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[Fwd: a precisely measured map drawn by one of Nabokov's
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Subject: a precisely measured map drawn by one of Nabokov's whimsical
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Date: Sun, 30 Jun 2002 01:35:06 -0400
From: "Sandy P. Klein" <spklein52@hotmail.com>
Reply-To: SPKlein52@HotMail.com
To: chtodel@gte.net
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EDITOR's NOTE. For full text, go to the NYTimes web site.
[The New York Times On The Web] http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/30/books/review/30SCOTTT.html
'The Russian Debutante's Handbook': In the Shadow of Stalin's Foot
By A. O. SCOTT
ho is Vladimir Girshkin? This question -- a similar one drives most
novels about a young man's coming-of-age -- hovers over Gary
Shteyngart's energetic, ambitious first novel, even as it haunts
Vladimir himself. In the long-ago year of 1993 (''the first year when
mocking the mainstream had become the mainstream''), in which ''The
Russian Debutante's Handbook'' takes place, Vladimir is a 25-year-old
graduate of a Midwestern liberal arts college, living with his
girlfriend in a cramped East Village walk-up and spending his days
toiling as a public-service office peon in ''the most disheveled,
God-forsaken, not-for-profit corner of New York's financial district.''
But wait. Stifle that yawn. Yes, this is another book about an
overeducated, understimulated Manhattanite making his way through a
chaotic, confused moment in history, looking for love, money and
meaning. (What's wrong with that, anyway?) But Vladimir is different.
When we first encounter him, munching a soppressata-and-avocado sandwich
at his desk, we are informed that this young man has a special
relationship to history. He is ''the immigrant's immigrant, the
expatriate's expatriate, enduring victim of every practical joke the
late 20th century had to offer and an unlikely hero for our times.''
Vladimir is a Russian Jew, dragging a passionate Slavic soul and an
Ashkenazic sense of the absurd through the bright new American world
like a pair of battered, belted leather suitcases. His mother, a
maniacal investment banker, has embraced capitalism with the zeal of the
converted, while his father, a doctor specializing in insurance fraud,
nurses his nostalgia for the mother country in a suburban basement made
over to resemble the lost Russian village of his childhood. So Vladimir,
equally a child of the Brezhnev age and a Clinton-era 20-something, must
grapple with the classic immigrant's identity crisis -- the subject of
novels from ''The Rise of David Levinsky'' to ''The Joy Luck Club'' --
in particularly disorienting circumstances.
The world Vladimir inhabits is at once familiar and surreal; ''The
Russian Debutante's Handbook'' is like a precisely measured map drawn by
one of Nabokov's whimsical madmen. Vladimir is stirred from the torpor
of his job and his relationship with Challah, a fleshy redhead who works
in an S-and-M sex club, by a pair of chance encounters. The first is
with a demented Russian war veteran named Rybakov, who lives in
unexplained uptown splendor while drawing Social Security and
communicating with a mysterious electric fan. The second is with a young
woman named Francesca, who initiates Vladimir into the glamorous world
of American academe, introducing him to a circle of pretentious graduate
students for whom his Russianness is irresistibly exotic, and to her own
parents, university intellectuals who strike the young man as exemplars
of all that is tolerant, worldly and attractive in his new homeland
A. O. Scott is a film critic at The Times.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
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