffice.”
On a car trip, they take their own food (soft-boiled eggs wrapped in tin foil, Russian beet salad, cold chicken) into a McDonald’s; they help themselves to the free napkins and straws while spurning the 69 cent hamburgers as an unnecessary extravagance.
After considerable family discussion, the young Mr. Shteyngart’s birth name, Igor, is changed to Gary, because “Igor is Frankenstein’s assistant, and I have enough problems already” fitting in, and because Gary summons pleasant associations with the actor Gary Cooper. Although the newly minted Gary tries hard to espouse his father’s conservative Republican politics, he still finds himself becoming the “second-most-hated” boy in Hebrew school in Queens, mocked as “the Red Gerbil” for coming from “the country our new president will soon declare to be the ‘Evil Empire.’ ”
Gary also finds he has a decidedly different cultural vocabulary from that of his classmates. Without a television set at home, he spends his free time reading Chekhov stories — eight battered volumes of his collected works sit on the family bookshelves — but quickly learns that “these little porkers” at school “have very little interest in ‘Gooseberries’ or ‘Lady With Lapdog.’ ” It will be many years before his parents get a proper TV — a miraculous 27-inch Sony Trinitron — and, in the meantime, Mr. Shteyngart says, he takes to studying TV Guide in an effort to learn more about the alien American culture he yearns to join.
The title of this book, Mr. Shteyngart tells us, comes from a nickname his mother gave him, “Failurchka, or Little Failure.” Little Failure because his grades at Stuyvesant High School weren’t good enough to get him into an Ivy League college, which means his family “may as well have never come here.” Little Failure because it quickly became clear that he was intent on becoming a writer, instead of pursuing the vocation his parents envisioned. (“Everyone knows that immigrant children have to go into law, medicine, or maybe that strange new category known only as ‘computer.’ ”) Little Failure because he spent his youth “as a kind of tuning fork for my parents’ fears, disappointments, and alienation,” and because he was expected as a boy to succeed quickly and wildly in “a country we thought of as magical, but whose population did not strike us as being especially clever.”
Years of being an outsider, “observing from behind a language barrier” (combined with his efforts to “douse the flames” of animosity that flared between his increasingly embattled mother and father) would turn Mr. Shteyngart into “a calculating, attention-seeking mammal of few equals” — and a masterly storyteller. In the Soviet Union, as an asthmatic 5-year-old eager to please his grandmother, he began writing his first novel; it was a patriotic tale called “Lenin and His Magical Goose,” which, in retrospect, he says, had the Orwellian lesson of “Love authority but trust no one.” His first work in English, at the age of 10 — which will garner him the attention of otherwise indifferent or contemptuous classmates in Queens — is a sci-fi tale called “The Chalenge,” featuring an earthlike planet named Atlanta (with “conservative politics and strong retail base”) pitted against an alien planet named Lopes (a hot, Latin-like world that “contained many parrots”).
Mr. Shteyngart is candid about the casual bigotry that informed his early years in America: “Looking down at others is one of the few things that has kept me afloat through the years, the comfort in thinking that entire races are lower than my family, lower than me.” He adds, however, that living in New York and attending the elite Stuyvesant High School (filled with brilliant, “not white” students) soon forced his racism to die “a difficult, smelly death.”
At Oberlin College, he sheds “every last vestige of the Hebrew school nudnik and the Stuyvesant clown,” growing his hair long, donning Kurt Cobain-like flannel shirts and gaining campus notoriety for his many “alcoholic and narcotic exploits.” There, he writes, “a child of Lenin” will learn about Marxism “from faculty whose office doors are festooned with signs reading CARD-CARRYING MEMBER ACLU and LOBOTOMIES FOR REPUBLICANS: IT’S THE LAW.”
Some of the later parts of this memoir — dealing with the author’s budding career as a novelist, and his love life — feel somewhat perfunctory and hurried. But the closing chapter, recounting a 2011 return trip with his parents to Russia, provides a fitting end to this keenly observed tale of exile, coming-of-age and family love: It’s raw, comic and deeply affecting, a testament to Mr. Shteyngart’s abilities to write with both self-mocking humor and introspective wisdom, sharp-edged sarcasm and aching — and yes, Chekhovian — tenderness.
Welcome to America. Enjoy the Free Napkins and Straws.
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
LITTLE FAILURE
A Memoir
By Gary Shteyngart
Illustrated. 349 pages. Random House. $27.
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 Díaz a close runner-up).
His delightful debut novel, “The Russian Debutante’s Handbook” (2002) — which recounts the bumbling efforts of a Russian émigré trying to buy himself a slice of the American Dream — showcased his antic sense of humor and his ebullient, idiomatic prose, while his futuristic 2010 novel, “Super Sad True Love Story,” revealed his ability to combine sharp-edged satire with deeper, more heartfelt meditations on love and loss and mortality.
