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Lake Success Paperback – June 6, 2019

by Gary Shteyngart (Author)
4.0 4.0 out of 5 stars 2,784 ratings
Editors' pick Best Literature & Fiction
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*Over 50 Best of 2018 listings worldwide*

'Gary Shteyngart hears America perfectly; its fatuity, its poignant lament, its boisterous self-loathing. Its heartbeat. Reading him sometimes makes me want to scream - with recognition and with pure hilarity' - Richard Ford

A riotously satirical road trip through modern America from the brilliant author of Super Sad True Love Story and Absurdistan

Barry Cohen, master of the universe, has just had a very public meltdown involving a dinner party, an insider trading investigation and a $30,000 bottle of Japanese whisky. So he flees New York City, leaving behind his beautiful young wife and son, but remembering to bring his six favourite designer watches. Zig-zagging south through Trump's America on a Greyhound Bus pilgrimmage he is singularly unprepared for, Barry heads to Texas - to find his old college girlfriend and, with her, a shot at a second chance...

Lake Success marries the trademark Shteyngart wit with an astonishing emotional resonance, capturing the vivid eccentricity and contradictions of America right now while speaking to the universal human experience of love, belonging, and the pursuit of happiness.

'A trip through the American wasteland - from the people who have too little, to the people who have too much. Incredibly smart, incredibly funny, incredibly tragic, and therefore incredibly human, this is the perfect novel for these dysfunctional times' - Nathan Hill

'The funniest book you'll read all year. A rollicking and zinger-filled road trip [that] sneakily deepens into a poignant tale of a man trying to outrace his problems.I was utterly floored' - Maria Semple

'Stupendous... Reflecting with perfect comedy and horrible tragedy exactly what America feels like right this minute... I barked with laughter at the same time as wincing in pain' Elizabeth Gilbert

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Previous page
  1. Print length
    352 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Publisher
    Penguin
  4. Publication date
    June 6, 2019
  5. Dimensions
    5.08 x 0.83 x 7.8 inches
  6. ISBN-10
    0241984084
  7. ISBN-13
    978-0241984086
  8. See all details
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  1. Marrying an accomplished woman and taking her off the job market was a way to telegraph success among Barry’s peers.
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  2. When you got old, the facts about your past bounced around your consciousness like heads of lettuce in a sack.
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  3. What she missed most about dating men was that small, disconcerting time frame when you thought that maybe you could change them.
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Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

An Amazon Best Book of September 2018:: By most measures, Barry Cohen has achieved the American Dream. He manages a hedge fund with $2.4 billion in assets. He lives in Tribeca and has a beautiful wife. He even has a case full of extremely expensive watches. He appears, at least on the surface, to be a highly unlikely candidate for a cross-country journey to find himself. But when we first meet Barry, he is stressed out and unhappy, and he is bleeding because his wife recently attacked him. Soon we learn that there is more imperfection in his life: his son is autistic and an SEC investigation is hanging over his head. So when Barry gets on a Greyhound and tries to leave it all behind (naively seeking out a long lost college girlfriend), we understand the allure he finds in busing himself into the unknown. There is humor in this novel, much of it recognizably Shteyngartian; there is also a dark line running across this story like a line drawn across a map. Shteyngart traces that line, setting his story in the summer of 2016. As Barry meets “real” Americans—i.e. the other 99.9%-- they help to fill in the parts of Barry that are missing. Some readers will feel for Barry’s plight, some won’t. It was Shteyngart’s incisive observations about how we view ourselves and our country that drew me in. There are many different American Dreams out there. But are dreams real? --Chris Schluep, Amazon Book Review

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Penguin (June 6, 2019)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 352 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0241984084
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0241984086
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 2.31 pounds
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.08 x 0.83 x 7.8 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.0 4.0 out of 5 stars 2,784 ratings

About the author

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Gary Shteyngart

Gary Shteyngart

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Gary Shteyngart was born in Leningrad in 1972 and came to the United States seven years later. His debut novel, The Russian Debutante’s Handbook, won the Stephen Crane Award for First Fiction and the National Jewish Book Award for Fiction. His second novel, Absurdistan, was named one of the 10 Best Books of the Year by The New York Times Book Review, as well as a best book of the year by Time, The Washington Post Book World, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Chicago Tribune, and many other publications. He has been selected as one of Granta’s Best Young American Novelists. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, Esquire, GQ, and Travel + Leisure and his books have been translated into more than twenty languages. He lives in New York City.

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Top reviews from the United States

Cameron W. Brown
5.0 out of 5 stars Loved it.
Reviewed in the United States on March 3, 2019
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This was my first Shteyngart novel. It had everything. The characters were colorful and honest, and the personalities of the central characters felt appropriately detached for someone in the .01 percent. The writing was light at the right times and either dark or embarrassingly relatable at others. The narrative was enhanced by these small memories placed within the storyline that lent depth to the characters and context to the story. Loved how he did that. 10/10. Will be reading more, and will probably read this again. Best book I've read in a while. Excited to have found a new writer to follow. Had to review because I enjoyed it so much. Thank you Gary Shteyngart.
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Joe Flood
4.0 out of 5 stars the path not taken
Reviewed in the United States on October 31, 2018
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Shteyngart doesn’t typically write about winners. But he does so in Lake Success, the book centered on a pair of the 1%, a hedge fund manager and his wife. Despite their astronomical wealth, and all the luxuries it can buy, they are desperately unhappy. Their son is autistic, a diagnosis that they refuse to admit to themselves or their families. All the money in the world can’t fix him, a situation that sends both of them spiraling out of control.

