WORDS Lola Boorman
If you have not read Gary Shteyngart’s small but substantial body of work — consisting of novels Abusurdistan, The Russian Debutant’s Handbook and the prize-winning Super Sad True Love Story — you need to get yourself to your nearest bookshop sharpish. If you’re a well seasoned Shteyngart veteran then his most recent feat, Little Failure: A Memoir, will undoubtedly solidify the already bubbling mix of joy, schadenfreude, and nostalgia which his razor-sharp writing provides.
The market tends to be sceptical about memoirs (Morrissey’s recent contribution to this genre being a perfect example), particularly if the author is still relatively unknown and nowhere near the end of their career. Shteyngart’s new release, however, is not a tired writer’s quick-fix to bolster his bank account; it is a profoundly unique story and one which confounds almost every expectation.
Born in Leningrad in 1972, Little Failure (the title coming from the Russian term Failurchka, with which Shteyngart’s mother referred to him, we are told, “With love. Mostly.”) is about the author’s Soviet childhood and his family’s immigration to America in 1979. What initially poses itself as a generic immigrant narrative, Shteyngart confounds and subverts; Little Failure traces the life of a boy with about as many different identities as Star Trek productions. Growing up Soviet-American during the Cold War can’t have been easy, and as the Soviet Igor Shteyngart becomes the American Gary, the author describes how he struggles to come to terms with his conflicted identity in the polarised nature culture of 80s geopolitics. Indeed, the memoir presents an image of an individual flailing to find any morsel of selfhood and instead defining himself through, among many, many others: Lenin, The Republican Party, Star Trek, Chekov, circumcision (no, really) and weed.
The utterly fantastic nature of this man’s life is, for the most part, stranger than his fiction. His crisp prose style, saturated with media referentiality and parodic literary digressions immerses the reader in the author’s wild and wonderful mind. His vague memories of whimsical soviet Leningrad are juxtaposed with his complex interaction of pride and shame when describing his family’s immigrant lot, as they struggle to tick the boxes of their very own American Dream.
Shteyngart’s writing is self-deprecating but it is not self-pitying. He very consciously heeds his father’s advice not to “write like a self-hating Jew”. His patch-worked language bows to its Russian origins, does not shy away from its shaky English beginnings, and finally, in the finished product, powerfully renders the strength, subtlety and irony the author has spent his lifetime actively constructing. Although a little overly-sentimental at times, Shteyngart makes up for this in his wonderfully defamiliarising picture of America and the psychological effect of its media, its politics and its people.
Little Failure: A Memoir by Gary Shteyngart (Hamish Hamilton) will be released on 27 February 2014.
