Little Failure
Gary Shteyngart
[Penguin]
Little Failure is Gary Shteyngart’s sometimes moving, but generally frustrating, account of his attempts to come of age as an American having spent the first seven years of his life in Saint Petersburg. If this sometimes boils down to little more than a series of faux-naif riffs on old American TV shows, Shteyngart is at his best detailing the material conditions of watching these shows on his grandmother’s television, which “catches either picture or sound”. Told in a fictive present that all too often slouches unpleasantly into the fictive future, Little Failure decries the “terse indecipherable bullshit-mysterious style” practised by ‘guru editor’ Gordon Lish, but at times it could use his help.
The book is an inventory of bad habits. In his teens and early twenties, the author drinks to excess and smokes too much weed. In his late twenties, he is frivolous with his money and that of others. At one point, he even picks his nose. For the reader, however, no habit seems quite as bad as Shteyngart’s refusal to let a joke explain itself. On a New York school bus, for instance, a young and timid Shteyngart, newly arrived from the Soviet Union, excitedly identifies the five-storey apartment block his family now lives in. His classmates are astounded. “That’s your house?” they shout. “You live in that whole place? You must be so rich!” Certain that readers will be puzzled by this story, since at this point in the narrative Shteyngart is a poor young immigrant, the authorial voice generously explains: “The children think the entire building, all fifty apartments, is my home.” Ba, dum, tss. The book is full of these patronising interjections, which finally work to turn comedic call-backs into dull weekend trips home. James Wood once spoke of a generation of American writers for whom “the implicit is always to be prized from its shell and consumed publicly”. Perhaps it is in this sense, more than any other, that Little Failure represents a truly American coming-of-age.
Words: Kevin Breathnach
For more this month see our reviews of Can’t and Won’t by Lydia Davis and Flight by Oona Frawley or our preview of Tramp Press’ Dubliners 100 collection.
