Can the immigrant writer, having taken as his or her subject the expatriate experience and all its attendant dislocations, ever really relinquish that subject? Bharati Mukherjee, Henry Roth and Amy Tan might say no; Vladimir Nabokov and V. S. Naipaul, yes. Gary Shteyngart is still thinking about it.
Shteyngart's fourth and latest novel, “Lake Success,” veers from its forebears by placing a Long Island-born financier at its center, rather than Russian émigrés or their children, and for the most part shuns themes of transnational displacement and the hyphenated existence. Yet the fuel and oxygen of immigrant literature — movement, exile, nostalgia, cultural disorientation — are nevertheless what fire the pistons of this trenchant and panoramic novel. Shteyngart's subject may be America, but it's Trump's America: seething, atomizing, foreign and hostile even to itself. “Can it be that we're all exiles?” Roberto Bolaño once asked, a question that goes echoing through this novel. “Is it possible that all of us are wandering strange lands?”
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