Gary Shteyngart

Gary Shteyngart uses satire to examine ambition, migration, status, and the stories Americans tell about success. Lake Success, published by Random House in 2018, follows hedge-fund manager Barry Cohen after he leaves his family and travels across the country by bus. Carrying a collection of watches and searching for an idealized past, Barry meets people far removed from his protected financial world during the politically charged months of 2016. His wife Seema remains in New York, confronting their strained marriage and the demands of caring for their son. Shteyngart alternates these paths to expose privilege, self-deception, loneliness, and the uneven consequences of economic power. Lake Success is his fourth novel and a road narrative whose comic surfaces repeatedly give way to discomfort. The buses, stations, and borrowed rooms create a mobile cross-section of the country, while Barry’s expensive watches underline his desire to measure and control time. Shteyngart makes that desire central to a character who cannot manage the present he has created.