From: Walter Miale <w-vn@greenworldcenter.org>
Subject: ARTICLE: NABOKOV AS A PRECURSOR - of Gary
Shteyngart
In April, the editors of this forum kindly posted an off-topic
query I submitted, and I received three responses, each mentioning
Gary Shteyngart, the author of two novels, The Russian Debutante's
Handbook, and Absurdistan, which I proceeded to read. The books, which
are spellbinding, contain some Nabokovian resonances. For example, an
enumeration of features of the strangely Soviet-like landscape of the
south and central Bronx as seen from the el includes "the strange
Tudor-style row houses that must have wandered in from some quaint
English suburb." And in the same sentence the 325-pound narrator
mentions "the 350-pound woman (my long-lost fellow traveler) who
got on at 174th Street."
To give this a dose of Nabokov content, i.e. explicit
relevance to this email discussion forum, I would try to make a case
for the Borgesian idea of considering Nabokov as a precursor,
specifically a precursor of Shteyngart, but this may not be necessary.
Here is a miscellany, some of the je ne sais quoi, some of the
"secret points," of Absurdistan.
...citizens, Sevo and Svanï, went
about their lives, burrowing into the ready maw of the 718 Perfumery
or gathering around taxis and failed minibuses to spontaneously drink
Turkish coffee and spit sesame seeds at the sun.... Is this
"Nabokovian"? Gogolian? Ilf and Petrovian? Hunter
Thompsonian?
And so for the next half hour, while
I stroked her body up and down with my lurid male gaze, Nana told me
many, many facts about the Cathedral of Saint Sevo the Liberator. I
will try to relate to the reader some highlights (did I mention the
orange highlights in Nana's soft brown hair?), but for a full
appreciation of this weird octopuslike church, the reader should turn
to the Internet.
The cathedral was built in either 1475 or 1575 or 1675;
certainly there was a 75 in there somewhere....
Beloved Papa had a very dim
knowledge of flotation, a very faulty understanding of how physical
objects are kept aloft by water, this despite the fact that, like
every other Soviet Jew, he was a mechanical engineer by
training.
KBR was especially famous for its
very generous 'goody bags,' and people were wondering what they would
get at the rooftop luau (let me spoil the fun a little: it was a tin
of Beluga caviar accompanied by a mother-of-pearl serving spoon
engraved with the Halliburton logo; a selection of scents from the 718
perfume store, including their new Ghettomän aftershave; and gold
earrings shaped like tiny offshore oil platforms, which made a nice
gift for Timofey's new girlfriend, one of the older Hyatt
maids).
This was the only building of the Soviet
era that did not look as if it had been continuously crapped upon by a
flock of seagulls for the past five decades.
Mr. Nanabragov pointed out the fact
that I had twelve completely useless rotary phones lined up on my
desk, more than anyone save himself, almost as many as Brezhnev had in
his day (I assume his worked).
"The Holocaust is a serious
business," I said. "It requires very expert branding or
we'll all look like a bunch of idiots." The grant proposal
for a Holocaust Museum in Absurdistan beats all its competition for
"most wicked" thing in the novel and probably in all
American literature in the half century since Lolita.
Almost all [of the members of
some street gang] had ill-grown mustaches and sported pinkish
sun-bleached sandals meant for some nonexistent third gender, along
with buzz haircuts that spoke either of nationalism or
retardation.
I whipped out my laptop, jammed its
little dickey into a wall socket, and powered up the World Wide
Web.
A bit from the aforementioned
grant proposal: When asked to identify the following eight
components central to Jewish identity--Torah, Mishnah, Talmud,
Holocaust, Mikvah, Whitefish, Israel, Kabbalah--only Whitefish scored
higher than Holocaust in a survey of thirty drunk Jews at a nightclub
in suburban Maryland...
...the hundred-absurdi (US$.001)
note....
A dusty painting showed Lenin
cheerfully disembarking at Finland Station, beneath which a banner
warned in English: NO CREDIT CARDS. NO OUTSIDE PROSTITUTES, ONLY HOTEL
PROSTITUTES. NO EXCEPTIONS.
"Tell Papa my heart is
breaking," Nana said [about to leave Absurdistan for her senior
year at NYU]. "Tell him I'll come back as soon as the war is
over, so maybe they should try to wrap it up by Christmas
break."
We were handed over to a relatively
pleasant group of Nana's former American Express colleagues, who
immediately told us that the soldiers were merely 'volunteers' and not
affiliated at all wth the American Express company.
I had nearly removed her bra and
liberated one nipple when the conductor meekly came a-calling.
