Little Failure

by Gary Shteyngart

  The fearsome literary presence I’ve expected is actually a skinny Korean American man, maybe four inches my better in terms of height and seven years in terms of age, wearing jeans and an unassuming checkered shirt. Perhaps that bastard Hemingway is to be blamed for the image of the male writer as a grenade that’s just been uncapped and rolled across the floor—writers of my generation, for the most part, look very much like the rest of humanity. But all I can do is sweat humbly before my idol.

  We sit down and shoot the shit. He tells me he just started this program at Hunter, and he needs good students like me. He’s read the first thirty pages of my novel, and he’s impressed. I tell him about Cornell and all the gorgeous funding that awaits me in Ithaca. He agrees that it’s a deal too good to refuse. I take out a copy of his latest novel, A Gesture Life, which he signs to me “With warmth and admiration,” a series of four words which floor me with their unexpected solicitude. He admires me? As I prepare to leave, he asks if he can do one more thing that maybe, just maybe, could entice me to go to Hunter instead of Cornell.

  Two weeks later, at a SoHo restaurant called, appropriately enough, the Cub Room, I meet Cindy Spiegel, Chang-rae’s editor at Penguin Putnam and one of the rising stars of publishing. I have a speech prepared. I know the novel isn’t good enough yet. But I can work hard. I’ve already worked on it for close to six years, first at Oberlin and then with my friend John. I can work more. It’s really no trouble. I have a job, but I can work after work. I can work during work. I can skip breakfast and work. I can skip sleeping and work.

  Before I can unbosom myself of the well-rehearsed and patented “Stuyvesant Immigrant Work Song,” before the appetizers even arrive, Cindy offers me a book deal.

  I want to pause here for a second. I would love to re-create what Cindy said about my novel and how I felt in the first few moments when I realized my life’s dream would somehow collide with my reality. But I remember nothing of that afternoon, except walking out of the Cub Room and into one of those ridiculous spring days, one of those days that somehow push aside New York’s heat and cold and make life seem much too easy. And I remember breathing in the scent of a blossoming tree and not knowing the name of it, just walking beneath a cloud of its honey and perfume. What had just happened to me? Something happened that was the opposite of failure. Something so big my English cannot even say what it is.

  As a teacher of creative writing, a lifestyle choice nearly as maligned as psychoanalysis, I often look out at the table and see myself at age twenty-eight or thereabouts. Another desperate young man at the end of his options, insecure, anxious to be praised, betting his literary future, his romantic future, on his work.

  In the year 2000 it is still possible to woo a girl with a book deal. And woo I do. But what’s so amazing is how quickly I am wooed back. How soon a number of warm and attractive women are keen to walk down the street with me, hand in hand, to see Cabaret Balkan or whatever foreign nonsense is playing at the Film Forum, without a second wood-carving boyfriend waiting for them on their Brooklyn couches. I quickly settle down with an interesting one, an Oberlin graduate with some jet-setting predilections—one of our first dates takes place in Portugal. Lisbon’s airport handily features a shop selling engagement rings, and my new sposami subita, with the thick pretty eyelashes and the sexy way of wearing a simple hoodie, encourages me to buy her an engagement ring right there (she is of a certain Asian culture that stresses matrimony). I almost do so, but a slight panic attack keeps me from shaving the remaining points off my credit score.

  But it’s my happiest panic attack to date. I’m not stupid when it comes to these matters. I know how little attraction I pose for most women à la carte. And what I realize is that with Chang-rae’s single gesture, I will never have to go home to an empty bed again. From this point forward, I will know love whenever I need to know it.

  The early joys of my impending publication, and then the joys of actual publication, are without equal in my life. There’s something outrageously simple about extending yourself toward a goal the way a plant seeks the sun’s rays or a gopher the crunch of easy soil beneath his paws, and then getting exactly what you want, sunshine or some prized tuber.

