Russian Debutante's Handbook [Paperback]

Vladimir, the son of Russian immigrants who disdains his parents' wealth, is a low level clerk at an immigration agency in New York. He lives with chubby Challah, a young woman with low self esteem who makes a living as an S&M slave. Vladimir's character is passive and lacking in ambition, until he meets Fran the lovely daughter of progressive, well-educated parents. When he becomes the token ethnic member of her elite, well-to-do clique, he believes he has achieved the American dream -- until he runs out of money. In his quest for an easy buck, he gets mixed up with the Russian mafia and eventually ends up promoting a pyramid scheme in an old Russian city that has become the proving ground for youths seeking worldly sophistication. This is where the funny, coming of age story about the lovable and self-deprecating Vladimir breaks apart and drifts in several less interesting directions with too many cartoonish characters to follow and care about.

The cover photo of this book was one factor that inticed me to buy it. I can now say the cover is misleading. It portrays a young, twenty-something woman in sunglasses sitting on a sofa in a room that mixes industrialism and contemporary art with shabby antiques. I expected she had some central role in the story, but after finishing the novel, I can't even tell you who the woman in the photograph is. A woman at one of the bars that Vladimir frequents in Prava? Morgan, his last girlfriend? Shteyngart's editor probably decided that a cover with a young woman would sell better than say the photo on the back cover which shows a bearded Russian Jew holding a bear on a leash. That photo also has little to do with the story, but if it had been the cover, I don't think I would have bought the book.

As I started the book, I wasn't so sure, but even if the story does become a bit fantastical, it does make for a good read. In Vladimir, Shteyngart does capture something very universal in his sense of not belonging. Of course, Vladimir assumes that most of this has to do with him being a Russian-Jew immigrant to America, and lacking the kind of hard drive and ambition that his mother has that got the family to America in the first place.

When Vladimir gets in too deep with both the finer things and the more base things in American life, he makes it to "Prava" (a slightly fictionalised Prague) of the early 1990's, ostensibly to rip off young American expats whose families have enough money to support the kind of bohemian culture these young people are trying to create there.

However, even though a good number of the Americans there fully fit into Vladimir's picture that he's carefully constructed over the years, it seems that every once in awhile, there are people whom one meets that will not fit at all into that perception. And maybe, just maybe there's a chance for Vladimir to find a place in "American" life.

For me, being able to read a book in English with the "outside looking in" kind of perspective on the craziness of a lot of Americans, without being mean, was quite fun. Also, it was fun to read a story that really does include the world past the borders of the US.