Lake Success

A Novel

By: Gary Shteyngart

Narrated by: Arthur Morey, Soneela Nankani

Length: 13 hrs and 32 mins

Publisher's summary

"Spectacular." (NPR) • "Uproariously funny." (The Boston Globe) • “An artistic triumph.” (San Francisco Chronicle) • “A novel in which comedy and pathos are exquisitely balanced.” (The Washington Post) • "Shteyngart's best book." (The Seattle Times)

The best-selling author of Super Sad True Love Story returns with a biting, brilliant, emotionally resonant novel very much of our times.

Named one of the 10 best books of the year by San Francisco Chronicle and Maureen Corrigan, NPR’s Fresh Air and named one of the best books of the year by The New York Times Book Review, NPR, The Washington Post, O: The Oprah Magazine, Mother Jones, Glamour, Library Journal, Kirkus Reviews, Newsday, Pamela Paul - KQED, Financial Times, and The Globe and Mail.

Narcissistic, hilariously self-deluded, and divorced from the real world as most of us know it, hedge-fund manager Barry Cohen oversees $2.4 billion in assets. Deeply stressed by an SEC investigation and by his three-year-old son’s diagnosis of autism, he flees New York on a Greyhound bus in search of a simpler, more romantic life with his old college sweetheart. Meanwhile, his super-smart wife, Seema - a driven first-generation American who craved the picture-perfect life that comes with wealth - has her own demons to face. How these two flawed characters navigate the Shteyngartian chaos of their own making is at the heart of this piercing exploration of the 0.1 percent, a poignant tale of familial longing and an unsentimental ode to what really makes America great.

Longlisted for the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction

“The fuel and oxygen of immigrant literature - movement, exile, nostalgia, cultural disorientation - are what fire the pistons of this trenchant and panoramic novel.... [It is] a novel so pungent, so frisky and so intent on probing the dissonances and delusions - both individual and collective - that grip this strange land getting stranger.” (The New York Times Book Review)

“Shteyngart, perhaps more than any American writer of his generation, is a natural. He is light, stinging, insolent and melancholy.... The wit and the immigrant’s sense of heartbreak - he was born in Russia - just seem to pour from him. The idea of riding along behind Shteyngart as he glides across America in the early age of Trump is a propitious one. He doesn’t disappoint.” (The New York Times)

©2018 Gary Shteyngart (P)2018 Random House Audio

Critic reviews

“This is a novel that seems to have been created in real time, reflecting with perfect comedy and horrible tragedy exactly what America feels like right this minute. As I read Lake Success, I barked with laughter, at the same time wincing in pain. Gary Shteyngart has held up a mirror to American culture that is so accurate, and so devastating, that it makes you want to break the mirror right over your own head. I mean this as a good thing. The novel is stupendous.” (Elizabeth Gilbert)

“In Shteyngart’s hands, hard-won family love trumps the false values of materialism. Lake Success is another super sad love story, certainly, but an artistic triumph.” (San Francisco Chronicle)

“A novel in which comedy and pathos are exquisitely balanced...timely but not fleeting. Its bold ambition to capture the nation and the era is enriched by its shrewd attention to the challenges and sorrows of parenthood. Barry Cohen, the glad-handing protagonist, repels our sympathy while laying claim to it.... There’s something uncanny about Shteyngart’s ability to inhabit this man’s boundless confidence, his neediness, his juvenile tendency to fall in love and imagine everyone as a life-changing friend.... [This is also] one of the most heartbreaking novels I’ve read about raising a child with special needs.” (The Washington Post)

Fine. Could have harder bite.

