I have just finished a pair of books by Gary Shteyngart. His second book, Absurdistan, is the first one I read, followed by his first book, The Russian Debutante’s Handbook. Anyway, it’s been since Douglas Adams that an author has been able to make me laugh multiple times per paragraph while propelling a story forward. To me, Debutante was much more solid, but look for it at a bookstore — Amazon seems to be sold out.
While I enjoyed the books tremendously, I am hopeful that his third book will not again feature a young, drifting Russian immigrant who went to a liberal midwestern college as its slacker-protagonist. While the 2 books’ main characters differed in many respects, they shared much of this background in common, not to mention Shteyngart’s (or at least each character’s) view of Middle America equivalent to that of East Coast / West Coast elitists — a bland generalization about the “flyover states,” the silly little problems they have, their naivete, etc.
Which isn’t to say he doesn’t give that to all of America. Though the views may be based in the reality of these characters, it would be interesting to see the protagonists grow beyond this narrow view in which all Americans fit neatly into a few simple categories and can therefore be easily dismissed or manipulated, while those with a background similar to Shteyngart, naturally, can be as colorful and complex as any character you can find. But that would require effort, and both Misha and Vladimir, our protagonists, exert little of that until their backs are against the wall.