A new comedic novel from the author of Super Sad True Love Story. A panicked hedge fund manager takes a cross-country Greyhound bus trip to reconnect with his college girlfriend, leaving his wife to deal with their autistic 3-year-old.
Shteyngart’s storytelling is otherwise electric in its suspense and mordant hilarity; his characters are intriguingly and affectingly complex, and, while the action never stops, he still digs deeply into our perceptions of self and family, lies and truth, ambition and success, greed and generosity, love and betrayal, and, most touchingly, what we deem normal and how we respond to differences. Lake Success is a big, busy, amusing, needling, and outraging novel, one to revel in and argue with ... For all his caustic critique and propulsive plotting, Shteyngart is a writer of empathic imagination, ultimately steering this bristling, provocative, sharply comedic, yet richly compassionate novel toward enlightenment and redemption.
Shteyngart does slapstick as well as ever, but he stakes out new terrain in the expert way he develops his characters’ pathos—particularly in depictions of Barry’s and Seema’s relationships with Shiva. There are some rough edges—secondary characters tend to feel like types or props, and many of the couple’s problems are the kind that money (which they have plenty of) can either fix or greatly reduce—but this is nevertheless a stylish, big-hearted novel.
