Shteyngart, Gary - Absurdistan

I finished Absurdistan three weeks ago. That I’m still reflecting on it is a testament to the complexity of Gary Shteyngart’s second novel and the caliber of his writing; that I still don’t know what to make of the book, even whether or not I enjoyed it, is probably due to the same things. Or not. I don’t know.

Absurdistan has received almost universal praise from critics. Elle described it as a “freakishly intelligent, verbally giddy, frequently flying ride.” The Cleveland Plain Dealer called it “weighty…a riotous, often sad, but redemptive ride that is never weighed down by its big topics.” Walter Kirn, who wrote about it for the New York Times, was beside himself with acclaim, calling Shteyngart “a giant on horseback” and beginning his review with random quotes from the novel.

But I’ve noticed that many critics have been relying more than usual on that trusted reviewer’s tool, the comparison - desperate, it seems, to provide readers (and possibly themselves) with some point of reference for this bothersome book. Shteyngart has been likened to Vladimir Nabakov, Saul Bellow, John Kennedy Toole, Leonard Wibberly, and Woody Allen. Other reviewers have compared Misha Vainberg, the hero of Absurdistan, to Ivan Goncharov’s Oblomov - the Russian Hamlet who is said to have answered “No” to the question “To be or not to be” - as well as to Ferdinand, the bull who preferred to smell flowers than to fight (originally a children’s story, then a 1938 Oscar-winning Disney cartoon, and eventually, much later, a tattoo on the right arm of singer-songwriter Elliot Smith). And I’d like to add to these lists Christopher Buckley, Benjamin Kunkel, George Orwell, Kurt Vonnegut, Michael Moore, Finnish surf-rockers Laika and the Cosmonauts, and Fez from “That 70’s Show.” No kidding, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel called Absurdistan “a Monster Truck Rally of a satire, sort of Jonathan Swift does ‘South Park’ with help from Rabelais, Gogol, Kafka, the Marx Brothers, Evelyn Waugh and Joseph Heller.” The thing is, I can see that.

Misha Vainberg is thirty years old, weighs well over 300 pounds, and is the son of the 1,238th-richest man in Russia. He describes himself as “an American impounded in a Russian’s body.” He wears vintage Puma track suits and in his spare time (which, like everything else, he has in abundance) Misha likes to freestyle rap. He graduated from Accidental College in the American Midwest with a degree in Multicultural Studies and has lived in New York City for eight years. After a visit to St. Petersburg, however, Misha is forbidden to fly back to the United States because his father, who used to only “dabble in criminal oligarchy,” is now a full-fledged gangster and has recently assassinated an influential Oklahoma businessman.

Misha travels to the country of Absurdistan to buy Belgian citizenship and a chance to win back his wayward “multicultural” girlfriend, Rouenna, who lives in the Bronx and describes herself as a onetime Catholic, now Methodist, half Puerto Rican, half German, half Mexican, and half Irish, but she was “raised mostly Dominican.” But things go from bad to worse in Absurdisvani. Misha is caught in the middle of the country’s two largest ethnic groups, the Sevo and the Svani, and a civil war ostensibly over which direction Christ’s footrest should tilt on the Orthodox cross. But Misha discovers that the internal conflict is actually a wag-the-dog genocide being orchestrated from the top floor of the Hyatt hotel by local warlords, U.S. officials, American Express, Century21, and a multinational corporation the Absurdis call “Golly Burton.”

Absurdistan is the most wicked of satires. The author wields a sharp blade and slashes indiscriminately. No one in the room is safe. He lays open communism and capitalism, Russia and the United States, foreign policy, the media, and religion. Dick Cheney and Vladimir Putin are minor characters. He laces the book with enough “factual” detail that I spent a good amount of time flipping through my encyclopedia looking, for example, for the inspiration for the fictional Absurdistan - the “Norway of the Caspian,” near Iran, with a country to the north that has a green flag bearing the Muslim crescent. (I never could tell.) The book ends on the morning of September 11, 2001, for no other reason (as far as I can tell) than to have it end on September 11, 2001. Shteyngart even targets himself. Rouenna has an affair with Misha’s old Accidental nemesis, a Russian expatriate named Jerry Shteynfarb, whose first novel is a semi-pornographic version of The Russian Debutante’s Handbook, Shteyngart’s much-lauded entree.

Shteyngart even comes close to satirizing the satire. Absurdistan seems solid at first; under a microscope, however, its building blocks are less substantial, like quarks, or like puffs of matter that exist in two places at the same time and maybe don’t exist at all. The jokes in the book are good but the biggest joke is on us all.

Maybe.