From Russia, with Love

By Lev Grossman

American fiction is in a satirical mood. Sometime in the 1990s--David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest makes a handy point of reference for weary travelers-- the earnest, rock-hewn realism of the Raymond Carver school gave way to a more fluid, molten hyperrealism. The widespread conviction that truth has become stranger than fiction triggered a kind of strangeness inflation, an arms race of exaggeration, wherein novelists satirically augment and amp up and overclock their fictions in an attempt to keep up with the sheer implausibility of real life.

Which is great if you're into satire, a genre that's easy to like but hard to love. It's thin, it's shallow, it dates easily, it rarely feels larger than the thing it's making fun of. A case in point would be Gary Shteyngart's first novel, The Russian Debutante's Handbook, a charming-enough outing about expatriates in Prague that has approximately one joke that gets steadily less funny over time. An exception would be Shteyngart's second book, Absurdistan (Random House; 352 pages), a satire that is profoundly funny, genuinely moving and wholly lovable.

Thirty-year-old Misha Borisovich Vainberg, the hero of Absurdistan, is in every way and dimension an exaggerated character: grossly fat, filthy rich, loudly sentimental and operatically miserable as only a Russian can be. Vainberg lives in St. Petersburg, but his spiritual home is America, which he adores beyond all reason. Unfortunately, he's stuck in Russia because of trouble with the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service. Pines Misha: "I am an American impounded in a Russian's body."

Misha is a stateless being, trapped between a fantasy America and a debased post-Soviet Russia ("a nation of busybody peasants thrust into an awkward modernity") that he regards with an Oedipal mixture of love and contempt. East and West play a hilarious game of Telephone in his head--he's obsessed with hip-hop, and he and his best friend have formed an awful duo called the Gentlemen Who Like to Rap.

He attempts to inveigle himself into the U.S. via the fictional Caspian splinter state of Absurdistan, only to get tangled up with the cynical local oil politics and the local dictator's foxy daughter. All the while he bemoans his fate with Nabokovian wit and efficiency--when he alludes to the "typical drabness of the one-room Soviet apartment, with the bulbous refrigerator shuddering in the corner like an ICBM before launch," you can practically smell the spoiled milk.

The same way Gatsby chased Daisy, Misha chases his imagined America--with perfect, pure good faith, going further and further out on a limb until he's the only true believer in sight. He is, of course, doomed to be disillusioned and heartbroken--the novel ends hopefully, but the dateline is early morning, Sept. 11, 2001. Still, there's no doubt that he will reillusion himself again, repeatedly, as many times as necessary. He believes in America unshakably, sentimentally, incorrigibly--the way only a Russian can.