Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #872560 in Books
• Published on: 2002-06-07
• Released on: 2002-06-13
• Original language: English
• Binding: Unknown Binding
• 452 pages

From Amazon.com
Vladimir Girshkin, a likeable Russian immigrant, searches for love, a decent job, and a credible self-identity in Gary Shteyngart's debut novel, The Russian Debutante's Handbook. With a doctor-father of questionable ethics and a manic, banker mother, Vladimir avoids his suburban parents and their desire that he pursue the almighty dollar as proof of success. Vladimir gets by as an immigration clerk, eking out a living in a cruddy New York City apartment while accumulating an array of quirky acquaintances, from a wealthy but disheveled old man (who claims his electric fan speaks to him) desperate for citizenship to Challa, a portly S/M queen. As a love interest, Challa is replaced by Francesca, a graduate student whose friends welcome Vladimir for the status he brings their bohemian clique, and whose parents encourage them to shack up (she lives at home) as visible proof she can maintain a steady relationship.

The Russian Debutante's Handbook is a quirky amalgam of dead-on American absurdities, albeit with somewhat stereotypical characters. While Vladimir flounders with how to improve his state, he becomes an expatriate in a trendy European city, becomes somewhat of a mobster himself, and generally has a good time. While many of the central characters remain elusively thin, Vladimir is a delight, and Shteyngart's wit is merciless: Russian women wear "wedding cakes of blond hair" and graduate students lounge in a bar "as if waiting for funding to appear." Reminiscent of Gogol and other Russian satirists, The Russian Debutante's Handbook is a genuine, sublime social commentary. --Michael Ferch

From Publishers Weekly
Orwell once remarked that the narrator of Tropic of Cancer was so far from endeavoring to influence the future, he simply lies down and lets things happen to him. Shteyngart, whose sensibility is allied with Miller's, takes a passive character, Vladimir Girshkin, and makes him briefly proactivewith disastrous resultsin his smart debut novel. Vladimir is the son of immigrants who came to the U.S. via a Carter administration swap (American wheat for Russian Jews); his father, a doctor prone to dreams of suicide and complicated medical schemes, and his mother, an entrepreneur who makes fun of her son's gait, give him the inestimable gift of alienation. In true slacker fashion, Vladimir, at 25, is wasting his expensive education clerking at the Emma Lazarus Immigration Absorption Society. A client, Rybakov, bribes Vladimir to get him American citizenship, confiding that his son, the Groundhog, is a leading businessman (in prostitutes and drugs) in Pravathe Paris of the nineties in the fictional Republika Stolovaya. Vladimir fakes a citizenship ceremony for Rybakov in order to curry favor with the Groundhog. Then, because he has unwisely repelled the sexual advances of crime boss Jordi while trying to make some illicit bucks to keep his girlfriend, Francesca, in squid and sake dinners in Manhattan, Vladimir leaves abruptly for Prava. Once there, and backed by the Groundhog, Vladimir embarks on a scheme to fleece the American students who have flocked to Prava's legendary scene. Although the satire on the expatriate American community is a little too easy, Shteyngart's Vladimir remains an impressive piece of work, an amoral buffoon who energizes this remarkably mature work.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Failurchka Mother's Little Failure is what Vladimir Girshkin's overweening Russian immigrant mother calls her 25-year-old son at the beginning of this picaresque, episodic, and somewhat sprawling first novel. Vladimir is stuck in a dead-end job and saddled with girlfriend Challah, "queen of everything musky and mammal-like." Then through a series of chance encounters, he is catapulted to the eastern European city of "Prava" to find himself welcomed into the fold of powerful Mafiosi. Shteyngart introduces a large cast of exotic characters, mainly twentysomethings meandering from adventure to adventure. Yet this distinctive new voice, which is both richly ironic and often side-splittingly funny, still seems to be seeking the right register. The relentless humor and satire obscure the development of character that is necessary to make readers believe the cast is real and not just being staged. Moreover, one wonders why the author felt the need to (thinly) disguise Prague (Prava) with its river Tavlata (Vltava) and the 1969 (1968) Soviet invasion. Thus, his highly imaginative but at times maddening panorama comes to resemble a dazzling Potemkin village. Though this is not an experimental novel, it is difficult to escape the conclusion that the author is still experimenting with a very large talent he's not entirely sure what to do with. But having gotten a taste, we will eagerly await his next offering, in which less just might be more. Recommended for all literary collections and larger public libraries. Edward Cone, New York
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Customer Reviews

Borsht Belt Redux
I'm usually willing to give first novels the benefit of the doubt, but Shteyngart has crafted a work so utterly devoid of interest, amusement or anything resembling talent that I genuinely hope that he is never allowed to inflict another book upon the reading public.

