Lessons from Absurdistan

Gary Shteyngart at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books.

Gary Shteyngart's Absurdistan has been recommended to me many, many times, and after hearing an interview with him on the Leonard Lopate Show back in January, I decided I would read it, eventually.


Comedy is promised ("Profoundly funny" says the Time front-cover blurb), and comedy is delivered. Much of the humor in the novel emerges, unsurprisingly, out of absurd situations or actions: in the very first chapter, a spontaneous gangster rap between the 325-lb. Russian protagonist Misha Vainberg and his friend Alyosha-Bob—this is not the Brothers K Russia—sets the tone for the rest of the novel.


Interestingly, Shteyngart has said that his favorite writer is Vladimir Nabokov and that his favorite of Nabokov's works is Pnin, a humorous but moving novel about a Russian immigrant trying and failing to assimilate into middle-upper class Western society. Absurdistan is filled with farce, but it's not just all slapstick humor and fat jokes (although there's a lot of that). Misha Vainberg is unlikeable for a variety of reasons—his excesses, his racial misconceptions—but in the end, it's hard not to feel for the guy and cheer him on because he seems to sincerely mean well. 

Near the end of the novel, as Misha wrestles with his under-developed but quickly awakening moral consciousness, one particular passage stood out to me:

At Accidental College, we were taught that our dreams and our beliefs were all that mattered, that the world would eventually sway to our will, fall in step with our goodness, swoon right into our delicate white arms. All those Introduction to Striptease classes (apparently each of our ridiculous bodies had been made perfect in its own way), all those Advanced Memoir seminars, all those symposiums on Overcoming Shyness and Facilitating Self-Expression. And it wasn’t just Accidental College. All over America, the membrane between adulthood and childhood had been eroding, the fantastic and the personal melding into one, adult worries receding into a pink childhood haze. I’ve been to parties in Brooklyn where men and women in their mid-thirties would passionately discuss the fine points of The Little Mermaid or the travails of their favorite superhero. Deep inside, we all wished to have communion with that tiny red-haired underwater bitch. We wanted to soar high above the city, take on the earthly powers below, and champion the rights of somebody, anybody. The Sevo people would do just fine, thank you. Democracy, it turned out, had the makings of the best Disney cartoon ever made. 

For Misha, who's been coddled all his life in physical luxury and been insulated from the problems on the street that he can't help but see in Absurdistan, his involvement in the political mess that is Absurdistan gives him the opportunity to make sense of himself as an adult in ways that the American liberal arts college experience couldn't. All over America, the membrane between adulthood and childhood had been eroding, the fantastic and the personal melting into one, adult worries receding into a pink childhood haze. 


There's been talk in articles published in the Times and elsewhere about the possibility of extended adolescence as a current trend: young adults getting stuck in adolescence into their 20s. I guess it depends on how you look at it, but it seems that getting "educated" in college and thinking about yourself ("Advanced Memoir seminars," "Facilitating Self-Expression") does no good unless you put yourself out there and get outside the bubble—Misha's bubble is particularly difficult to escape, since he's the son of the 1238th-richest man in Russia. Shteyngart's image of "parties in Brooklyn where men and women in their mid-thirties would passionately discuss the fine points of The Little Mermaid" is especially resonant; consider the trend of universities offering classes about youth literature or popular animation. I'm not necessarily criticizing their value for academic study, but it's hard not to think after reading this passage that there's more to being a mature individual than being able to put the intellectual machinery to anything you fancy; it's whether you can move past the Disney cartoon outlook on life and figure out what's really real to you.