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Shteyngart (left) and a slightly more furry pal.
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Serial killers, pinup girls, and hatchet jobs about your former bossit must be summer, right? Oh, but it's not all sandy fun and sunblock stuck to those pulpy pages. There's serious stuff, toolike grouchy old Don DeLillo, grouchy dead Clement Greenberg, war in Iraq, and Political Activism 101. Besides, the weather may not improve until July, anyway, so you can pick a book to suitgloomy or sunny.
IMMIGRANT SONG
"Now we'll see who whips the Groundhog in the banya." It sounds like S&M, and while that does play a small part in The Russian Debutante's Handbook (Riverhead, $14, new in paperback), Gary Shteyngart's vividly sprawling, unreasonably entertaining 2002 debut novel goes way beyond sex. The book is literally all over the map: from Leningrad, where our hero, Vladimir Borisovich Girshkin, is born; to Westchester, N.Y., where he's raised; to Florida, where he's pursued by Catalan mobsters; to Prague, where he finds refuge with Russian mobsters; plus a few other passport stamps I'm leaving out.
Dubbed "failurchka" by his doubly overbearing mother (both Jewish and Russian, you see), Vlad is frail, sickly, undersexed, underemployed, undermotivated, and possibly balding at the age of 25. As the novel begins in 1993, college dropout Vlad has no prospects and loads of guilt. He's no bootstrapping, high-achieving "alpha immigrant" but more "beta," he frets. Those Catalan mobsters are almost doing him a favor by chasing him to Prague, a "better place to be unhappy," where his fortunes abruptly change.
Shteyngart makes Vladimir a kind of greedy, lazy Candide figure on a polyglot picaresque. We see the world through this immigrant's thickly bespectacled, maladjusted, half-Soviet eyes. Vlad hates everything outside the city: "nature's dictatorial regime, its cult of greenness." He marvels at Miami's "blightscape of motels" and the face of yet another mobster (the Log): "nine-tenths scowl, one-tenth eyebrow."
Shteyngart's language is always playful and allusive, providing a spark for his hapless hero. It's an assimilation comedy, if you will, about a guy who never quite fits inand is never quite sure he wants to. (He's too Jewish to be Russian and too Russian to be American; in Prague, skinheads mistake him for a Turk.) Vladimir compares himself and other post-Soviet wastrels to Eastern Europe's infamously cheap, scorned automobiles: "We're like human Ladas or Trabants." Yet no matter how underestimated and self- deprecatory, like Vlad himself, they have an amazing ability to survive. Brian Miller
Gary Shteyngart will read at University Book Store (4326 University Way N.E., 206-634-3400), 7 p.m. Thurs., May 22.
POMPOUS ASS
"DearLet's agree to overlook (maybe even enjoy) the absurdity that joins us: You agree to indulge my lecturing on matters I didn't understand until I was older than you, and I make every effort to connect to your passions and objectionsto take your arguments seriously, even though you're too young to have had the experience I draw on."
Thus begins Letters to a Young Activist (Basic Books, $22.50), Todd Gitlin's contribution to an "Art of Mentoring" series inspired by Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet. It's hard to imagine any 20-year-old activist tolerating such a pompous ass. But then, it's also hard to imagine Todd Gitlin knows any actual young activists.
Gitlin, once president of Students for a Democratic Society (in 1963, just before it became relevant), is now mainstream media's safe Rolodex substitute for interviewing actual activists. For the last 30 years, he's made his living explaining away activism to fellow boomer editors and reporters at networks, The New York Times, and the like. Unsurprisingly, boomersnot studentsare also his audience in Letters.
Leaving aside Gitlin's absolutism, his excessive use of imperatives (do this, don't do that), his frequently tortured metaphors, and his failure to even define activism (presumably we know it when it blocks rush hour), not all his advice is bad. Encouraging activists to focus on changing actual policy, or to not dismiss all things American out of hand, for example, are tips activists of all ages could do well to heedif those tips advance their goals.
Yet Gitlin generally assumes only one valid activist goalimmediate policy changeand that the theories underpinning such activism are timeless. Simple, pragmatic empowerment strategies like teaching, witnessing, and disseminating information via the Internet are notably missing from Gitlin's suggested reading list (as well as from his own text). Tellingly, the elder Gitlin would have given the younger Gitlin the exact same advice back in 1963.
A critic, by definition, explains to the public the work of an artistor, in Gitlin's case, activist. The critic shouldn't have to explain the public to the artist/activist. In presuming to do so with Letters, Gitlin mostly just explains Gitlin. I can't think of a worse mentor. Geov Parrish
Todd Gitlin will read at University Book Store (4326 University Way N.E., 206-634-3400), 7 p.m. Wed., May 21.
BOOM TO BUST
Don DeLillo's sentences are practically all priceless, and I don't resent a penny of the $2.3 million he made for writing the flop novel Cosmopolis (Scribner, $25). As Auden said of Freud, DeLillo has become a climate of opinion: Without his influence, we'd have lost everybody from Jonathan Franzen to Bret Easton Ellis. Calamitously, Cosmopolis resembles The Corrections much less than American Psycho. It depicts the daylong crossing of Manhattan in April 2000 by 28-year-old Eric Packer of Packer Capital, leaving his $104 million skyscraper penthouse for a haircut on the West Side aboard his white limo, which has more features than the Batmobile.
