Adjust your expectations when you pick up Gary Shteyngart’s “Lake Success.” His new book is not insanely funny nor hilariously absurd.It’s better than that. A mature blending of the author’s signature wit and melancholy, “Lake Success” feels timely but not fleeting. Its bold ambition to capture the nation and the era is enriched by its shrewd attention to the challenges and sorrows of parenthood.Barry Cohen, the glad-handing protagonist of “Lake Success,” repels our sympathy even while laying cl...

I listened to this novel months ago—just about the time it came out. I haven’t been able to adequately put into words how I felt about it. This was the first time I’ve partaken of a Shteyngart novel, and it is more in every way than I was expecting. There is a shadow of Pynchon’s frank absurdity there, and some bungee-cord despair—the kind that bounces back, irrepressible. Shteyngart’s novel is overstuffed with funny, sad, true, caustic, simplistic, derogatory observations about life in America

Shteyngart Blew It; Phallacies Come to be Too Much to SwallowA quite humorous story about a hedge fund manager married to a gorgeous (and pregnant) Indian attorney who now stays at home in their highrise Manhattan condo to raise their autistic son. Mr. Drexel-Burnham cracks from stress at work, experiences an existential crisis and goes on a bus trip to see his college flame/fiancee' in Texas. Seemed great. More than halfway through the novel unfortunately, Gary Shteyngart shattered my delicate

Nope, I can't do it; I can't continue to try to read this book that I hate. I despise the characters and the story isn't captivating at all. I've tried to give it a chance, but when I look at the book and try to read another page it is painful to think about. Definitely not the book for me. Maybe for someone else.I don't get them at all. Rich and snobby? Completely withdrawn from their child because he is Autistic? They are shallow and nothing is making any kind of sense at all. I'm just not sur...

There has been a lot of talk about what constitutes the American novel but for my money, Success Lake is the American novel for these times.Although the Trump election is not front and center it pervades everything; it’s a time when amorality and greediness are “punished” by a slap on the wrist. Into this poisonous atmosphere leaps Barry Cohen, a hedge fund manager of a This Side of Capital (lifted from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise.) By all outward appearances, Barry lives the Ame...

This is a witty book about how we define success, and how we might strife for what the term commonly entails instead of asking ourselves what makes us happy. Protagonist Barry Cohen is a wealthy hedge fund manager in New York, but when his 3-year-old son is diagnosed with autism, his marriage becomes strained. As he then also is confronted with an SEC investigation, Barry boards a Greyhound to flee his life and search for his college sweetheart.Shteyngart plays with the classic American trope of...

3.5 starsLet me start off by saying the main character, Barry, is a total and complete asshole. If you don’t like books where you dislike the main characters, this is one to steer clear of. Barry, to me, was fingers on the blackboard grating. I mean, what is it with the bloody watches? This is someone you want to feel something for, in a positive way, but I couldn’t. His son is on the severe end of the autism spectrum. All those dreams of a normal family have gone away. He’s incapable of even te...

"Like your first ankle monitor bracelet or your fourth divorce, the occasional break with reality was an important part of any hedge-fund titan's biography"- Gary Shteyngart, "Lake Success"Like great Indian food, I'm not exactly sure why this novel works for me, but GOD this book was delicious. OK, so I know SORTA why it works. It is brilliantly absurd, and sharp enough to almost immediately, and almost painlessly, draw blood. I kept thinking that this novel was like a mirror presenting this rid...

SUPER SAD TRUE LOVE STORY, Shteyngart’s 2010 dystopian masterpiece, will remain one of my 50 favorite books of all time. Its haunting prescience convinced me that technology and social media had already dominated and intruded on our lives to chilling, sinister effect. Some of it is already dawning—the way we can destroy lives with Facebook or Twitter is just one example of the way we live now. LAKE SUCCESS isn’t quite as epic, and although there is a nod to the dystopian—just a sprinkle--this is...

"We've all gone to look for America." Okay, not all of us. But Barry Cohen, the spectacularly wealthy -- and self-made -- hedge fund manager Barry Cohen has. He leaves his beautiful young wife, Seema, the daughter of immigrants, and his young son who is on the spectrum, and disappears on a Greyhound bus to see if he can rediscover the man he once was or (perhaps) the man he wanted someday to be. Barry and Seema are delusional, self-absorbed, and utterly perfect. Each is a mess, and I cared deepl...

