Like the tragic clown who bawls so mellifluously in the opera, funny men are often sad sacks at heart. Although Gary Shteyngart's three comic novels – covert memoirs about his life as a Russian immigrant in America – have brought him critical and financial success, he persists in regarding himself as a failure. Telling his story again in a new book that is more candidly autobiographical than his novels, he prosecutes his abiding quarrel with himself, with his family, with Russia (that would probably have killed him if he had stayed there), and with America (that even more unforgivably saved his life). Little Failure is irrepressibly funny, but almost by default. The witticisms are fired off like bullets, and Shteyngart's wisecracking grin eventually hardens into a smirk of something like despair.
"I am a kind of joke," he says. He means it metaphysically, and it's not a laugh line. Small and furry, he sees himself as one of biology's nastier jests, and in addition he blames history and geography for afflicting him with a name that is only easily garbled into Shitfart. It doesn't help that this invidious label was the result of a bureaucratic error in Soviet Russia: his family's actual name is Steinhorn, meaning "stone horn", which Shteyngart says would be better suited to a priapic German porn star than to a boy whose American schoolmates jeered at him as a red nerd. Outdoing those who mocked him, he describes himself as a gnu, a gerbil, or "a tiny vertical dachshund".
Hilarious as it often is, Little Failure is a record of existential homelessness, of living in a limbo between two different countries and identities. Shteyngart's parents, who were among the "grain Jews" granted exit visas in return for Jimmy Carter's donation of wheat to the USSR, left Leningrad for New York in 1979. Little Gary, aged seven, was agape. As if transported from Kansas to Oz, he felt that he had "stumbled off a monochromatic cliff and landed in a pool of pure Technicolor". But acclimatisation was hard. He had trouble making friends, since whenever he said "Oh, hi there" it came out as "Okht Hyzer", which could have been "the name of a Turkish politician".
America, he decided, tasted like the cereal he was fed, "easy and light, with a hint of false fruitiness"; an all-you-can-eat salad bar at a steakhouse summed up American plenty, a dual display of capitalism and gluttony. Much later, he equated America with the body of a girlfriend – loamy down below like the fertile soil of the hinterland, topped by an Anglo head from which grew "20 inches of rich, flaxen hair". Yet despite his appetite for cereals, salads and the grabbable rear and kissable nose of the girlfriend, Shteyngart cannot forgive himself for adjusting to his adopted country, and broods over what he has lost.
He writes incisively about Americanisation, which is a moral process as much as a course in civics. Immigrants are expected to undergo a regeneration, almost a reincarnation: America is the homeland of happy endings, where happiness is earnestly pursued and invariably attained. Orthodontic improvements are essential, guaranteeing that everyone can emit an evangelical grin, and after his father's dental makeover Shteyngart is startled to see him "smiling fully, with teeth, in the American manner". He is taken aback as well to see the acquired, Americanised good nature of his grandmother fall away as she lies dying, when her face settles back into "a contorted Soviet grimace".
Shteyngart's twin nationalities offer a choice between satire and sentimentality, between the rage and frustration that go with being Russian to the effervescent optimism that is compulsory in America. Recoiling from the young Gary's asthma, his father called him "snotty", and his mother, realising he would never qualify as a lawyer or accountant, nicknamed him "Little Failure" – or "Failurchka" in her Russo-American pidgin. Their barbed endearments, Shteyngart reflects, are symptoms of a "natural cruelty that comes with our mother tongue".
But he prefers this razor-tongued truthfulness to the American insistence on boosting the ego and being the star of your own life; he is grateful for his infantile sickliness and his adult neuroses, because a writer, in his opinion, is "an instrument too finely set to the human condition", vocationally condemned to pain. This is why, even though he says he will never live anywhere but New York, he remains an archetypally Russian figure – a chirpier version of Dostoevsky's rancorous, liverish subterranean hero in Notes from Underground, a more antic companion for Lermontov's malcontent Pechorin in A Hero of Our Time.
Never having quite grown up, Shteyngart interprets geopolitical disasters on an analogy with the rough treatment he received in his American childhood. Hitler's invasion of Russia, he believes, was treated by Stalin as a "breach in school-yard-bully etiquette"; the despot reacted by sentencing 20 million Soviet citizens to death, at least two of them Shteyngart's own kin. But little Gary, in his imagination at least, is as indiscriminately vindictive as any totalitarian ogre. At Hebrew school, he longed for a nuclear holocaust and amused himself by writing science fiction, with fantasy serving as his "multiple warhead delivery system".
The Russian Shteyngart writes to rid himself of gripes and grudges, ignoring his father's advice not to be "a self-hating Jew". The American Shteyngart writes for a more plaintive, ingratiating reason: to his parents, his brutal schoolfellows, and his "several readers around the world", he is crying out, as he admits in desperate italics, please love me. His work is strained by these mixed motives, and – exemplifying Freud's diagnosis of humour – he relies on jokes to hold the contradictions together. Thus his self-dislike is shadowed by preening narcissism: every chapter of Little Failure is illustrated by a snapshot of Gary from infancy to young adulthood, and although he insists on his shaggy grotesquerie, he often looks as adorably pixieish as the young Audrey Hepburn.
Hoping to deflect such criticism, he quotes the opinion of a teacher who watched him try too hard to be cute in an acting class and screeched: "You know what your problem is, Gary? You're fake and manipulative!" His silent reply was, "This is New York": attitudinising comes with the territory. Elsewhere, with subtler irony, he confesses that this fakeness made him a writer, whose three novels and this memoir are all exercises in fiction, which is, he warns us, another word for falsehood. "I have," he says, "no mythmaking abilities beyond the lies I tell on the page."
There is a wink of postmodern self-congratulation here, but also a wrenching insecurity. As Shteyngart remembers the wheezing panic of his asthmatic infancy, he says, "Emerging from nothingness takes time"; he is still unsure whether he has hauled himself out of that black vacancy into the bright American light. At a reading he gave in New York a while ago, he ended by calling for questions and then, when none were forthcoming, asked if anyone wanted to give him a hug. He needs our embraces as much as he needs our laughter, but I doubt that they'll make him feel much better about himself.
