An Interview with Gary Shteyngart
By Andy Hunter
A self-described "small, furry oddball," Gary Shteyngart has established himself as one of America's most promising literary satirists. His novels, The Russian Debutante's Handbook (2003) and Absurdistan (2006), are scathingly funny takes on contemporary geopolitics and cultural identity (Shteyngart is Jewish and emigrated from the Soviet Union at age 7). A few days after Granta named him one of the best young US novelists, he sat down with the Brooklyn Review to celebrate over brunch.
You're teaching at Columbia now. Is there anything you try to hammer into your students?
Strong voice. You want to pick it up and know that only one person could have written this. The writing voice is a very special animal. It lives separately from the speaking voice and sometimes even the thinking voice. It should sound organic, and feel real. There's instincts that can be working against it. Worries about authenticity. The idea is to get beyond that and let the real stuff come out. My class is really varied; they're writing all kinds of stuff. I'm so glad to see literature becoming multi-ethnic and going all over the place. I was just named one of Granta's promising young novelists, and what was fascinating was the incredible diversity of the people there. For the first five years after I had written my first book I was scared to submit it, because it felt like the market wasn't looking for it, and I was almost embarrassed to write in such a critical way about my own heritage.
What made you think that people weren't interested?
Well, I really thought it was crap; also I really wanted to write, but my family had very different kinds of expectations; there was a huge push for me to actually go law school or something. My parents were like, we spent a hundred grand on Oberlin and what the hell are you doing with your life?
There's a great part in Debutante's Handbook where the ex-Czech official nails Vladimir about how he's a writer, and his immigrant parents don't consider that a legitimate profession-
Absolutely.
The universality of that is sad.
It is very sad, yes. That was a factor, the subject matter was a huge factor, and just a general insecurity. It's a weird thing, but a lot of publishing now is geared toward a full-package; you need to be movie-ready; you need to be media-ready, and a small furry oddball maybe is not the best kind of person for this industry. And most of the books I read were so different from what I was writing. There was no niche to stick it in.
So did you find you had outgrown the material when it was published six years later?
I did. I outgrow everything I write very quickly. I'm deep into my third book and when I read from Absurdistan I'm like, what the hell is this all about? It seems like something from a different planet. When I toured for Debutante's Handbook, people would ask me questions about the book and I couldn't even remember what the hell they were talking about. I was like, "You're right, maybe that does represent that." It's very hard to write the kind of stuff I write, because it's not gonna be well-received by a lot of the so-called communities that I come from. I have very little positive things to say about, let's say, organized Judaism.
Did you get in trouble for Misha attacking Hassids in Absurdistan?
Not worse than I thought, and I live in an all Hassidic building. But there were some people that were unhappy; some Holocaust survivors would write in: 'Wait a minute!'
So, you really already feel that you've gone beyond Absurdistan? I thought there was a big leap between the two books.
Thank you. A lot of my fans I think wanted a sweet hero, like from the Handbook, and were a little put off by this big bad wife-beating slob of a man.
Is it a struggle to write comically about somebody who is sometimes repulsive, and keep him sympathetic?
Comic writing is a balancing act because if it's just pure comedy then you've never really fulfilled the purpose of literature; you've fulfilled the purpose of stand-up. You're always wondering, am I tipping my hand too much? You always have to stand back and realize what the bigger themes of the book are. I always try to take a reader to place that's not quite the place they know. Whether it's a kind of redux of Prague in the '90s or the oil-rich states in the last five years. The book I'm writing right now is set in New York, but it's set slightly in the future. Some things have changed a great deal. I'm always trying to screw with the landscape a little bit. And I want the reader to think about certain things while I'm doing that screwing, but at the same time, I want the reader to smile.
Do you feel there's some danger of the humor overshadowing your ideas?
Well, so far so good; they've gotten the kind of attention that you want a novel to get from serious publications. To be honest it's always been a surprise for me. Because I think there's a certain kind of person who will never read comic novels, or won't get it if they do read it. So when you write a comic novel, in a way you're consciously limiting your audience, which limits your sales. Many novels have a good sense of humor but would not be classified as comic, like The Corrections or Middlesex. But my novels do veer towards comedy in a very conscious way.
In the film world people complain about how a comedy will never get a Best Picture Oscar, despite how hard it is to do comedy well. But in the novel there's everything from Candide to Catch-22.
Catch 22 is a perfect example. The novel, because of its interiority, can channel all kinds of deeper, psychological drama -- I mean, Herzog in some ways is a comic novel. A man goes nuts and starts writing off these angry letters...
Notes From the Underground-
In a sense, all these novels deal with many of the issues of the day and get people talking about them through the comedy. It's almost a Trojan horse that gets people interested. Also, tastes shift a lot, and after 9/11 there was this great idea that irony's dead-
Which didn't really pan out.
It didn't pan out at all! I mean, I feel bad for Sam Lipsyte's novel -- at the time, he wrote a brilliant novel called The Subject Steve, which was published, I think, on 9/11.