I liked it fine. Did not love it. There were times that I could not get into it. Other times I was engrossed and felt there on the road with Barry. The dual and intertwining narratives of Barry and Seema, conjuring a mix of schadenfreude and empathy, signal that we are still deep in the midst of the anti-hero moment. The narrative arc was something like a cross between Sister Carrie--the rise of Seema (Carrie) and the fall of Barry (George)--mixed with On The Road, on crack instead of LSD. Some of Barry's adventures felt to drag on; I would have enjoyed some additional time with Seema. Nevertheless there were a few good laughs; the satire, like a dessert topping, was laid on but not too thick. Other times it took us viscerally through the debauching of Barry with the grittiness that you would expect of a Grayhound reststop. Perhaps in the fallen world that is Trump's America, that's the fourth circle of hell deserving for the Martin Shkreli’s of the late 2010’s. In fiction at least there is still karma and comeuppance. The close felt both unearned and completely fitting in the current moment. Any fuller satire, like a topping poured on too thick, would have drowned out the underlying narrative, and would have landed the novel in parody or absurdity. In short, it would have made it a comedy. As is, Shteyngart delivered a serviceable funnyish drama.

Loved this Story

The author handles the story with great depth and humor. A work that fits the times we live in.

Loved Barry Cohen

Though our hero has serious blind spots: cheating with stocks, cheating being a dad...
On my shelf now between Trollope and Roth

Painful but I couldn't put it down

It's quite a feat to make your main character such a schmuck and yet keep the readers kind of hoping that he comes out OK. The last chapter is an upper but the very last paragraph is confusing. Suicide? A second act forBarry? Great reading by the narrators.

Lake Success, a truly successful novel!

I found the novel revealing a panorama of modern life, full of complexity and beauty. It is both optimistic and compassionate, which are the qualities that we badly need in our contemporary dialogue. It's characters are both complex and charming. The narrator is excellent!

Glorious meditation on America’s 1%

Masterful and compelling storytelling. This tragi-comic tale brings us from the gilded world of hedge funds to the underbelly of the continent - on a madcap and occasionally sordid journey by greyhound bus to places we never knew existed but are not entirely surprised to find. Excellent.

GREAT BOOK

seriously got me thinking about my future, what to do if i have kids and etc

Great performance - slightly miscast?

This book was very, very well read by the two narrators. I couldn’t help but think, though, that the male narrator was miscast. The character was is his 40s. The narrator sounds maybe 20 years older.

Great book, meh narrator

I enjoyed this book very much. My one complaint is that Arthur Morey (reading the "Barry" POV) is (and sounds) too old. I heard Gary Shteyngart read an excerpt on City Arts & Lectures and much prefer his reading voice - I wish he'd recorded the audiobook himself.

Rewarding the Worst

"Like your first ankle monitor bracelet or your fourth divorce, the occasional break with reality was an important part of any hedge-fund titan's biography"
- Gary Shteyngart, "Lake Success"

Like great Indian food, I'm not exactly sure why this novel works for me, but GOD this book was delicious. OK, so I know SORTA why it works. It is brilliantly absurd, and sharp enough to almost immediately, and almost painlessly, draw blood. I kept thinking that this novel was like a mirror presenting this ridiculous reflection that seems a bit freaky, distorted, and ugly. You think it is funhouse mirror from a carnival, but there is a moment of clarity when you realize the mirror is FINE. The reality is just that you ARE a bit freaky, distorted, and ugly. Shteyngart's novel arcs like Bellow's The Adventures of Augie March mixed with a bit of Kurt Vonnegut and Paul Beatty. While I can't say it was as literary or timeless as Bellow's Great American Novel of exploration and identity, it still hummed with some of that same wild, kinetic energy.

'Lake Success' contained only a few characters to love (Shiva, Jonah, Seema's father, and a couple others), but many, many to learn from. The obvious two are the protagonists (Seema and Barry). They are the super-rich, .01%, Lucy and Ricky, of America in the 21st Century. They aren't the protagonists we need, but the protagonists we deserve.

And then there are the watches, and the pimp juice, and the crack, and the maps, and the sadness. So so much sadness. If I say anymore, I'll just f-it up and ruin the surprise and melancholy joy (No, no. Not joy really. Pleasure? Hell no. experience? trip? Maybe) that this novel was. Thank you Mehrsa for recommending it.