These last few weeks of international crisis have once again presented to wary citizens a baffling modern tangle of political and cultural concerns -- blurred borders and ill-defined belligerents, conflicts at once nationalist, ethnic, religious, mercenary, and coldly strategic. (Will Druze Lebanese support Shiite Hezbollah now that Israel has attacked? Is this all some frame-up for an American war with Iran? Who's calling the shots here, anyway?) You can take your position and pick your sides, but bewilderment remains the price you pay for global citizenship. It's a condition ripe for satire, even if the current catastrophe doesn't quite move one to laughter.
“Who are you by nationality?“ wonders Misha Vainberg, the narrator and soul-searching protagonist of Gary Shteyngart's robust, feisty, and timely new novel, Absurdistan. With this, the opening tone is set for Shteyngart's exhaustive romp through the modern crisis of identity politics and globalism, where Eastern Europe teeters between self-loathing and national pride; Jews are caught in all varieties of diasporic angst; and pursuit of the American dollar, in the name of a comically skewed international version of the American dream, unites all. Absurdistan, so singularly preoccupied with nationality that its title immediately lands us in a vague post-Soviet setting, stops at nothing to expose the wobbly foundations of nation states, full of corrupt and raucous global players unable to step back and fully contemplate the, yes, absurdity that Shteyngart has in store for them.
From Misha, the Russian experience is made plain; commenting on his mother's death, he notes she lived from "1939-1983. From Stalin to Andropov….a pathetic time to have been alive." Even for viewing the most personal of situations, there is no lens other than the political. This is Shteyngart's new world order; please adjust accordingly.
The still-precocious-at-age-30 Misha is a self-described "sophisticate and melancholic," an obese Russian Jew circumcised at age 18 by an eager group of Brooklyn Hasids, a scion of one of the New Russian oligarchs laying claim to the country's post-Soviet spoils, and a proud graduate of the Midwestern liberal arts school Accidental College (where he majored in multiculturalism). Absurdistan opens in St. Petersburg, where an uneasy Misha, unable to get a visa back into the United States, longs for his former days as a New Yorker with his Bronx-bred girlfriend and laments life in this “phantasmagoric third world city…in [a] studied imitation of the West.” From here, Misha is thrown into a turbulent geopolitical maze of sorts, beginning with his father's murder in Russia and leading eventually to the civil war-ridden former Soviet bloc republic of Absurvani, known in English as Absurdistan.
The complexities of this plot certainly hold the reader's attention, as Absurdistan bursts into a civil war replete with dueling ethnic subgroups and fierce competition for media coverage. Israel features predominately in this conflict, since even the fabled Absurdis know of its global strategic importance. In this part of the world, Misha's Jewish background gives him the unique opportunity to negotiate with Israel on behalf of Absurdistan in the hopes of gaining the patronage of the United States. (This plot strand inspires what can only be described as the funniest grant proposal in all of literature, a request for Jewish-American funding on behalf of a gonzo Holocaust memorial museum in Absurdistan.)
It is in the book's last section, as the Absurdis' civil war escalates in dissonant alternating passages of horrific carnage and comic geopolitical gamesmanship, that Shteyngart begins to channel the modern political atmosphere most seriously. Never lost in the escalating political farce, however, is the book's ruthless yet sympathetic depiction of Misha's emotional interior. As the story blows through parody after parody of everything from Halliburton to high-priced psychoanalysis, a bare-bones reality begins to haunt Misha. At the center of this absurdist conflict, we have what is at once still very modern and yet all too old-fashioned: a young man yearning for New York City, where he believes all his dreams will come true.
In what seems to have become a trend among the hipper-than-thou school of irreverent young novelists, Shteyngart throws in a self-referential (and self-deprecating) subplot involving Misha's romantic and intellectual rival, a hotshot novelist and writing professor named Jerry Shteynfarb. This tongue-in-cheek alter ego offers, of course, a convenient outlet for the author to play devil's advocate. The fictional Shteynfarb is something of a cliché, readily quoting Edward Said and exploiting a young student for publishing's sake. His bouts of sparring with Misha offer an interesting and often hilarious juxtaposition of liberal ideals at odds with fledgling communities and traditional social hierarchies. But Shteyngart bites off a bit more than he can fully chew. Layers develop through this relationship that seem, even in such a "globalized" plot, superfluous -- the product of a storyteller more hyperactively intellectual than fully disciplined.
Absurdistan, though, certainly relies on more than mere inside jokes and a titular absurdism to sustain its relevance over 300-plus pages. Shteyngart presses into our historical moment with an unwavering precision. Mercifully avoiding all manner of “post 9-11” catchphrases, he captures the feel of turn-of-the-century global turmoil through madcap plotting and a tone of cynical irreverence, all shot through with an unlikely (and quite American) note of optimism. In the end, it is an almost throwaway comment given at the book's opening which best captures the sentiment that just might be hidden at the center of Absurdistan: "How can I be so fortunate?,” Misha asks. “Sometimes I can't believe that I am still alive."
Erica Lipper, a former Prospect intern, is a graduate student at Georgetown University.
