Barry Cohen has a lot of assets under management, as he likes to tell anyone he meets, but they don’t include a stable marriage, a functioning relationship with his son or a future in which he is not about to be subpoenaed for insider trading. And so, blitzed on $33,000-a-bottle Japanese whisky and bleeding from an altercation with his wife and their son’s nanny, the 43-year-old hedge funder makes good his escape, pausing only to gather up his collection of highly expensive watches.
Flinging himself on to a Greyhound bus, he sets off in pursuit of… what? An earlier version of himself, an authentic America, and his college girlfriend Layla, now living in El Paso, are some of the rabbits Barry chases down holes in the course of Gary Shteyngart’s hugely entertaining and acute look at the life of not just a muddled man, but a thoroughly confused country. For this road trip takes place at the very moment that America is gearing up to choose its 45th president, a prelapsarian time in which the sound of Trump’s voice puts Barry in mind of “a genuinely sad older man from the outer boroughs”.
Barry is a tremendous character: screwed up by past, present and future, utterly contradictory, swinging between hopelessly sentimental impulses towards good to a cut-throat, winner-takes-all mentality, via a bemused amorality. He “hates” gun violence, for example, “but felt it was a cost priced into living in America”; talking to a black woman on a bus, and aware of his inability to relax, he ponders “the best way to mention his love of the rap band Outkast”.
Perhaps Barry’s problem is that he is a writer manqué, never quite recovered from the caning his short story about a shepherdess received in a creative writing class at Princeton, and doomed to name all his funds after F Scott Fitzgerald novels. Certainly, he sees every encounter and adventure on the road as a myth in the making, an interlude that will usher him on to the next part of his renaissance. Sadly, he is more Don Quixote than Don Juan.
Shteyngart is terrific at set pieces: Barry’s visit to Baltimore, where he stumbles across a group of tourists following the footprint of The Wire and nearly collides with “a German woman in denim shorts documenting a pothole”; his Atlanta reunion with a colleague he fired who has now become insanely wealthy and insanely chilled; a lurid, psychedelic excursion across the Mexican border.
And Barry’s is not the only story the novel tells: back in Manhattan, Barry’s abandoned wife, Seema, is embarking on an affair with the Guatemalan writer who lives a few floors down, in the less expensive apartments that do not sit immediately below Rupert Murdoch’s penthouse domain. Wealth, constantly on show and constantly calibrated, thrums through the narrative, even as it threatens to ebb away from Barry, who nonetheless – time being money – keeps up to date with his rare watch log, in which he records every second gained and lost.
Lake Success – a spot on the map that beguiled Barry in childhood – is filled with sadness, from the panic and despair that both parents feel for their small son, Shiva, recently diagnosed with severe autism and almost entirely uncommunicative, to the spectacle of an America about to walk into self-willed calamity. Shteyngart’s forte is to unite the absurd with the abysmal, and to undercut each moment of pathos with fly humour (“That same night he had told Layla about his mother’s death, he asked if they could try anal sex. She didn’t want to. This was before the internet”).
What hope for Barry, or for his country? Unsurprisingly, the novel brings us to the moment that none of its characters wholly believed could happen, and the ascension of Donald Trump (“The energy in the room began to flag. It was mostly feminine energy. About half of the male attendees were secret Trump supporters – many hoping for tax breaks – but the women were all on the same page”). But less predictably, it also takes us far beyond, into a sort of fairytale not dissimilar to those conjured by Barry’s juvenile pen. Can we trust in a happy(ish) ending? That, Shteyngart seems to suggest, is the million-dollar question.
• Lake Success: A Novel by Gary Shteyngart is published by Hamish Hamilton (£16.99). To order a copy for £14.61 go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
