{"id":34028,"date":"2020-01-24T03:59:33","date_gmt":"2020-01-24T11:59:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/?p=34028"},"modified":"2020-01-22T15:49:12","modified_gmt":"2020-01-22T23:49:12","slug":"novelist-explores-trump-era","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/2020\/01\/24\/novelist-explores-trump-era\/","title":{"rendered":"Novelist explores Trump era"},"content":{"rendered":"

Gary Shteyngart opens the Cherie Smith JCC Jewish Book Festival on Feb. 8 at Rothstein Theatre. (photo by Brigitte Lacombe)<\/em><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cYou want to know the first rule of running a billion-dollar-plus hedge fund?\u201d Lake Success<\/em> protagonist Barry Cohen recalls telling the high school boys who invited him to speak to their Investors\u2019 Club. \u201cDon\u2019t sweat the metrics. We\u2019re not really about the numbers. Do you know what we are? We are a story<\/em>. Hedge funds are a story<\/em> about how we\u2019re going to make money. They\u2019re about being smart, gaining access, associating with someone great. You. You are someone smart enough to make others feel smart. You are bringing your investors something far more elusive than a metric. You\u2019re bringing them the story of how great you\u2019ll be together.\u201d<\/p>\n

Through the character of Barry Cohen, on his journey to what would be self-discovery if he were at all self-aware, author Gary Shteyngart explores the societal circumstances in the United States that led to the election of President Donald Trump \u2013 and could well do so again.<\/p>\n

Shteyngart opens the Cherie Smith JCC Jewish Book Festival on the night of Feb. 8. In conversation with CBC\u2019s Lisa Christiansen at Rothstein Theatre, he will no doubt talk about his latest novel, Lake Success<\/em>, about a hedge-fund manager who flees his wife and young child, who has recently been diagnosed with severe autism, as well as a Securities and Exchange Commission investigation into his financial dealings.<\/p>\n

Barry is stuck in a childlike state. He had a difficult father and his mother was killed in a car crash, a death Barry witnessed and which haunts him. Barry yearns for affection; he cannot regulate his emotions. He believes himself to be a self-made man and he is constantly coming across people he thinks would benefit from his mentorship, from fellow fund managers to a poor black youth he encounters on his travels to his first girlfriend, with whom he is trying to reconnect \u2013 hence, the bus trip. He is trying to find her, in the hopes of rekindling that relationship, and all the lost hope it encapsulated, while disregarding all the relationships \u2013 personal and business \u2013 he has left behind in New York City.<\/p>\n

\"image<\/a>The main female characters in Lake Success<\/em> \u2013 Barry\u2019s wife, Seema, and his former girlfriend, Layla \u2013 are not as well-constructed as is Barry. Despite a sympathetic portrayal, it is hard to understand what anyone would see in Barry, yet he manages to attract smart and beautiful women. The novel provides some explanation as to why Seema would marry him, including family expectations. And, after meeting him for the first time, she recalls, \u201cshe went home and Googled Barry\u2019s net worth and found it comforting. A man that rich couldn\u2019t be stupid. Or, Seema thought now, was that the grand fallacy of 21st-century America?\u201d So, she thought she was connecting with an intelligent and wealthy man, but how Barry continues to be an attractive prospect to women (and men) after he cowardly runs away from his responsibilities and is nearly penniless is a bit of a mystery.<\/p>\n

For some readers, Shteyngart might come down a little too easy on the one-percent, as exemplified by Barry, Seema and the few people we meet in their realm. When the Jewish Independent<\/em> asked the author why it was important to imbue the character of Barry with humanity, Shteyngart said, \u201cBooks about inhumane characters are not fun to write. Imagine an entire novel set from Trump\u2019s point of view. Eat burger, get angry, eat burger, get angry. It\u2019s just not 330 pages worth of material.\u201d<\/p>\n

That is not to say that Shteyngart is condoning the lifestyle of the ultra-rich; in fact, quite the opposite, though he does so with seeming resignation.<\/p>\n

\u201cWithout giving too much away for the new reader,\u201d he said, \u201cBarry does change. Somewhat. Slightly. But the damage that has been done to the country socially and politically by Barry-like oligarchs is not going to go away, even if the next election ends the so-called Trump Era.\u201d<\/p>\n

While Lake Success<\/em> doesn\u2019t offer insight into how the divisions in Trump\u2019s United States could be repaired, Shteyngart\u2019s acerbic wit and astute observations offer an entertaining read that will hopefully elicit readers\u2019 introspection about our own privilege and identities, how we define and carry ourselves in the world. Both Barry and Seema have a conflicted relationship with their cultural heritage; Barry his Jewish, Seema her Tamil.<\/p>\n

As Barry holds his three-week-old son in his arms \u2013 long before the autism has been diagnosed \u2013 \u201che whispered through all his agnostic lapsed-Jew bullshit, \u2018Please, God, just don\u2019t do anything to him, okay? My sins are my own.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Later in the novel, on the bus as it enters Louisiana, Barry overhears a conversation between two white men, one an aspiring preacher who declares hatred of \u201cany kind of ignorance,\u201d then goes on to explain why \u201cthey nailed Jews to the cross\u201d and that \u201cMuhammad was killed, because he couldn\u2019t accept Jesus Christ as permanent.\u201d At that moment, \u201cBarry realized that the man was now looking at him. And also that he was a Jew. He hadn\u2019t really thought of being Jewish since he was in grade school. But he did now.\u201d<\/p>\n

Even later, Barry would again look at his heritage differently, considering how it could be passed on to his son. For the most part, though, Barry is perceived as a white male throughout the novel.<\/p>\n

\u201cYes, it\u2019s very strange,\u201d said Shteyngart about being Jewish in America. \u201cI was being interviewed by a Jewish intellectual who was trying to convince me that we weren\u2019t white. Which is oddly enough the talking point of the neo-fascist right. In any case, the feeling that Jews were a part of the American mainstream \u2013 think Seinfeld<\/em> \u2013 has been badly shaken both by the physical attacks against Jews and by the general feeling that the country is now being run as an exclusive enclave for straight white Christian males with the occasional sprinkling of Sheldon Adelson.\u201d<\/p>\n

Lake Success<\/em> is a provocative read with some brilliant one-liners, such as the description of neighbours in their building, whom Barry hates, as being \u201cso featureless, they could have come with the hallway,\u201d and, when he faces difficulty becoming a writer, Barry concludes, \u201cHe was a damaged person, but not damaged enough to make a life out of it.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Jewish Book Festival runs to Feb. 13 at the Jewish Community Centre of Greater Vancouver and other venues. For the full lineup, visit jewishbookfestival.ca<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Gary Shteyngart opens the Cherie Smith JCC Jewish Book Festival on Feb. 8 at Rothstein Theatre. (photo by Brigitte Lacombe) \u201cYou want to know the first rule of running a billion-dollar-plus hedge fund?\u201d Lake Success protagonist Barry Cohen recalls telling the high school boys who invited him to speak to their Investors\u2019 Club. \u201cDon\u2019t sweat […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":34031,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[784],"tags":[4041,389,7699,9594,9595,9011,5080],"class_list":["post-34028","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-books","tag-cherie-smith-jcc-jewish-book-festival","tag-gary-shteyngart","tag-humour","tag-lake-success","tag-novelist","tag-social-commentary","tag-trump"],"blocksy_meta":{"styles_descriptor":{"styles":{"desktop":"","tablet":"","mobile":""},"google_fonts":[],"version":8}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34028","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=34028"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34028\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/34031"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=34028"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=34028"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=34028"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}