Mr. Shteyngart’s evocative new memoir, “Little Failure,” is as entertaining as it’s moving, and it underscores the autobiographical sources of his fiction. His heroes tend to share not only his self-esteem issues and biting wit, but also his appreciation of the absurdities of life on both sides of the former Iron Curtain. He gives us a visceral sense of what it was like to be uprooted as a child from the monochromatic world of the U.S.S.R. and plunked down in 1979, in the perplexing and gloriously Technicolor world of the U.S. of A. In doing so, he poignantly conveys his parents’ hard-fought efforts to make new lives for themselves in America, while using humor to chronicle his own difficulties in trying to bridge the dislocations of two cultures.
Mr. Shteyngart tells us how he and his parents obtained exit visas from the Soviet Union, packed their possessions into two green sacks and three orange suitcases and made their way to New York. He also makes us understand the strict ground rules of his parents’ frugal, cautious existence in the States:
“My parents don’t spend money,” he observes, “because they live with the idea that disaster is close at hand, that a liver-function test will come back marked with a doctor’s urgent scrawl, that they will be fired from their jobs because their English does not suffice.”
On a car trip, they take their own food (soft-boiled eggs wrapped in tin foil, Russian beet salad, cold chicken) into a McDonald’s; they help themselves to the free napkins and straws while spurning the 69 cent hamburgers as an unnecessary extravagance.
After considerable family discussion, the young Mr. Shteyngart’s birth name, Igor, is changed to Gary, because “Igor is Frankenstein’s assistant, and I have enough problems already” fitting in, and because Gary summons pleasant associations with the actor Gary Cooper. Although the newly minted Gary tries hard to espouse his father’s conservative Republican politics, he still finds himself becoming the “second-most-hated” boy in Hebrew school in Queens, mocked as “the Red Gerbil” for coming from “the country our new president will soon declare to be the ‘Evil Empire.’ ”
Gary also finds he has a decidedly different cultural vocabulary from that of his classmates. Without a television set at home, he spends his free time reading Chekhov stories — eight battered volumes of his collected works sit on the family bookshelves — but quickly learns that “these little porkers” at school “have very little interest in ‘Gooseberries’ or ‘Lady With Lapdog.’ ” It will be many years before his parents get a proper TV — a miraculous 27-inch Sony Trinitron — and, in the meantime, Mr. Shteyngart says, he takes to studying TV Guide in an effort to learn more about the alien American culture he yearns to join.
The title of this book, Mr. Shteyngart tells us, comes from a nickname his mother gave him, “Failurchka, or Little Failure.” Little Failure because his grades at Stuyvesant High School weren’t good enough to get him into an Ivy League college, which means his family “may as well have never come here.” Little Failure because it quickly became clear that he was intent on becoming a writer, instead of pursuing the vocation his parents envisioned. (“Everyone knows that immigrant children have to go into law, medicine, or maybe that strange new category known only as ‘computer.’ ”) Little Failure because he spent his youth “as a kind of tuning fork for my parents’ fears, disappointments, and alienation,” and because he was expected as a boy to succeed quickly and wildly in “a country we thought of as magical, but whose population did not strike us as being especially clever.”
Years of being an outsider, “observing from behind a language barrier” (combined with his efforts to “douse the flames” of animosity that flared between his increasingly embattled mother and father) would turn Mr. Shteyngart into “a calculating, attention-seeking mammal of few equals” — and a masterly storyteller. In the Soviet Union, as an asthmatic 5-year-old eager to please his grandmother, he began writing his first novel; it was a patriotic tale called “Lenin and His Magical Goose,” which, in retrospect, he says, had the Orwellian lesson of “Love authority but trust no one.” His first work in English, at the age of 10 — which will garner him the attention of otherwise indifferent or contemptuous classmates in Queens — is a sci-fi tale called “The Chalenge,” featuring an earthlike planet named Atlanta (with “conservative politics and strong retail base”) pitted against an alien planet named Lopes (a hot, Latin-like world that “contained many parrots”).
Mr. Shteyngart is candid about the casual bigotry that informed his early years in America: “Looking down at others is one of the few things that has kept me afloat through the years, the comfort in thinking that entire races are lower than my family, lower than me.” He adds, however, that living in New York and attending the elite Stuyvesant High School (filled with brilliant, “not white” students) soon forced his racism to die “a difficult, smelly death.”
At Oberlin College, he sheds “every last vestige of the Hebrew school nudnik and the Stuyvesant clown,” growing his hair long, donning Kurt Cobain-like flannel shirts and gaining campus notoriety for his many “alcoholic and narcotic exploits.” There, he writes, “a child of Lenin” will learn about Marxism “from faculty whose office doors are festooned with signs reading CARD-CARRYING MEMBER ACLU and LOBOTOMIES FOR REPUBLICANS: IT’S THE LAW.”
Some of the later parts of this memoir — dealing with the author’s budding career as a novelist, and his love life — feel somewhat perfunctory and hurried. But the closing chapter, recounting a 2011 return trip with his parents to Russia, provides a fitting end to this keenly observed tale of exile, coming-of-age and family love: It’s raw, comic and deeply affecting, a testament to Mr. Shteyngart’s abilities to write with both self-mocking humor and introspective wisdom, sharp-edged sarcasm and aching — and yes, Chekhovian — tenderness.
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