What happens when an award-winning and best-selling comic novelist lets the mask fall? Gary Shteyngart writes in his new memoir, Little Failure, “On so many 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.”
Little Failure is the dramatic journey of the Shteyngart family — from the Soviet Union to Queens, New York, from refugee status to U.S. residents. In his novels, Shteyngart’s funny register has dwelled in the outrageous and satirical, but in Little Failure, the humor is decidedly dark, self-deprecating, circumstantial. It’s an explosive book. While much of the writing is dead serious, when humor does arise, it does so with the same mean-meets-kind one finds in violent and melodramatic countries. (When Shteyngart was born, his parents received a letter from the government: “Dear Parents! We cordially congratulate you and share your joy at the birth of a new human being — a citizen of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and a member of the future Communist Society…”)
“Because I was often sick and runny nosed,” Shteyngart writes, “as a child (and as an adult) my father called me Soplyak, or Snotty. My mother was developing an interesting fusion of English and Russian and, all by herself, had worked out the term Failurchka, or Little Failure.”
Comic distance from things that are still relatively at hand is something the author handles well. While in hiding, his Great Uncle Aaron witnessed the invading German force execute his family (his parents and his wheelchair-bound sister). Shteyngart describes Aaron’s escape like so; “After the Germans moved on, Aaron hoofed though the fields to a happy local chorus of ‘Run, Yid, Run!'”