Well, even Home Land got rejected 30 times.
30 times, yeah. But, look at the landscape now. Claire Massud's The Emperor's Children deals with 9/11 but hardly in a heroic way. If anything it's a kind of sarcastic indictment of the chattering classes in the time of 9/11. Who would think that would sell a gazillion copies four or five years down the road from 9/11?
But there has been no real successful, poignant book about 9/11.
No, there's not. You know, 9/11 was a tragedy, but in some ways people are realizing that tragedies are all over the world, and often in much greater scale than 9/11.
In certain places, every day there's a bomb.
Some people live in 9/11 all life long. People were comparing it to the Holocaust early on, saying you can't write about it for 10 or 20 years, but honestly, the horror and the scale of the events are quite different - not to minimize the tragedy for those who lost loved ones.
You often pair tragedy with comedy. There's the point in Absurdistan when he encounters this woman pimping her child, and then he sees what I assume is a dead child, which he mistakes for an animal.
Yeah.
You're at the apex of horror. And then you end the chapter with a prostitute joke. Did you feel like you were taking a risk there?
Yeah. I was taking a risk there because I was so horrified by everything that I needed to tell a joke. In a sense, it's a Jewish maneuver; you're confronted with the ultimate horror and it all ends in a prostitute joke. I did actually meet a woman who tried to sell me her five-year-old daughter. I remember being so horrified that I went back to my hotel, taking a bottle of Ativan and being depressed for the next month. So this is my way of dealing with it, is instead of that, the prostitute joke. Whether that's effective or confusing for the reader, I don't know. I just know that to me, that feels like the right thing to do.
Well, you've talked about how Jewish humor is dark, and Russian humor is dark, and that Russian Jewish humor is-
The darkest.
So is that an example?
Yeah. You know, World War II in Russia, at least a seventh of the population was decimated by the war: Hitler's murder of the Jews, and then Stalin's murder of everybody down the line, and yet there are so many comic novels in Russia that make blistering humor from that epoch of Russian history. Almost everyone you know in Russia has lost a grandfather in the war or Stalin's camps, and it's a subject for insane satire! So Jewish; Russian - in some ways the two meld and in some cases the humor is very similar. I grew up with the idea that tragedy was to be expected from life. When my parents grew up, huge chunks of family died - Hitler and Stalin, the whole nine yards - so you kind of grow up thinking things are gonna turn out pretty tragically. Then you move to America, where the tragedy is that you can't get into Brown, so it kind of really jostles you.
Yet America is less assured now.
9/11 did create a feeling of insecurity, and the Bush policies of the last five years have further fed the idea that we're not a country that may be assured of its security down the line, that so many mistakes have been made. We can't compete anymore. Empire-states get really tired. It's always, "Liberty, freedom this, freedom that." It's almost like we're tired of our liberty, and we just want to die already. Forget about all this crap. Then it creates the feeling that I grew up in a failing superpower, and I'm in a failing superpower right now, and that's the subject of the next book that I'm working on, in some ways. That broadens my desire to make fun of it.
Did you have a brief moment of hope between those two feelings, when it seemed like you were in a successful superpower and the American Dream might actually work out?
Oh, yes, when I was very young, my parents are hard core Republicans, so for a little while there I was a hardcore Reagan lover. All the Russians love Reagan. It didn't last very long.
What made you decide to go from the comic 'Russian immigrant with a bear' author's photo on the Handbook, to this swarthy, sexy seducer pictured on the jacket of Absurdistan?
Well, my idea was that I would take photos of myself with different animals down the line, ever larger bears, or maybe some kind of elephant. Then Marion Ettlinger, whose work I've always liked, said, "let's make a sex god out of you." and I thought, I'm getting older, all kinds of hair loss and vanities are cropping up; I might as well let Marion make me beautiful. And she did.
How did you feel about that, when you went on your book tour?
Yeah, a lot of supportive women said, "My God, what the hell happened to you?" I said, it's all about lighting.
Well, at least the raw material's there.
The raw material is there, absolutely. But, a thing that's really funny is, authors are some of the most insecure people on the planet, then you put them in these weird semi-public positions. I can get freaked out by anything, you know, and just want to hide in my cubby hole.
Is the new book still set in 2040?
No, it's changed a little. It's set in New York City on an unspecified date, but a little earlier than 2040. It's too complicated to explain, but a there's a large portion of the population that can no longer read or write, and use colors and symbols to communicate.
Is that where you see the culture going?
Somewhat. An imagist culture as opposed to a literate culture.
Are you relying less on autobiography in the new book?
I'm taking baby steps away from it. The main character in my new book was born here. But he has Russian parents. And the book is not about Russia. Well, 89 percent of it is not about Russia.
Do you like the things that you're inventing as much as the material based on your experience?
