In Gary Shteyngart's fourth novel, Lake Success, he applies his ample gift for satire, leavened by a keen appreciation for human frailty, to survey a troubled American present.
Forty-three-year-old Barry Cohen is a hedge fund manager facing a wave of client redemptions after a three-year losing streak. To make matters worse, Barry is under scrutiny by the SEC, on suspicion that he traded on insider information to short the stock of a company about to release a new drug.
And so, in the summer of 2016, he flees his apartment in New York City's Flatiron District, leaving behind his much younger wife and three-year-old son. Barry boards a Greyhound bus with $1,200 in cash and a suitcase full of the vintage watches he avidly collects, hoping to "see the country as it really is" and perhaps reconnect with his first love from his college days at Princeton.
Barry's journey across the Deep South to California explores issues of class and race. This is a U.S. in the midst of being torn apart by a bitterly divisive presidential campaign, becoming "archipelagos of normalcy amid a dry, angry heat." As is the case with most road stories, much of the pleasure of Lake Success lies in the journey, not the destination. And yet Shteyngart brings the book to a close in a post-trip epilogue that's both moving and profoundly satisfying. For all the uneasy feeling of recognition it may provoke, this is a bighearted novel, whose generosity and essentially good nature might leave readers feeling just a little more optimistic about the future than they are when they pick it up. --Harvey Freedenberg, freelance reviewer