Click on a thumbnail to go to Google Books.
|
Loading... Lake Success (original 2018; edition 2019)by Gary Shteyngart (Author)
Work InformationLake Success by Gary Shteyngart (2018)
   No current Talk conversations about this book.  steve02476 | Jan 3, 2023 |    ) BibliophageOnCoffee | Aug 12, 2022 | Barry Cohen is the kind of guy we love to hate, a hedge fund gunslinger living by his own rules, way up in the stratosphere of privilege, so removed that he’s completely disconnected from reality. But he is a bit different in various ways from how we imagine his contemporaries, and how Shteyngart portrays his set. He has a wife, Seema, Indian, intelligent, independent, who doesn’t fit the mold of trophy wife. He has an autistic son. And he has multi-million dollar watch collection that obsesses him because it brings worth and order to his life. Then he has a major mid-life crisis fueled by all these events: the government on his tail for insider trading, a disintegrating fund due to horrid trades, a wife who comes to regard him as unimaginative and distant, and a son he claims to love but can’t bear to be around. He snaps and goes in search of a grail of sorts, his better youth, his idolized old love Layla, who lives and teaches in El Paso. To get to her, to escape his life, he sheds everything, his money, his Amex black card, all except the best of his watches, and embarks on a Greyhound plunge into the real America during the run-up to the 2016 election. Barry thinks of it as On the Road, and maybe his trek is a search for something meaningful. Maybe it’s like Sullivan’s Travels, a quest for relevance that proves circular. Or maybe it’s simply an attempt to escape a world spinning out of his control, replacing it with something more manageable and fulfilling. Readers can decide for themselves what’s what here. What readers get to see is the lifestyles of the rich in contrast to regular folks in Barry’s landing zones: desperation in Baltimore, quiet refinement in Richmond, laid back riches in Atlanta, generosity in Jackson, MS, equanimity in El Paso, kindness in Phoenix, resolution in La Jolla, and acceptance back in New York. The novel does satisfy in that Barry learns things about himself, that he is more like his son Shiva than he knew, that he could find a satisfaction of a sort inside himself, that he was more than just a prospector in the financial mines of the world. Years after the adventure, with his marriage dissolved, his relationship with his son more distant, himself more at peace with himself, he earns redemption, and we readers like him better than we did ten years previous. Barry’s a bit more connected to life. (  ) write-review | Nov 4, 2021 | Barry Cohen is the kind of guy we love to hate, a hedge fund gunslinger living by his own rules, way up in the stratosphere of privilege, so removed that he’s completely disconnected from reality. But he is a bit different in various ways from how we imagine his contemporaries, and how Shteyngart portrays his set. He has a wife, Seema, Indian, intelligent, independent, who doesn’t fit the mold of trophy wife. He has an autistic son. And he has multi-million dollar watch collection that obsesses him because it brings worth and order to his life. Then he has a major mid-life crisis fueled by all these events: the government on his tail for insider trading, a disintegrating fund due to horrid trades, a wife who comes to regard him as unimaginative and distant, and a son he claims to love but can’t bear to be around. He snaps and goes in search of a grail of sorts, his better youth, his idolized old love Layla, who lives and teaches in El Paso. To get to her, to escape his life, he sheds everything, his money, his Amex black card, all except the best of his watches, and embarks on a Greyhound plunge into the real America during the run-up to the 2016 election. Barry thinks of it as On the Road, and maybe his trek is a search for something meaningful. Maybe it’s like Sullivan’s Travels, a quest for relevance that proves circular. Or maybe it’s simply an attempt to escape a world spinning out of his control, replacing it with something more manageable and fulfilling. Readers can decide for themselves what’s what here. What readers get to see is the lifestyles of the rich in contrast to regular folks in Barry’s landing zones: desperation in Baltimore, quiet refinement in Richmond, laid back riches in Atlanta, generosity in Jackson, MS, equanimity in El Paso, kindness in Phoenix, resolution in La Jolla, and acceptance back in New York. The novel does satisfy in that Barry learns things about himself, that he is more like his son Shiva than he knew, that he could find a satisfaction of a sort inside himself, that he was more than just a prospector in the financial mines of the world. Years after the adventure, with his marriage dissolved, his relationship with his son more distant, himself more at peace with himself, he earns redemption, and we readers like him better than we did ten years previous. Barry’s a bit more connected to life. ( ) write-review | Nov 4, 2021 | ) wordloversf | Aug 14, 2021 | no reviews | add a review
AwardsDistinctionsNotable Lists
Fiction.
Literature.
HTML:“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 bestselling author of Super Sad True Love Story returns with a biting, brilliant, emotionally resonant novel very much of our times. NAMED ONE OF THE TEN 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 • 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, a poignant tale of familial longing and an unsentimental ode to America. 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 . No library descriptions found. |
Current DiscussionsNonePopular covers
 Google Books — Loading...GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)813.6Literature English (North America) American fiction 21st CenturyLC ClassificationRatingAverage: (3.61)
Is this you?Become a LibraryThing Author. |
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Wikipedia in English
1
Listened to audiobook format. (