  My would-be bride and I are now living in a small but affordable duplex in the far West Village—her real estate acumen is without equal. My psychoanalysis is going well, even though a part of me misses the pain of being with a Pamela Sanders. Each day, out of habit, I bring up my cheek for my new girlfriend to slap, and each day she doesn’t slap it. “I just can’t seem to spoil you enough,” she tells me, as we lie in bed surrounded by an impromptu meal of Popeyes fried chicken, Doritos Cool Ranch–flavored tortilla chips, and non-diet Coke. It’s not true, what she said. I learn how to be a spoiled little bastard pretty quickly, but each time she tells me I can’t be spoiled, I block out some space in the bathroom to cry happily to myself.

  And each day I make the trip to one of those Hudson Street media bodegas that feature a complete selection of the latest Albanian and Eritrean news sources. There, I scoop up the dozens of publications that are running advance and nearly all favorable(!) reviews of my first book. Places I’ve understood to exist only vaguely, Boulder, CO, and Milwaukee, WI, and Fort Worth, TX, harbor people who have not only read all 450 pages of my meandering manuscript but also approve of what I’m trying to say.

  Which is what exactly? The Russian Debutante’s Handbook, about to sail into Barnes & Noble and destined to enjoy a slight commercial success, is if anything an unfaithful record of twenty-seven years of my life. It is filled with Nat Sherman cigarettes, guayabera shirts and janitor pants, words like “venal” and “aquiline,” cats named Kropotkin, dying beloved grandmothers, Eastern European castles brooding over urban hilltops, midwestern collegiate panic attacks, sedulous Jewish roommates from Pittsburgh, large female American backsides, cheerless Soviet cartoon crocodiles, eyebrow waxing, aged balsamic vinegar, and the age-old questions of whether it is better to be an alpha or a beta immigrant, and whether it’s okay to bring others into the world when you are not happy with who you are. It is a catalog of the styles and mores of a particular era as recorded by an outsider fast becoming an insider. It is a very long document in which a troubled young man talks to himself. It is a collection of increasingly desperate jokes. To this day, some people tell me it’s my best work, implying that it’s all been kind of a downhill slog from there. After finishing the book you hold in your hands, I went back and reread the three novels I’ve written, an exercise that left me shocked by the overlaps between fiction and reality I found on those pages, by how blithely I’ve used the facts of my own life, as if I’ve been having a fire sale all along—everything about me must go!

  On so many occasions in my novels I have approached a certain truth only to turn away from it, only to point my finger and laugh at it and then scurry back to safety. In this book, I promised myself I would not point the finger. My laughter would be intermittent. There would be no safety.

  With my first novel about to be born in the late spring of 2002, I feel my life shifting irrevocably; all those tectonic plates that once shuddered against each other are finally aligning to make a permanent surface upon which I can grow plants and herd cattle. It gets easier. But there’s something my analyst knows that I don’t: This burst of sheer joy will not last long. Already, the mechanisms at my disposal are working to revert myself back to the mean, to the unhappiness, to the drinking. A particularly cruel and personal review finally comes by way of the West Coast and that is the one I savor, the one I draw comfort from, the one I memorize. But this will not be my worst review by far.

  The phone rings in my West Village duplex, with its childish triptych of cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin stretching along an entire wall, with its sense of a happy new couple trying out life together. Another terrific early review has just landed on my laptop, and tonight we are going to my favorite sushi restaurant, on Hudson Street, to celebrate. The day before, David Remnick, the edito
r of The New Yorker and my father’s future nemesis, had called me personally to ask if I could write an article on Russia for the venerable magazine.

  I pick up the phone eager for whatever else the world can provide me.

  It is my father’s voice. “Mudak,” he says. My mother’s howling takes up the rest of the conversation.

  The Russian word mudak stems from the ancient term for “testicles,” and in a rural sense connotes a castrated piglet. In a modern sense it is perhaps closest to the American “dickhead.” In my father’s arsenal of words I know that it is the nuclear option, and that’s what it feels like when he says it: like being deposited in the middle of Threads or The Day After. Dead trees are whistling around me; a bottle of milk is melting on my doorstep. “Attack warning red!” “Is it for real?” “Attack warning is for bloody real!”

