LAKE SUCCESS

-->

Fiction

Stick-in-your-eye privilege

LAKE SUCCESS
By Gary Shteyngart
352 pp. Random House
Reviewed by Sarah Corbett Morgan

Barry Cohen appears to have it all. A hedge-fund manager with 2.4 billion dollars in assets, he has the trophy wife, the lavish New York apartment, and thinks nothing of drinking twenty-thousand-dollar-a-glass whiskey—single malt, of course.  

But in the first pages of Gary Shteyngart’s newest novel, Lake Success, we encounter Barry in the bowels of New York City’s grubby Port Authority Bus Terminal searching for a ticket kiosk. He is drunk, his face is bleeding, scratched where his wife and the nanny both attacked him, and it’s three in the morning. He has a few dollars in his pocket, a roller bag with some hastily gathered clothes and a fist full of high-end collector watches he cherishes. He throws away his credit cards in the nearest trashcan. He’s on the lam. 

So begins Barry’s search for himself; he believes in his arrogant and entitled way that this is a road trip to self-discovery and yet Barry has little self-awareness, much less compassion for others. Barry’s goal is to find Layla, his college girlfriend now living in El Paso, Texas. He wants to see if he can recover himself through her. He travels by Greyhound that he refers to as merely The Hound. He sits up front, as far from the stinking bathrooms as possible.

There are problems back home. The SEC is closing in, something to do with some questionable trades and stock in something called Valupro, a pharmaceutical company Barry purchased some time ago. The only “valu,” as Shteyngart writes, is that “the company promised mad valu to its shareholders,” but customers would end up bankrupted should they ever become ill and need medication. Images of the Pharma felon, Martin Shkreli, now serving time for securities fraud, spring to mind. In fact, there are lots of parallels to real life people in these pages.      

Then there is the issue of the son and wife left behind. It becomes clear early in the book that his three-year-old son, the aptly named Shiva, is on the autism spectrum and pretty far along on that spectrum. He does not speak or communicate. Barry has a hard time with all this; he’s never mentioned his son’s diagnosis to anyone. 

I don’t think I’ve read better descriptions of a severely autistic child, his routines, meltdowns, and self-absorption, than Shteyngart’s descriptions of Shiva. The fact that this family has money to deal with their problems, though, is a kind of stick-in-your-eye picture of pure privilege. 

The autism spectrum runs through the novel; Shteyngart seems to suggest we are all on it in some form or another. Some people are avid list makers, others, like Barry’s hedge-fund buddies, devoted spreadsheet keepers, some are collectors of antique watches, and then there is Barry’s son who delights in flipping a light switch from on to off and back again. Incessantly.  

Shteyngart uses his scalpel-like wit to skewer the entire elite class of the New York City and Wall Street crowd. He describes Barry’s apartment as being a bit “like a long-haul jet, their building divided into economy, business and first…The top three floors belonged to Rupert Murdock.”  Barry and his wife, Seema, somewhere around the mid-levels.  White male entitlement wafts up from the pages in all its stench, a bit like those bathrooms on The Hound.

And then we watch Barry lose everything. 

It’s rare that I would feel any sort empathy toward a hedge-fund manager, or as Tom Wolfe called them, Masters of the Universe—and yet, to Shteyngart’s credit, that is precisely what happened to me reading Lake Success. Barry, like all of us, seems redeemable.