MEAN LAUGHS: Shteyngart’s satire spares no one, not even himself.
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Absurdistan, an amplified Slavomerican mash-up of a novel, begs for a hyperbolic descriptive sentence to express its catch-all style. “As if Woody Allen and Nikolai Gogol’s love child had written a Confederacy of Dunces for the new millennium!” Or some such thing. Certainly Shteyngart (an American born in Leningrad in 1972, he hit it big with his debut, The Russian Debutante’s Handbook) has variously called upon, pillaged, mocked, or paid homage to all his influences to construct the epic story of the epically obese Misha Vainberg. He is a Dostoyevskian holy fool, an ineffective Oblomov, a Tolstoyan do-gooder who caught a severe case of satyriasis from Philip Roth. All this and 325 pounds more.Banished from his beloved adopted home in New York, blacklisted by the INS after his father kills an influential Oklahoma nutria farmer, the hugely fat, reluctantly Jewish Misha is stranded in St. Leninsburg in the former CCCP. He is living the high life of New Russian Capitalism, as the son of the 1238th-richest man in Russia, gorging on sturgeon, drinking himself into a stupor, and shouting into his Nokia mobilnik but yearning for the squalor of the South Bronx and his beloved Rouenna, “my big-boned precious, my giant multicultural swallow.”
Misha feels a deep connection to American urban culture. His Russian mobster father is, after all, an original gangsta, and the Vainbergs, like all Jews, are fundamentally ghetto. The oppression of African-Americans is familiar to Misha, their circumstances “blighted, equivocal, and downright Soviet.” Or as Rouenna explains it, “all of you Russians are just a bunch of niggaz. . . . your men don’t got no jobs, everyone’s always doing drive-bys . . . the childrens got asthma, and y’all live in public housing.” Misha expresses his love by rapping (badly) and sporting vintage Puma tracksuits.
When Misha’s Beloved Papa is offed on the Palace Bridge, a revenge killing, it sends his son spiraling into mad despair. All the Ativan, Johnny Walker Black, and sturgeon kebabs in Russia cannot help him. He must get back to New York. Like all good Russian heroes in crisis, he heads for the Caucasus, to the republic of Absurdistan, where a corrupt diplomat has arranged a counterfeit passport, his ticket back to gangsta Paradise.
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Misha is trapped in Absturdistan by a staged civil war between the indigenous Sevos and Svanis, in collusion with the bad guys of Halliburton and Bechtel. The conflict is meant to attract some attention (and income) to the obscure republic. The Absurdistanis want Misha to entice Israel to give them money. A plot is hatched to make the tiny country the ultimate J-Date destination by frequent mention of the Holocaust “brand” in its travel literature. This will induce Jews to mate and perpetuate, ensuring a steady tourist income. Instead, the war rages out of control, Absurdistan implodes, and Misha must find a way to save himself and get back to Rouenna.Shteyngart is one of the funniest, smartest writers out there. His satire is brilliant, if a bit mean-spirited. He spares no one, not even himself. Absurdistan is haunted by a doppelganger of Shteyngart’s successful self, “Jerry Steynfarb,” a pompous, trend-riding literary darling who steals Rouenna away from Misha, only to dump her after he knocks her up.