"I'm paying for both of us," I told the old man trembling in
his AmEx regalia and visored cap. "And for my manservant
too."
"Three persons, all told,"
the conductor said, showering us with his spittle. He was yet another
aficionado of the local breakfast favorite, sheep's head and trotters
dunked in garlic broth. "Er, all told, one hundred and fifty
thousand dollars, please, sir."
"Evelyn Whuh?" the Texan
was shouting. "Get outta here, mister. That ain't a real
name!"
The death toll from the Absurdi
conflict was approaching three thousand, the American electorate still
couldn't find the Caspian sea on a map, while the Russian president
Putin was promising both to bomb the warring parties and to mediate
between them.
He was clearly a Jew. And such a
Jew! A prehistoric Jew, as I've said before, a Haimosaurus
rex...
"You'll love New York," I
said. 'It's like having the whole world on one small
island.'
"I understand you can play
basketball with blacks on the street," Yitzhak [the prehistoric
Jew's son] said.
Shteyngart has the eyes, ears, nose, tastebuds, and sensitive
skin of a novelist. Absurdistan, his second novel, is about, among
other things, gluttony. "Valentin's tarts wept when they saw the
menu. They couldn't even name the dishes, such was their excitement
and money lust. They had to refer to them by their prices: 'Let's
split the sixteen dollars for an appetizer and then I'll have the
twenty-eight dollars and you can split the thirty-two . . . Is that
all right Mikhail Borisovich?'" But the dishes give off a
soupçon of green cheese and acid reflux: the smoked venison on a bed
of kiwi mousse...the toxic sturgeon of the Caspian, and its fishy
eggs...and the Chateau Lafite, probably emptied and the bottle
refilled with a mix of Bulgarian varietals. The gluttany motif recurs
throughout the book. For example, there's this, a couple hundred pages
later: "I sat down in a snowdrift, opened a bag of corn chips,
and swallowed them all in one go. Then I lit the remainder of a joint
and realized that I should have smoked the marijuana first and eaten
the corn chips second. When would I learn already?"
Like Borat and Andy Kaufman's dream childhood, Absurdistan is set
in a former Soviet "republic" in the petroleum -stan belt,
where Uncle Sam has in recent years quietly assumed so fateful a
presence. In the midst of the turmoil that goes with the messy
squabbles of the oligarchs there, and the ascendance, in Absurdistan
and in the United States, of the military economy over the
manufacturing and petroleum economy, the narrator attends an office
party at Golly Burton (Georgian pronunciation?) to celebrate its new
contracts with the US Army (it was originally an oil drilling services
company), and he exchanges a few words with the company mascot, a
parrot, who tells him why everyone at the party is so excited:
"Cost-plus! Cost-plus!" (In the upsidedown world of military
contracting, profits are proportional to costs, so there is an
incentive to maximize costs. Do that in a civilian business and you're
dead.)
A naive initial reading of Lolita may lead to some uncertainty
and discomfort about the moral character of the book ("Hmm, this
pervert is too well drawn and too amusing. Are we supposed to laugh
with him at the expense of his victim?") before a re-reading
leads to the conclusion that the book is very (to use what is possibly
not the moh zhust) moral. Similarly, in The Russian Debutante's
Handbook, Shteyngart's world of villains is drawn so convincingly in
its otherness that the prim reader may find herself raising at least
one horrified eyebrow. ("Hm, is this edifying, or merely a hell
of a lot of fun?") With Shteyngart's second novel, I think the
morality is quite clear.
In Nabokov, as in fiction generally, there is a mix of reality
and fantasy. Reality in Nabokov's novels is imbued with fantasy, and
is possibly as real and as fantastical as reality itself, and probably
more interesting. Shteyngart's reality is still more real and no less
fantastic.
More real? Shteyngart, like Dashiel Hammett, like
Machiavelli, like Shakespeare, is attuned to the political dimension.
It's not merely that he is politically savvy (about a thousand times
--conservative estimate-- more so than Bellow); but reality IS
political, that is, it has a dimension of power relations (with its
algebra of injustice) that is incalculably complex and vastly more
extensive than is to be found say in the world of Gogol's bureaucrats
and burghers, or Godunov-Cherdynsev's Berlin or his Russia under
Alexander II. (The Gift) (Of course communists of both kinds
(pro- and anti-) tend to get it all wrong. Hammett was somewhat of an
exception.) In the preface to Bend Sinister, Nabokov indicates that he
prides himself on being "supremely indifferent" to history
and its outcomes, and elsewhere he ridicules the naive idea of trying
to influence the course of history. Shteyngart also makes fun of the
idea of changing the world, or rather he makes fun at least of
criminal oligarchs who imagine themselves as altruistic men of
destiny, but Shteyngart does not sleep through the collective
nightmare of history. He takes it for his subject matter, immerses the
reader in its bowels (pardon the metaphor) and provides a breathtaking
overview.
