Lake Success

May 1, 2018

In his first novel in seven years, relentlessly best-booked Shteyngart (e.g., Absurdistan) introduces us to ultrarich but clueless and self-absorbed hedge fund manager Barry Cohen, upset by an SEC investigation and his son's diagnosis of autism, who runs cross-country on a Greyhound bus as visions of uncomplicated romance with his high school sweetheart dance in his head. His ambitious, luxury-loving wife, a first-generation American, has her own problems.

Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from July 1, 2018
Shteyngart's acidly prescient novel Super Sad True Love Story (2010) looked to the near-future. This rambunctious tale of a morally challenged, on-the-run New York hedge-fund manager takes place during the incendiary 2016 presidential campaign. A deft satirist, Shteyngart revels in describing Barry Cohen's ludicrously elite environs and calculated strategies based on his belief that a hedge-fund manager must be a storyteller first and last. Barry's anxious striving stems from his unhappy adolescence in Queens, while a vestige of his abandoned literary dreams is found in the name of his fund, This Side of Capital, a cockeyed tribute to F. Scott Fitzgerald.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)

Starred review from July 1, 2018
A hedge fund manager on the skids takes a cross-country Greyhound bus trip to reconnect with his college girlfriend, leaving his wife to deal with their autistic 3-year-old."Barry Cohen, a man with 2.4 billion dollars of assets under management, staggered into the Port Authority Bus Terminal. He was visibly drunk and bleeding. There was a clean slice above his left brow where the nanny's fingernail had gouged him and, from his wife, a teardrop scratch below his eye." Shteyngart (Little Failure, 2014, etc.) gleefully sends Barry, on the run from troubles at work as well as his inability to face up to his son's recent diagnosis, on an odyssey that the author himself made on a Greyhound bus during the lead-up to the 2016 election, thus joining Salman Rushdie, Olivia Laing, Curtis Sittenfeld, and others with recent works set in the dawn of the Trump era. Barry is, in some ways, a bit of a Trump himself: He's from Queens, has a serious inferiority/superiority complex, has achieved his success through means other than actual financial genius. Barry, however, is a likable naif whose first stop is Baltimore, where he uses the "friend moves" he developed in middle school to bond with a crack dealer named Javon. He leaves Baltimore with a rock in his pocket and the dream of establishing an Urban Watch Fund, where he would share with underprivileged kids his obsession with Rolexes and Patek Phillipes as a means to self-betterment. In fact, Barry has left New York with not a single change of clothes, only a carry-on suitcase full of absurdly valuable watches. And now there's that crack rock. Off he goes to Richmond, Atlanta, Jackson, El Paso, Ciudad Juarez, Phoenix, and La Jolla, the home of an ex he's been out of touch with for years. Alternating chapters visit his wife, Seema, the daughter of Indian immigrants, who's back in New York with their silent son, Shiva, and his nanny, conducting an affair with a downstairs neighbor, a successful Guatemalan writer named Luis Goodman (whose biographical overlap with the real writer Francisco Goldman has all the markings of an inside joke).As good as anything we've seen from this author: smart, relevant, fundamentally warm-hearted, hilarious of course, and it has a great ending.

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Starred review from May 1, 2018

Set before the 2016 election, this is the story of a midlife crisis of an individual--and perhaps of the nation. Barry Cohen is a New York hedge fund manager, a member of the .01 percent, married to a beautiful younger Indian American woman and scoring the game of life by people's incomes. Yet he has another side, the memories of a pool cleaner's son who dreamed of becoming a novelist (his hedge fund is called This Side of Capital) and Layla, the lost love he hasn't seen since college. When the SEC begins investigating, his marriage falters, and the challenges of raising an autistic son become overwhelming, Barry takes off, getting on a Greyhound for a trip to El Paso to find his Layla. Throwing his credit cards away, the wealthy Barry finds himself near penniless, rubbing shoulders with the 99 percent and learning something about himself along the way. VERDICT This is a road trip through a heartland both national and personal with one man's dysfunction echoing his country's as Barry attempts to escape the present only to have the present confront him in the end. Shteyngart's latest (after Super Sad True Love Story) is a hilarious, melancholic, and rapier-sharp tale for our times. [See Prepub Alert, 3/12/18.]--Lawrence Rungren, Andover, MA

Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.