A Moment with Gary Shteyngart

Erica Jong

Gary Shteyngart is a man who has always felt comfortable in the absurd. His novels, The Russian Debutante’s Handbook, Absurdistan and the current Super Sad True Love Story are scathing satires that border on the grotesque. This year, The New Yorker named the Leningrad-born Shteyngart one of America’s top 20 fiction writers under the age of 40. Novelist Erica Jong caught up with the New Yorker at his perch at Columbia University, where he teaches creative writing. Shteyngart talks with Jong about Hebrew school, sex at Oberlin College and whether his books are good for the Jews.

Often in your novels there’s a cartoonish image of Jews that may be taken out of context. Do you wonder about nascent anti-Semitism in your books? I certainly wonder about it myself, and in the works of the late J.D. Salinger and Mordecai Richler, Mel Brooks, Woody Allen, Philip Roth and other Jewish North American writers. But you can’t censor satire, and you can’t cut funny, so what do you do?

Whenever a new book comes out, my father asks, “Is this book going to be good for the Jews?” and I say, “It’s not gonna be good for anybody.” My main targets, especially in a book like Absurdistan, less so in Super Sad, were nationalism and religion—organized religion. And this is a case of “Write what you know.”

I grew up in a horrific Hebrew school environment in Little Neck, New York, where [Jews] were trumpeted as the race to end all races, the Chosen People. Arabs were [considered] despicable creatures… Obviously I’m influenced by the older generation, like Roth, and the key is not to glorify anyone. Now, does that sometimes reach into the opposite view, a kind of caricature? I’m sure it does. The criticisms I wanted to bare are based on my views of geopolitics and my own criticisms of Israel. I think these are important things to say. Of course, if you invent a 335-pound guy, running around, screwing everyone in sight and eating sturgeon, as in Absurdistan...

The epiphany for that character is a circumcision late in life. And that’s not something I’m unfamiliar with myself. And the pain and the awfulness of that—all done for religious reasons just as pubescence was approaching….Nobody in Russia thinks of any psychological impact on anything. It is the land that Freud forgot.

I think Jews in America, and even in Russia, are now so well established and wield such important positions within each society… that one worries less about self-inflicted anti-Semitism. That Jews in Russia are powerful now is very strange.

You write about sex a lot. But it’s not specifically erotic. Why do you look at sex that way? Is it because of the horrific circumcision? How would any kid like a bunch of alter cockers leaning over him and cutting his penis while giving a blessing?

Oberlin College had something to do with it… the land of horrific sex. Playboy Magazine always rated it the ugliest college in America. But it was ugly inside, too. There was such a terrible attitude toward the sexual act. So self-important and so insecure at the same time. Then there was a term describing sex with someone you hate….This was somehow tied into identity politics. So for someone who was not very sexually experienced by the time I got to Oberlin, this was quite a peculiar place to become a sexual creature. When I was at Oberlin, I understood nothing except “I wanna go home.” My last real asthma attack was at Oberlin. I think it was the bad sex that triggered it. So can one write about good sex? I guess one can. It’s much harder to have good sex.

You are in love with Italy, and so are your characters. What is it that writers find in Italy that makes us so happy? It’s not just the food and wine and landscape. There’s something more. Your character Lenny Abramov moves to “The Free State of Tuscany.” He says he can grow old there, but not in America.

When I’m there, I feel my age tick differently. In Italy, it’s possible to grow old. Of course, they’re a very visual culture and love beauty and yet even an old man can be beautiful there. It’s not a nation like America, which believes in heaven still. It’s a Catholic country, strangled by the family, but we’re a nation obsessed with God—the American dream does not end at death. There’s a McMansion waiting for us in the sky. Italy, though an incredibly dysfunctional country, makes me feel the years and months differently. That’s Lenny’s dream of escape. The Italians may text-message more than anyone but they’re fundamentally opposed to the kind of solitary existence we’ve developed here. Only in America could Mormonism or any of this stuff have a genesis. I always thought the second “m” was silent in “Mormon.”