Sometimes I forget which is which. I feel great about the stuff I'm coming up with now. A lot of the book is about technology and immortality. A lot of great comic novels are written after whatever it is has taken place. Armageddon, or the rise of a certain political party. I feel like I really am living in a great time of historical change, mostly for the worst, but certainly a great watershed moment in our history. I wanted to capture that as much as I can, and set it just a little bit in the future. I'm having a great time with it. Who knows, it could be a piece of shit in the end, but when I write I really enjoy writing. It's not a chore to me.
Let me ask you about the writing process. I read your interview in Modern Drunkard.
[Laughs.] Oh yeah. I can't believe I survived that interview. It was, like, 20 drinks or something, and we were up miles high, and didn't realize the effects. I spewed all over the Denver International Airport. [Laughter.] It's a fitting gesture, but still, you know.
I was surprised at how witty you both remained until the very end.
Well, I have to thank my heritage for that, that's a Russian thing.
How many drinks can you have and still have a decent writing day the next day?
Oh, I can do five or six strong drinks, wake up by 11:00, and get on my horse by one.
Wow. I too like to drink at night, but I've been trying to write in the morning, and for me it's a horrible combo.
I've given up on the idea of writing in the morning. A lot of writers talk about that, and I don't know how any of them do it. Maybe you have to be older and more settled into a routine. Maybe family helps.
Do you write every day?
Well, no. But I have analysis almost every day, so I gotta get out of the house by 4:00. I get up, write maybe three hours, go to my shrink, and then go out and party.
What's the relationship between writing and analysis?
I wouldn't say there's a formal relationship, but maybe it continues to fuel my self-obsession - my main characters have had quite similar backgrounds to mine. I love the Zuckerman novels that Roth wrote. I don't want to follow that example completely, but I love the idea of getting to figure out what went right with me, and what went wrong. Most of my characters are deeply frustrated, deeply unhappy and in a way I'm channeling my own frustrations and unhappiness. Being in analysis has been a great help because it's a very literary endeavor; you're constructing sentences about your own experiences, and you're trying to examine the actions of the people around you, and you're with a person who is also very verbose, and acts as a kind of screen for you. A good analyst points out things that you may have missed, so it's really a win-win situation. The ultimate affect of it on my work is ungaugeable. But my analysis does have a date of termination, a few years from now. At that point it'll be interesting to see how my work changes … when I'm cured. [Laughter]
You write from outlines, I hear.
Very strict outlines, yeah. But not with this book, only the first two. This book is written in a more esoteric manner, it's diaries and letters; there are two main characters and I'm letting them pretty much write the story themselves. Their relationship and how they view the world is determining the whole plot.
A lot of writers say that if they have a rigid idea of where they're trying to go, then it kills the life of their prose. There's also the idea that once a character comes alive, he or she starts going in directions other than what you planned.
Well, I try to make the outline funny, too. I try to already inject a kind of attitude that I want into each chapter. The outline is almost like a conductor's cue. Does it over-determine the plot? Maybe. That's why I'm interested in trying new things. There's so much unhappiness about the novel's place in our society now. I think it should be very much a living thing. You just have to constantly reinvent the wheel. But that doesn't mean you can't fall back on genres or motifs that have been tried before. There's a happiness to writing, but it doesn't necessarily makes for a very happy life. You're often judging yourself more harshly than any critic would. There is a pleasure in writing it, but a lack of pleasure when it comes time to send the thing out.
Is your teaching a hedge against the uncertainty of the writer's life?
Oh, sure. I love teaching, but certainly having a tenure-track position is a big relief in many ways. Even if you're doing well right now, you really don't know what's gonna happen with the next book. The publishing environment right now is very precarious. Myself and a few other young writers are hanging on nicely, but I don't know what's gonna happen next. The trends have been very worrying. There have been periods in the history of our race where people have moved away from the written word into other things. We may be at the cusp of something that will replace it. It is a big shift, you know. Philip Roth could publish 400,000 copies of Portnoy in hardcover. And Portnoy was discussed as a cultural event.
So it's really been falling off for a while.
I don't mean to be the Cassandra here, but people's minds are very different now. They don't have the time or the inclination to thoughtfully meditate on the world at large. Bombs are going off everywhere, and the bullet point format is dominant. A Yahoo box boils down what you should know into five sentences. Seventy-three people died when a bomb went off in a book market. I don't know why it seems any more shocking than people looking for vegetables and dying, but for some reason it really caught my attention. People look more to non-fiction books and very short bursts of information. Down the line, I still think when people try to figure out what went on in the minds of educated people living in the year 2006, they will turn to the novel. With Absurdistan, I wanted to create a portrait of this country and another country and Russia, as it is lived through the eyes of one particular character, but with a chorus of other people chiming in about the great uncertainty of being alive in 2001.
Misha's letter to Rouenna, in email speak: was that a cut on the way the written word is developing?
It's not even a cut. It's what it is. My new book has a huge section that are written in email format. People try to distill all their feelings into these brief messages. The results are often funny. A person's crying out for help and they sound stupid, but you still hurt for them. But email is the major mode of communication, even for me.
Yeah, it's such a bizarre contradiction that as written communication becomes more and more important-
Written communication killing the word is absolutely, hysterically ironic.