Fiction:You'll know the joke about the rabbi and priest.
The priest says to the rabbi: "Tell me, you're not allowed to eat bacon - is that right?" And the rabbi says: "Yes, that's right." "Just between ourselves though," says the priest, "have you ever tried it?" "Well, I must admit," says the rabbi, "many years ago, I did taste bacon." "It's pretty good, isn't it?" says the priest. "Yes," says the rabbi, "I have to agree, it's pretty good. But tell me, priests are not allowed to have sex - is that right?" "Yes, that's right," agrees the priest. "We're not allowed to have sex." "Between ourselves though," says the rabbi, "have you ever tried it?" "No," says the priest, "I never have." "That's a shame," says the rabbi, "because it's a lot better than bacon!" Gary Shteyngart is a Jewish American novelist, who may not be to everybody's taste. Personally, I think he's a lot better than bacon.
Shteyngart, earlier this year included in Granta's Best of Young American Novelists 2, was born in Leningrad in 1972 and moved with his parents to the US, aged seven. His first novel, The Russian Debutante's Handbook (2003), featured the comically pathetic, sex- obsessed Vladimir Girshkin, a Russian-American Jew seeking his fortune in a thinly disguised eastern European city, Prava. Absurdistan features the comically grotesque sex-obsessed Misha Vainberg, a Russian-American Jew who is frantically trying to escape from a thinly disguised former Soviet republic, Absurdistan. If the shtick was funny the first time then it's still funny the second. Whether it'll be funny the third time . . .
Shteyngart writes a vulgar, carefree kind of humour, wildly politically incorrect, vicious, jeering, and ribald, which makes most English comic novelists sound like Thackeray, and the Irish like George Bernard Shaw. His imagination - like the best imaginations - seems completely unfettered. He writes with vim, zest, gusto, zeal, and élan, though admittedly it's a Russian, melancholic kind of élan, if such were possible. You'll perhaps recall the moment when Levin - Tolstoy's alter ego - strides magnificently into the novel Anna Karenina. "What youth and vigour!" exclaims Oblonsky (in Constance Garnett's classic translation). Shteyngart is perhaps as much like Levin as any young American now writing.
The hero of Absurdistan, Misha, is a monstrosity and a wonder. Fabulously wealthy, the son of the 1,238th richest man in Russia, he has been educated at the absurdly useless liberal arts Accidental College and has a "South Bronx girlie-girl" girlfriend. In Russia, after the murder of his father, Misha finds himself stranded and prevented from returning to his beloved America. In desperation, attempting to obtain a false passport, he flies to Absurdsvani, a former Soviet republic, where, by a series of mishaps, he ends up as minister of multicultural affairs.
You need know nothing else of the plot, it's pure picaresque, and the characters sufficient merely unto their gags: there are sidekicks, analysts, tarts, and one Jerry Shteynfarb, a "perfectly Americanized Russian émigré (he came to the States as a seven-year-old)" who wrote a novel called The Russian Arriviste's Hand Job. Shteyngart writes in long rolling riffs and episodes. Here's a typical vignette. In his role as minister of multicultural affairs, Misha sets out "A Modest Proposal" for a Museum of Sevo-Jewish Friendship: "Studies have shown that it's never too early to frighten a child with images of skeletal remains and naked women being chased by dogs across the Polish snow. Holocaust for Kidz will deliver a carefully tailored miasma of fear, rage, impotence, and guilt in children as young as ten. Through the magic of Animatronics, Claymation, and Jurassic technology, the inane ramblings of underqualified American Hebrew day school teachers on the subject of the Holocaust will be condensed into a forty-minute bloodbath. Young participants will leave feeling alienated and profoundly depressed, feelings that will be partly redeemed and partly thwarted by the ice-cream truck awaiting them at the end of the exhibit." If this offends, well, you'd be better off with bacon.
Ian Sansom is the author of the Mobile Library series of mystery novels, published by Harper Collins
Absurdistan By Gary Shteyngart Granta, 333pp. £10.99