  Mudak. Added to Snotty and Weakling and Little Failure, this may be the final word to grace the tombstone of our relationship. Because while the hurt is still thrumming in my ear—why can’t you be proud of me in my finest moment to date?—I am back on my psychoanalyst’s couch trying on the new words I’ve just taught myself.

  I am not a bad son.

  Through the howling coming at me from across the East River, I discern the source of my parents’ anger, the mudak-inciting pain. A Jewish newspaper has sent a reporter to meet my parents in their natural habitat and in her subsequent article has suggested that my parents somewhat resemble the hero’s parents in my novel.

  “We don’t ever want to speak to you again,” my mother is shouting at me.

  If you won’t speak to me, it is better not to live!

  Those are the traditional expected words on my end. But what I say instead is: “Nu, khorosho. Kak vam luchshe.” Well, that’s fine. Do as you please.

  And that stops the howling. And that makes them backtrack, if not apologize. But it is too late. The razvod has been signed and notarized, not between my mother and my father but between them and me. I will continue to see them and love them and call them each Sunday night, as mandated by Russian law, but their opinions of me, the fanged hurt of their own childhoods, will not rend my world asunder, will not send me to the nearest bar, will not be unleashed upon the woman I share my bed with.

  But then there’s also this. My mother, a financial administrator at a New York nonprofit, the hardest-working person I have ever known, dutifully going over a letter with me over the phone while I’m at Oberlin, making sure those nefarious articles are in place. “Igor, is it ‘We have submitted budget for third quarter, fiscal 1993,’ or ‘We have submitted the budget for third quarter, fiscal 1993’?”

  “Submitted the budget,” I say, literally rolling my eyes, holding the phone away from me as if I am speaking to a younger version of myself. “I have to go, Mama. Irv is here. We’re going to [light up a spliff and] see a movie.” But how can I, the Red Gerbil of Solomon Schechter School, not recognize what it’s like to be ashamed of what comes out of my mouth, or, in my mother’s case, what is painstakingly typed beneath the letterhead of her agency? “Mama, your English is so much better than the Americans who work with you,” I say to her. “You really don’t need my help.”

  But she does. And now I’ve published a book that mocks, gently, but sometimes not so gently, a set of parents that are not entirely dissimilar from my own. What does that feel like for them? What does it feel like to pick up a book, or an article in a Jewish newspaper, and not fully understand the subtlety, the irony, the satire of the world depicted therein? What does it feel like to be unable to respond in the language with which that mockery is issued?

  And as I’m suing for my razvod, how can I also not celebrate my parents, my exes? After all, they could not have known that all these years I had been sitting there with the only thing truly at my disposal, the only thing truly mine. My notebook. Taking notes. “When a writer is born into a family, the family is finished”†—Czesław Milosz.

  My father’s favorite saying to me: “Maybe after I die, you will come pee on my grave.” It is supposed to be sarcastic, but what he’s really saying is “Don’t let go.”

  “Don’t let go of me.” Because sometimes it may seem like I have. Because instead of my fighting back, instead of my indignation, what he hears is silence.

  When he tells me that one of my postcollege girlfriends is too fat, that he’s personally affronted by her weight, although he does “respect her right to exist,” there is silence.

  When my mother tells me, before I am to go off on a trip to India, that I shouldn’t get any vaccines “because they will give you autism,” that canard of the extreme right wing, there is silence.

  Silence instead of the yelled rebuttals, the peeing on the grave, which they’re used to, which feels familiar and pee warm. “It would have been better if you had told me you were a homosexual,” my father said when I told him I had started psychoanalysis. Beyond the post-Soviet distrust of the practice—mental hospitals were used by the Soviet state against its dissidents—there is another fear. You can fight with your gay son, tell him he is a disgrace in your eyes. And he will fight back, will beg for your love. But what do you tell someone who is silent?