A few weeks back I read Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine and was terribly bothered by all the comments indicating Eleanor was on the autism spectrum. There is nothing in the book that would indicate to anyone who knows anything about autism they haven't learned from a very special episode of Law and Order that Eleanor was autistic. People seem to think that anyone withdrawn, anyone with difficulty interacting with others, is autistic. It makes me crazy. So, it is ironic that Lake Success and

Compensating For EverythingIt’s been about 30 years since Sherman McCoy in Bonfire of the Vanities and Patrick Bateman in American Psycho satirically demonstrated the excesses promoted by wealth in the financial industry of New York City. Both books followed hot on the heels of the real Ivan Boesky’s ‘Greed is Good’ commencement address at UC Berkeley (and, of course Gordon Gekko’s equivalent speech in the film Wall Street). Barry Cohen in Lake Success is a resurrection of the type: insanely arr...

The roof garden was divided into roughly two demographics: capital on one side, and cultural capital on the other. It wasn’t quite as split as a Hasidic wedding, gender-wise, but it was close enough, and Barry worked up the gumption to leave some of his Wall Street bros behind and wade into the more dangerous territory of feminine culture-meisters. Lake Success contains some interesting themes and I can see why the critics are eating it up. It's also a good candidate for any number of literar

I finished it. I consider that an accomplishment in itself, considering how little I liked this book. Looking over the reviews on GR, I see plenty of people enjoyed this book, or at least thought it was deserving of awards, or found it meaningful, or that it represented the times we are currently living in, or that it spoke to them, or that it was very readable, or relatable and so on. I can't say I agree with any of that. Instead, I'll say why I hated this book.1. The only reason I read this bo...

We meet Barry Cohen in the summer of 2016, an early middle aged hedge fund manager. His life is about to implode, and actually has EXploded in a less than civilized way as he flees his enviable digs in the Flatiron District sporting scratch marks on his face, headed for the Port Authority and a Greyhound that will deliver him, he hopes, to a simpler, cleaner, more fulfilling life with his college girlfriend. The fact that the suitcase he has hastily packed doesn't contain changes of clothing, bu...

Hmm. It's either a brilliant Candide-esque satire of the clueless wealthy idiots who got us into our current mess (maybe they didn't vote for Trump but they thought about it!, etc) or it's a tone-deaf straight white liberal male asking questions about how we got here. And if you finish a book and wonder which one it is... chances are the answer isn't going to be positive.Gary Shteyngart is the first of his cohort to bang out a proper Trump-responding novel - although this only tangentially conne...

A long time ago, I read Gary Shteyngart’s “Super Sad True Love Story” and LOVED it. He writes thought provoking novels about our culture and society. Shteyngart writes with incredible wit and satire. As a reader, I wanted to pay exceptional attention to each word, situation, and theme because his best work is in the minutia.In “Lake Success” Shteyngart uses protagonist Barry Cohen as an utterly ridiculous, self absorbed, egotistic, unmonitored, and narcissistic individual. Barry is a hedge-fund

This is not a novel to read if you need likable characters. Barry Cohen is mostly despicable, living in a bubble of privilege and delusion. And his wife Seema isn't much better. Their worst flaw is that neither has figured out how to fit their autistic son, Shiva, into their glossy lives. Lake Success is about how both of them evolve- at least a little. Shteyngart's genius is how he manages to combine biting satire with big-hearted warmth. In the end, I found myself rooting for each of them.

In Lake Success, Gary Shteyngart channels what Philip Roth called “the indigenous American berserk” with sympathy, humor, and pathos. Always funny, Shteyngart encapsulates his deep understanding of contemporary America into the lives, loves, and failures of Barry and Seema Cohen ”during the year 2016, at the start of the First Summer of Trump.” Barry and Seema live in rarefied Manhattan in which the mother of a three-year-old boy worries that ”’If he doesn’t do well, forget Hunter, forget Ethica...

(2.75) I’ve rarely felt so conflicted about a book. When I started writing up my Pittsburgh Post-Gazette review (published here this past Sunday), I had little idea of what arguments I was going to make. (You can tell me whether you think I succeeded in making them!) I could almost have written the whole thing as a series of questions. What did I actually think of Lake Success?I could appreciate that it was a satire on the emptiness of the American Dream – Shteyngart has many cutting lines about...