Lake Success
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4.6 • 8 Ratings
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- £2.99
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- £2.99
Publisher Description
'Gary Shteyngart hears America perfectly; its fatuity, its poignant lament, its boisterous self-loathing. Its heartbeat. Reading him sometimes makes me want to scream - with recognition and with pure hilarity' - Richard Ford
'A trip through the American wasteland - from the people who have too little, to the people who have too much. Incredibly smart, incredibly funny, incredibly tragic, and therefore incredibly human, this is the perfect novel for these dysfunctional times' - Nathan Hill
'The funniest book you'll read all year. A rollicking and zinger-filled road trip [that] sneakily deepens into a poignant tale of a man trying to outrace his problems.I was utterly floored' - Maria Semple
'Stupendous... Reflecting with perfect comedy and horrible tragedy exactly what America feels like right this minute... I barked with laughter at the same time as wincing in pain' Elizabeth Gilbert
A riotously satirical road trip through modern America from the brilliant author of Super Sad True Love Story and Absurdistan
Barry Cohen, master of the universe, has just had a very public meltdown involving a dinner party, an insider trading investigation and a $30,000 bottle of Japanese whisky. So he flees New York City, leaving behind his beautiful young wife and son, but remembering to bring his six favourite designer watches. Zig-zagging south through Trump's America on a Greyhound Bus pilgrimmage he is singularly unprepared for, Barry heads to Texas - to find his old college girlfriend and, with her, a shot at a second chance...
Lake Success marries the trademark Shteyngart wit with an astonishing emotional resonance, capturing the vivid eccentricity and contradictions of America right now while speaking to the universal human experience of love, belonging, and the pursuit of happiness.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A wealthy, self-deluded New York hedge funder sees America by the grim light of a Greyhound bus in Shteyngart's funny yet resoundingly mournful latest (after the memoir Little Failure). When a very drunk Barry Cohen stumbles into New York's Port Authority bus station, he convinces himself he's embarking on a Kerouac-esque journey to find himself. In reality, he's fleeing a failing marriage, the responsibilities of being the father to a severely autistic three-year-old son, and a potential SEC investigation. As Barry rattles around the country he buys crack in Baltimore, shacks up with an ex-girlfriend in El Paso, Tex., hits rock bottom in Phoenix his wife, Seema, the overachieving daughter of Indian immigrants, moves on romantically and does her best to ensure her son, Shiva, gets proper care while trying to keep his diagnosis a secret from friends and family. Barry is pathologically eager to please, full of good intentions that he rarely manages to follow through on, and the pity he elicits in the reader is genuine. Seema, though, is a bit of a puzzler, and readers will have trouble reconciling her driven, bristly personality with some of the decisions she makes. Shteyngart does slapstick as well as ever, but he stakes out new terrain in the expert way he develops his characters' pathos particularly in depictions of Barry's and Seema's relationships with Shiva. There are some rough edges secondary characters tend to feel like types or props, and many of the couple's problems are the kind that money (which they have plenty of) can either fix or greatly reduce but this is nevertheless a stylish, big-hearted novel. Shteyngart made his name as a sharp satirist, and he'll undoubtedly widen his appeal with this effort.
