by Gary Shteyngart
Granta £10.99, pp334 A
In his jacket quote, Simon Schama compares Gary Shteyngart's second novel, Absurdistan, with John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces, but it seems far closer to a modern British classic, Money. Where Martin Amis skewered the avarice and excess of the Thatcher and Reagan Eighties, Shteyngart brings a similar viciously clever humour to a world dominated by the fragmentation of the Russian empire and American 'interventionist' oil wars.
Though they are products of different times and geographies, Shteyngart's larger-than-life narrator, Misha Vainberg, has much in common with Amis's fascinatingly repellent John Self: both are physically revolting, disturbingly self-aware and driven by gargantuan physical and fiscal appetites. Shteyngart even includes a fictional alter-ego, as does Amis - the vain, intellectually risible creative-writing tutor Jerry Shteynfarb, a Russian-Jewish immigrant feted for his overrated first novel, The Russian Arriviste's Hand-Job (not a million miles away from the author's debut, The Russian Debutante's Handbook
But while John Self lived for money, Misha has a different goal. The US-educated son of a murdered Russian-Jewish oligarch, Misha has more dollars than he can spend, but it can't buy him the only thing he really desires - a US visa - since his father killed an American businessman and Misha is banned from US soil.
Separated from his Bronx girlfriend Rouenna, his quest to escape from Russia takes him to the little-known but oil-rich former Soviet republic of Absurdsvani, where a crooked consular official is willing to sell him a Belgian passport. Alas, civil war breaks out, the borders are sealed and Misha is caught up in the ancient feud of the Sevo and Svani peoples, only to learn that the conflict may have been staged to secure US aid and lucrative contracts for multinationals Halliburton and KBR.
Shteyngart conjures from the outset an atmosphere of disgust, both in his narrator and in the general corruption of modern Russia, where society is a lurid exaggeration of American consumer culture and its flipside. Three hundred and fifty pounds, burdened with toxins, sweating profusely, Misha is often pictured with various juices dripping down his chins and pooling between his breasts, which he never tires of describing. Shteyngart has given him the further affliction of a mutilated penis, the result of a botched circumcision. But because he is wealthy, Misha is never short of young women moistly ready to leap on his ravaged khui and he never misses a chance to describe this either, which after a while does slow down the plot.
The plot itself, once it becomes netted in the complexities of the Svani-Sevo civil war and its US and Russian interests, becomes increasingly bewildering. Shteyngart is a funny writer with a speciality in casual one-liners, and perhaps this kind of caustic comedy is the only plausible way to portray contemporary Russia and an international community in which the Sevo politicians want Misha to lobby American Jews for money to build a Holocaust museum so the Sevo people can impress the US State Department with their affection for Israel in order to persuade US companies to invest in reconstruction after a fake war.
Shteyngart has undoubtedly captured the tragicomedy of current international relations, but the novel feels like a brilliant idea for a short story stretched beyond its limits, its characters simply too gross, too cartoonish, to truly live or make any claim on the reader's emotions.