  And within that silence, time itself has stopped. Within that silence, the words hang in the air, fluttering in Cyrillic, not entirely painless but without the power to bring back the small, unquestioning child at their mercy.

  Don’t get any vaccines. They’ll give you autism. Don’t write like a self-hating Jew. Don’t be a mudak. Soon you will be forgotten. How can I not hear the pain in that? His pain? Her pain? How can I not publicize that pain?

  And how can I not travel, across eight time zones, to its source?

  * * *

  * The image of Pamela Sanders plus a weapon pointed at a head is what in creative writing classes is called “foreshadowing.”

  † And, I might add, if the family isn’t finished, then the writer is.

  Author and Lenin rekindle their bromance on St. Petersburg’s Moscow Square.

  I’M BACK IN RUSSIA. It is June 17, 2011, the temperature is cold and gloomy, but with some outlandish bursts of warmth. In other words the temperature and the way I feel about the country of my birth are one and the same. Since my first return to Russia in 1999, I’ve been back almost every other year, dutifully taking down everything I see, categorizing each kernel of buckwheat and pale sheet of salami, testing myself by walking into the Chesme Church where the maquettes of gallant eighteenth-century Turkish and Russian fighting ships once faced off in their eternal Anatolian battle. I’ve shared vodka shots with weeping policemen in Haymarket Square, slipped on innumerable patches of ice, nearly been sliced in half by a Georgian ruffian; in other words, done all the things one normally associates with a trip to the former Soviet Union.

  I am on the morning’s first speedy train between Moscow and St. Petersburg. The train is called the Sapsan, named for the mythical peregrine falcon, the world’s fastest animal, and designed by the equally mythical engineers of Siemens AG. I am hungover to the point where even the gentle German rocking of the Falcon brings on serious flashes of nausea. In the past few years I’ve been careful about my drinking. But on the night before my current Moscow-Petersburg journey, spurred on by that most lubricated of creatures, an aging Russian intellectual, I drank myself to the point where I wedged myself into the cupboard of a Moscow bar. I remember a pleasant young American television executive working on some suspicious-sounding international project telling me, “Wow, you really do drink like a Russian.”

  Afterward, blankness, the flash of a hipster hotel on a trendy island off-shore from the Kremlin, a hundred-dollar last-minute cab to the train station, and here I am in the biznes-class carriage of the Falcon, a thirty-eight-year-old man about to start writing his first memoir. Which is what brings me to St. Petersburg in 2011. Even as I am inching my way between Russia’s two biggest cities, my parents are charting their path across the Atlantic. My mother has not been to Russia in
twenty-four years, since her mother died, and my father in thirty-two years, or from the time he left the Soviet Union in 1979.

  We are all coming home.

  Together.

  A wind whips the Falcon into the station. It is early summer, but the St. Petersburg skies are gray, that unremitting gray of upstate New York in winter. The days are almost at their longest, the light is flat and cruel; soon, there will be no real sunset. At night, by moonlight, the sea wind sends the Finnish clouds on secret missions over the city.

  I’ve booked two sleek hotel rooms across from the train station near Uprising Square for me and for my parents, but when I show up, tired and haggard from my insomniac trip to Moscow (its purpose: an article about a Muscovite magazine called Snob), I am told my room isn’t ready. To my exhaustion is added a strand of fear. What if I don’t get any sleep before my parents arrive? They have come at my request, have traveled to a country they don’t particularly want to remember. Over the years I’m the one who’s returned so many times, have penned so many nightmarish scenarios about the place, and now I’m the one who has to protect them. But from what? From memory? From skinheads? From the treacherous wind? All I know is that I need to be my best for them. My mother is in her mid-sixties and my father in his early seventies. By Russian standards, they are already advanced pensioners. Finally given the room key, I plop down on all that cheap blond wood, large TV flashing images of all the other properties owned by the hotel chain, which, par for the global course, is based in Minneapolis but administered out of Brussels. Two tidy Ativan tablets touch the tip of my tongue, and the usual ragged, unsatisfying, chemical sleep approaches.