Austinist Interviews Gary Shteyngart

You call it that. That’s not the actual name of the book though…

I love making fun of the whole thing. You know it’s really interesting there are some people who love the first book [The Russian Debutante's Handbook] so much that they hate the second book because the tone is so different.

I refuse to read the first book because I just assume it sucks. Just kidding…

I think you’re right to do so. It was a charming little book. I was 22, 23, when I wrote most of it. I was in Accidental College [Oberlin] and I was so optimistic and so full of life...Who wasn’t at that age? Remember it was the Clinton era, things were going okay...we protested a lot, but we had no idea what was coming down the pipes. So the second book is much darker, there’s no redemption here at all.

Misha’s so obsessed with returning to New York and being a New Yorker and yet there’s this whole heft of Sept. 11 that’s about to drop. What’s he going to go back to?

Well, I didn’t want to drop September 11th because I didn’t want the book to be about New York in that sense, I wanted it to be about a person. You know I have friends in all these different countries, all these absurd [countries]…Russia I count as a different kind of Absurdistan. And after 9/11, I lived about 20 blocks away, I had a friend who almost died in it. So, you know, it really hit home; they kept writing these letters, emails, very sympathetic, saying, “I can’t believe this has happened to you, your country, your city.” And then as the years went on and we began to invade everything the sympathy started to change and people started to say, “Look, I‘ve been living at ‘Ground Zero’ all my life. I’m in the middle of an ethnic war, there’s bodies left and right… Nobody gives a shit about us. We’re completely off the map as far as the world is concerned.” So I think by ending the book on September 10th and saying no more would be a good way to pay my debt to the fact.

What I liked most about the book is its humor and how it’s tempered with a harsh reality. For instance, the moment Misha is approached by a woman pimping her very young daughter…

Well, that sort of happened [to me]. I remember even as it was happening, I was about to pass out, I was reaching for my Ativan stash, but I was thinking, “You’ve gotta get this down. You’ve gotta get this down.” Bizarre instinct, I mean, a part of me was thinking, as I was walking away from there: “I should have done something to help the kid.” And then I was thinking: “Well, what the hell could I have done?” and I kept going. The beach area and the hotel were surrounded [by] this huge highway [that] ran past, the biggest I’ve ever seen, like 10 lanes of honking traffic. This was the only time I almost got run over by a car because I was befuddled, so confused, I couldn’t believe what was happening. And I felt, in this odd way, that it was happening to me in some way, which is even stranger, and I ran to the hotel and I took it down…

That whole section, that chapter, it’s a kind of series of things that [actually] happened. The being mugged by the guy who [said] “help my mother be your mother,” that’s the first time I heard that line. I was walking down street in Tbilisi, this was in Georgia, the main street, and this guy came by and said, “Hey, you look like a big Jew.” And I said, “Yeah, I’m a pretty big Jew.” He said, “Welcome to my country, the Jews have a big peaceful history in our country. We love our Jews. Your mother will be my mother, there will always be water in my well to drink, we are brothers.” I said, “Oh, this is so sweet of you.” And then he gets out this big knife and says, “Now our mother needs help.” I was thinking, you know, this is great, it really does feel like what happened to the Soviet Union. Democracy, free markets, we thought we were being welcomed to this fold and then the knife came out and everybody had to give up all their money… people who were nominally middle-class became beggars. So all these absurd things that happen there was much symbolism behind everything, it’s fascinating.

With the title being Absurdistan, and even though some of the events in the book seem absurd, but, as you’ve just related, there’s a reality behind it.

This is a reality book and the reality is that we are becoming Absurdistan with each passing day. Look, you have a government that spies on its own citizens, is basically an oil kleptocracy, the government serves the oil interest, just the way it does in Russia… I always thought Russia would become more and more like America as the years went on. Quite the opposite is happening: America is becoming more and more like Russia. And then it’s no wonder that [Vice President Dick] Cheney was just in Kazakhstan, which is one of the worst, most corrupt republics, and he was praising their system of government. He said, “I really admire what you do here,” because I think that’s what he wants for America too. I think that would be his wet dream.

Ahhh, I love having unsolicited sex with the asses of my constituency.

Right, exactly. So it’s really frightening to see that happen. Because when I came back from Absurdistan it didn’t take long for me to think I never left.

Do you want another drink? Austin’s an easy-going town and sometimes the service is easy-going too.

A little too much "easy-going," I know, it’s like Brazil. We were delayed 30 hours on one flight and 40 hours on another. This is Varig, the national airline, apparently they were afraid that if they land at some airports they’re going to confiscate their airplanes because they haven’t paid their landing fees in years. So it’s like they’re negotiating, you know, the pilot’s giving the credit card…

So you like Brazil a lot?

A lot, yeah. I decided I’m going to get a cheap, cheap beach house in some tropical country…

Did you say sheep?

Cheap, yeah. C-h-e-a-p.

I thought you said sheep, s-h-e-e-p.

Oh sheep, I oughta get a sheep. That was the second girlfriend in Armenia. No, that’s my dream to spend half the year there [Brazil]. If Austin had a beach… I always think about, you know, next book flops, where do I go?

Anything new you're working on?

Yeah, yeah. I’m going to do this thing, the focus for it is so much more complicated than anything I’ve ever done before. It’s set in the year 2040. The All-Holy Albany Rensselaer run by the enigmatic Reverend Cho. Reverend Cho is the father of Eunice Cho and Jerry’s married to Eunice. Jerry’s to 65 years [of age] at this point.

It’s the same Jerry Shteynfarb from Absurdistan?

Yeah, but everything else is gone…everyone’s dead. There’s Jerry Shteynfarb, or as locals refer to him “him old man already,” it’s a polyglot language: part Korean, part Tagalog, part Igbo, part Spanish, and part English and nobody’s literate. The comedy consists mainly of different, all holy cities attacking each other, getting slaves, who are sold to the Chinese in exchange for certain goods and petroleum. The Chinese sail into what used to be Boston, it’s completely underwater and it’s called Jesus Bay and they buy their slaves from there. Only two centers of civilization exist: one is called the New York Cooperative Exclusion Zone and the other is called... the Los Angeles Cooperative Exclusion Zone. Within these zones live about a million people, each one of whom is worth at least 120 million Euwon, those are the yearly fees and there is no death there. Organs are replaced… and Jerry’s dream is for immortality and… since there’s nothing to do in these immortal places people decide, “Oh, I’m going to write something even better than Anna Karenina since I have 35,000 years to do so, perhaps I will accomplish that.” So they decide to import Jerry for some writing tips and Jerry is very excited because he senses a way to get out… but to get into the cooperative, the people there they hate the stench of death, so all the mortals who clean their yards and do all their stuff, and even a novelist from the outside, have to wear this big, pink puffer suit. Bouncing around so that they don’t smell. And Jerry’s dream is to get rid of the puffer suit and get inside, and the other thing is that almost all of the Cooperatives are Jewish, there’s Russian Orthodox, there’s Evangelical, so there’s a lot of reasons to crucify me for this book. But it’s all Jerry’s schemes, the way Girshkin schemes or the way Vainberg schemes, to get away with murder to actually become a Cooperative. So I’m having a lot of fun with that. First I’m having a lot of fun inventing the language for the worlds. I’m having so much fun reading the Bible, which I haven’t done since Hebrew school. Some work there…and then I’m going to enroll in an Evangelical college for a while.

Bob Jones?

No, there’s one that just opened up in the Empire State Building…

Special thanks to Gary Shteyngart for being so gracious an interviewee and apologies for any mispelled items regarding the yet to be released Shteynfarbian epic.

*Image (c) Marion Ettinger*