The plot, such as it is, concerns one Vladimir Girshkin, a sad-sack immigrant living in New York, who, fleeing the U.S.A. after a run-in with a homosexual Catalan mobster, transforms himself overnight into a caricature of a "New Russian" mafia don in Prague (renamed, but not even thinly disguised, as "Prava" in the novel, for no fathomable reason). Vladimir lurches from one incoherent misadventure and dysfunctional sexual relationship to another, none of which are ever convincingly portrayed or developed. Indeed, besides Vladimir and his grossly stereotyped Jewish mother, none of the characters in the novel are any more than paper-thin; particuarly in the Prava section, characters suddenly appear only to disappear a few pages later, never to be heard from again.

The silly plot and near-total absence of characterization, however, might be easier to overlook, if the novel were as funny as other Amazon reviewers have claimed. It's not. In fact, it's not remotely funny at all...unless you genuinely enjoy the corny humor of 50's-style Borsht Belt comedians. Many other reviewers of this book have also compared it to the satiric classics of Gogol and Nabokov. Have any of them actually read Gogol or Nabokov? The true antecedents of this novel are that excruciatingly unfunny American pseudo-classic _Confederacy of Dunces_, and the even more excruciatingly unfunny Russian TV variety show "KVN" (Klub Vesyolykh i Nakhodchivykh), a kind of Russian "Hee-Haw." Hackneyed cliches jostle with stale racial/cultural/class stereotypes and incoherent similes ("the clouds were like tree bark") as the book lurches to its predictable conclusion and Vladimir once again seeks solace in the West. Bits of interpolated Russian add an exotic flavor, perhaps, for anyone who's never set foot in the country; most people who know Russia, however, will cringe at yet another gross, cartoonish portrayal of the so-called "Russian soul."

Hopefully, this travesety of a novel will soon be consigned to the Remainder Pile of History; it's easily the worst book I've read during the last five years, one I actually regret having bothered to finish.

Good characters and humor, plot that bogs down in the end
The characterization of Vladimir Girshkin is excellent, from how he looks and dresses (which morphs through the book), to how he thinks about himself, his family, his ethniticity, to how he perceives the other Russians and Americans around him. Many humoristic moments as Vladimir, in an effort to get himself out of a dead-end life, gets in with deeper and crazier schemes to extract money and respect from different criminal elements, all the while building (or rebuilding?) the ego inside the man. The characterization, as a trip of self-discovery, is very well written.

But I did find myself forcing to finish. I did end up caring about the characters, esp. Vladimir and Morgan in the end, so I pushed on wanting to see what happened to them. But the plot bogged down, taking turns that made the humourously ludicrous ones in the beginning of the story seem normal. You have to suspend your reality checks for a novel like this, but it just got harder to do toward the end. The clever literary references and play on words at the later half of the novel didn't make me chuckle or think as much as the ones in the beginning.

I will read Mr. Shtenyngart's next novel with anticipation. Writing any novel is hard work, and I'm glad Gary pressed on with number 2.

A treat
I was recommended this book by a friend of mine. She had already read it, and knowing about my love of Russia and Eastern Europe, figured that it would be up my alley.

As I started the book, I wasn't so sure, but even if the story does become a bit fantastical, it does make for a good read. In Vladimir, Shteyngart does capture something very universal in his sense of not belonging. Of course, Vladimir assumes that most of this has to do with him being a Russian-Jew immigrant to America, and lacking the kind of hard drive and ambition that his mother has that got the family to America in the first place.

When Vladimir gets in too deep with both the finer things and the more base things in American life, he makes it to "Prava" (a slightly fictionalised Prague) of the early 1990's, ostensibly to rip off young American expats whose families have enough money to support the kind of bohemian culture these young people are trying to create there.

However, even though a good number of the Americans there fully fit into Vladimir's picture that he's carefully constructed over the years, it seems that every once in awhile, there are people whom one meets that will not fit at all into that perception. And maybe, just maybe there's a chance for Vladimir to find a place in "American" life.

For me, being able to read a book in English with the "outside looking in" kind of perspective on the craziness of a lot of Americans, without being mean, was quite fun. Also, it was fun to read a story that really does include the world past the borders of the US.