Lake Success (2018)
By Gary Shteyngart
Random House, 339
pages
★★★½
Benjamin Franklin once observed, "Money never made a man happy
yet, nor will it. The more a man has, the more he wants. Instead of filling a
vacuum, it makes one. " Lake Success
follows in the tradition of other works on amoral investors who make hash of
their lives such as American Psycho,
Black Edge, The Wolf on Wall Street, Nothing Personal, and Bonfire of the Vanities.
Shteyngart's
novel spans the years 1987 to 2016. Barry Cohen is hedge fund investor who is
very good at hustling high rollers to slap down their cash. He's very bad at
actually making those investments pay off, but each time one of his enterprises
collapses, he still pockets tens of millions of dollars. He's the kind of guy
who thinks he can buy or smooth talk his way out of any situation, and that he
can "fix" people by giving them advice.
Overall,
Barry is a jerk. He calls himself a "moderate Republican." He also thinks
that opening a ten thousand bottle of wine makes him sophisticated, and that
bragging about money makes him seem brilliant, not boorish. Barry's a walking model
of conspicuous consumption, which he wears on his wrist. He is obsessed by
expensive watches–such as Patek Phillipes– that sell for several million
dollars. Barry's other collections include a Manhattan penthouse and an
attractive wife, Seema, who is the daughter of Sri Lankan immigrants. What
could possibly go wrong? How about insider trading and peddling investments in
a drug that harmed rather than helped. But the thing that really knocks Barry
off his pedestal is his son, Shiva, who is born "on the spectrum;"
that is, severely autistic.
Lake Success is told, in alternating
chapters, from Barry's point of view and then Seema's. Barry can afford a nanny
to care for Shiva, but he can't buy his way out of an impending SEC indictment,
Seema's growing contempt of him, or his embarrassment over Shiva's limitations.
He reaches a crisis point when Seema talks him into having dinner with Luis and
Julianna, who live in their apartment building. Barry thinks that Luis, an
author, is a fraud–and he might be right–but it bugs him more that they are
insufficiently impressed by his stature, and he's crestfallen by the sight of
their clever son Arturo. When play dates for the children come up, Barry instead
insults his hosts, an attempt to keep Shiva's condition secret.
When
the house of cards begins to tumble, Barry impulsively decides to bail. He
takes some cash, a "rollerboard"–I think Shteyngart meant "roll
aboard"–clothing, and some of his favorite watches, heads to Port
Authority, and tosses his phone into a rubbish bin. He doesn't have much of a
plan beyond finding his college girlfriend Layla, and boards a Greyhound bus to
begin that quest. A rich boy on a Greyhound bus? One who thinks he can somehow
reconnect with his lit major days at Princeton? What won't go wrong? Barry meets many people on his journey: a one-eyed
Mexican, a 9-year-old boy who is devoted to maps, a crack dealer he
contemplates managing, an ex-protégé he fired, a beautiful black woman named
Brooklyn who works at a Marriott in Jackson, Mississippi, and Layla herself.
The longer the trip goes on, the further downward Barry spirals. His absence
affords Seema a chance to test her wings, which she will do sexually, socially,
and vocationally.
Will
Barry learn from his experience? Not really. In his words, "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.” When he resurfaces in New
York, he sets up shop anew, and bores everyone with romanticized and sanitized
retellings of his road trip. Only the clueless rich can make a bus journey
sound as if it's like feeding Delhi slum children; only a conceited one can
overlook the hurt he authored or his own degradation, and still think he can
pick up where he left off.
Lake Success is more than a book about Wall
Streeters gone bad; it's also Shteyngart's attempt to capture the tone of
writers such as Jack Kerouac and F. Scott Fitzgerald. It is telling that
Barry's last hedge fund–The Last Tycoon–is named for Fitzgerald's unfinished
novel. (Barry is decidedly an unfinished product.) Ditto the fact that Lake
Success is a real place on Long Island not far from Great Neck, the model for
West Egg in Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby.
Lake Success is a well-written book, but it
has flaws. First, there is a dearth of likable characters. Seema is like a
dark-skinned Daisy Buchanan, a prima donna whose own moral compass often fails
to point toward true north. She clearly loves being a rich New Yorker, with or
without Barry. Most of the secondary characters are also morally challenged,
hence it's as if everyone is operating his or her own version of a high-risk
hedge fund. The Great Gatsby is proof
that one can write a brilliant novel with few sympathetic characters, but
Shteyngart's risky investments don't always pan out. Aside from Shiva, Arturo,
and Seema's parents, you won't lose sleep when bad things happen to nasty
people.
I
wasn't wild about Shteyngart's final chapters. There is redemption of sorts,
but do we believe it or even care? Shteyngart really could have ended the novel
when the Reagan/Bush recession ended in the early 1990s. Pushing the timeframe
to 2016 was an attempt to make backdoor inferences about double-dealing during
the age of Trump. Does he do so because he wants us to believe that this too
shall pass, or because he's pessimistic about the inability to rein in
Barry-like recklessness that has surfaced repeatedly since the 1920s? In other
words, is Lake Success an ironic
title, or a descriptive one?
Rob Weir
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