KEY POINTS:
This up-to-the-minute novel is a rollicking read with many laugh-out-loud moments. It's a biting satire about the greed of companies like Halliburton (yes Dick Cheney does get a mention), life in the new Russia under Putin and political corruption. It is also a love story albeit one described in coarse and sometimes repellent detail.
The main character is a Russian Jew, Misha Vainberg, the 325-pound son of Russia's 1,238th richest man. His father sends him to America where he obtains a degree in multicultural studies, the nickname Snack Daddy because of his prodigious appetite and a love of rap music. Shteyngart sprinkles his story liberally with witticisms. If the Russian poet Pushkin were still alive, he would be a rapper, Misha declaims. Yeah, MC Push, says his friend.
Misha finds his true love in New York but is called back to Russia by his father, who then kills a businessman from Oklahoma which means Misha cannot obtain a visa to return to America.
His father is in turn murdered by a rival and Misha sets out to obtain a new nationality from a corrupt Belgian diplomat in the fictional ex-Soviet republic of Absurdistan. The machinations between political factions in Absurdistan and a subsidiary company of Halliburton form the bulk of the plot and the focus of Shteyngart's satire. That it seems all too credible says more about the events of the past five years than any lack of invention on Shteyngart's part.
*Granta, $32.99
- Detours, HoS