Shteyngart's two novels deal with what is somewhat misleadingly
called the Russian mafia, and both of the novels take a Google
Earth-eye view of America and the Anti-America that is the former
Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, in which criminal communism was
replaced with criminal capitalism.
The Russian Debutante's Handbook focused on the doings of a local
Russian mafiya band with its brain and muscle, its soldiers
and fartsovchiki or whatever, and on how a New York social
worker who was born in Russia and educated at Antioch or some place,
finds himself in its milieu, a smooth operator.
Mark Danner speculated about why Osama bin Laden hadn't followed
up his success of September, 2001 with another attack. Nine Eleven,
Danner reasoned, was a hard act to follow, and he compared bin Laden's
dilemma with "the second novel problem" of a young writer.
Yes, one might have wondered how young Shteyngart would follow up the
brilliancy of The Russian Debutante's Handbook. Answer: beyond all
expectations.
Absurdistan zooms out, like the conclusions of an FBI superagent
in an American movie, to reveal the place of its mafiyosi (?), its
amusing and terrifying beeznissmen and hitmen and corrupt political
bosses, in the grand matrix of transnational crime. It's on a grander
scale than Hammett, who sticks to the municipal sphere, and the vision
is no less penetrating. The controlling centers here are at the apeces
of commerce and the power of the state. There's a cameo appearance by
Dick Cheney during his Halliburton days in the 90's. It's common
knowledge (yes?) that the oligarchs in Russia have allied themselves
with contract killers, but that can't be true in the United States,
can it?? This is how Major General Smedley Butler, USMC, winner of not
one but two Congressional Medals of Honor, put it, "I was a
racketeer, a gangster for capitalism....I was rewarded with honors,
medals, and promotion. Looking back on it, I feel that I might have
given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate a
racket in three city districts. The Marines operated on three
continents."
I think even communist believers of all stripes will like this
book. They can ignore the political revelation, or not take it
seriously, and read Absurdistan for what it is, three hundred-plus
pages of nonstop word artistry. The reality does not detract from the
enchantment. On the contrary, it gives it power.
Of course, as William Butler Yeats <a
href="http://www.online-literature.com/yeats/783/"
target="_blank">served notice</a> to Thomas Mann,
politics isn't everything. There is a pivotal point in Absurdistan
(omitted in the list of "points" above) when individual and
collective nightmares merge. The protagonist, an hereditary Russian
mobster-oligarch-tycoon named Vainberg (he's Jewish), has inhaled
fumes of Absurdistan's traditional hallucinogen, the same one that its
patron saint was under the influence of centuries ago when Jesus
appeared to him and told him to stomp on his ethnic enemies. Zonked to
his booties, Vainberg stumbles outdoors and finds himself somehow
outside the perimeter of the Absurdistan capital's equivalent of
Baghdad's Green Zone. He looks up and sees the skyscrapers dancing.
"And then the Hyatt decided to cut loose. She --for there was a
tender femininity about her-- lowered her hazel eyes, ignored the
spaghetti strap that had fallen promiscuously off her pretty shoulder,
and then, in a move of such dazzling brilliance that the enraptured
sun turned rainbow every glittering piece of her broken heart, she
jumped across the sea." What Misha Vainberg later realizes he
actually saw on that summer day in the year 2001, when the atrocities
in Chechnya were about at their height and a few weeks before the
destruction of the World Trade Center in Manhattan, was the bombing of
the high rise hotel where he had been living. In the weeks that
followed he got a taste of how the other 99.999 percent live, and had
a reverse-Salinger moment with a severely damaged child and her
unforgiveable mother. Without spoiling what may be one of noveldom's
great endings, it can be said that Vainberg resolved to return to his
American girlfriend and to marry her and live out his days with her in
the Bronx (in East Tremont, the non-white neighborhood where the girl
grew up, where in summer "the air is stagnant and stinks
alternately of sea, clotted cream, and rained-upon dog," and
where there are "stores with no name but PLAY LOTTERY
HERE.")
I can't wait for Gary Shteyngart's third novel. I hope it will be
about Blackwater. Or better yet, how about a retelling of Seven Brave
Tractor Drivers?
And how about a movie of Absurdistan? The best novels don't
ALWAYS make lousy movies. I'd like to nominate Ben Stiller to direct.
With a "Nutty Professor" getup, he could also play
Vainberg.