Barry breaks first, making a run for it, with his $2.4 billion hedge fund collapsing and the SEC on his trail. Throwing away his iPhone and going off the grid, he takes a nostalgic journey – on Greyhound – in search of an ex-girlfriend and the path not taken.

Shteyngart is a New York novelist. No one writes better of the delights and terrors of the city. There’s a great passage at the beginning of the book where Barry stumbles into the Port Authority Bus Terminal at 4 AM, drunk, bleeding and incoherent. To the cops stationed there, “he looked just like another New Yorker.”

The bulk of the novel is Barry traveling by bus across the country, meeting a very different world from his hedge fund manager associates. These chapters are not as strong as the New York sections, lacking the detail and emotional connection of his Gotham work. While there are funny vignettes of dead downtowns (Germans on a tour of “The Wire” locations in Baltimore), they seem rushed and superficial.

While Barry goes in search of his past, his wife Seema is left to clean up the mess. After engaging in an affair with poseur novelist, she’s forced to come clean to her striving Indian family about her son’s condition, as well as the question of what to do about her life and Barry. Is she more than a rich man’s wife?

Despite the topical theme, it’s not his best book about our times.

Super Sad True Love Story is a better novel. Without the burden of the present, Shteyngart presents in this book a New York and a country gone mad, teetering on the edge of financial collapse, and the deluded, dream-like worlds of Americans who don’t realize that their world is about to end. Brilliant, hilarious and heart-breaking, it’s a love letter to a tolerant, diverse, optimistic country that is about to disappear.

Everything by Shteyngart is worth reading but if I was new to the author, I’d start with Super Sad True Love Story, his masterpiece.
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Lorraine Devon Wilke
3.0 out of 5 stars Long, at times laborious, occasionally touching, but too detached for true impact
Reviewed in the United States on March 11, 2021
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I've not read any previous Gary Shteyngart books, but purchased this one based on the recommendation of Richard Russo, whose work I've read and largely enjoyed, some of it quite a lot.

I didn't particularly enjoy this book. I didn't have quite the scathing reaction as some of the more seething lower-star reviewers, and clearly Shteyngart is a facile, skilled, occasionally brilliant writer; my biggest problem is I didn't have much empathy for the protagonist, which is challenging when the bulk of the book is comprised of his first-person perspective on a whole spectrum of wildly and largely unrelatable experiences.

There are specific elements within the story that create a slate of themes: the world of hedge funds, the bludgeons and nuances of having an autistic child, the minutia of artisanal watches (I appreciated their use as a metaphorical device), the ramblings of a basically psychotic road trip, but while each had merit, I found none ingratiated me to the main character, making the read a sort of detached exercise. In fact, I didn't even come away with a visualization of what Barry looked like, which is really unusual, making him seem like a cipher.

The other characters had moments that glimmered or popped, but there, too, they seemed to largely be canvases for Barry's unfolding drama. Other than his father-in-law, and Jonah, the older autistic boy met on the road, I wasn't drawn in, which made me less interested in how their stories unfolded.

The delusional, narcissistic drive that compels the narrative forward from Barry's point of view becomes problematic if we don't relate enough to him. I didn't, emotionally, analytically, or from any point of world view.

I did, however, relate wildly to the thread about the gut-punch of Trump's 2016 victory... felt every moment of that particular pain. :)

There was a measure of redemption at the end, which was lovely, but still, I remained too detached to feel much. Well written, with interesting elements, but a book that will likely be an acquired taste. And, by the way, I didn't find it funny, so maybe it's just me! :)
3 people found this helpful
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Ben Mattlin
5.0 out of 5 stars A good read about a lost soul.
Reviewed in the United States on October 8, 2018
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This is basically a kind of cynical road-to movie--well, not really. But the protagonist, Barry Cohen, does travel across country on a mission to find himself, after his high-end Manhattan hedge-fund life implodes. A master of irony, Shteyngart displays an amazing, granular knowledge of finance, the autism spectrum, "flyover" geography, and artisanal watches--or at least enough to fool me. In alternate chapters, we follow the exploits of Barry's abandoned wife, Seema, which I found less interesting. Maybe it's because I'm a guy, but so is Shteyngart, and he's better on the male characters than the female ones. Seema's chapters are mostly about her connections with others--her lovers, her son, her parents--and, I suspect, would never pass the Bechdel test. Still, the overall story has a gripping, propulsive narrative drive. Even when Barry, a sort of anti-hero, falls into absurd depravity, you just can't stop reading. This may be Shteyngart's best fiction yet!
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Top reviews from other countries

William D.
5.0 out of 5 stars Really funny, really fun
Reviewed in Germany on October 19, 2023
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This is just a really funny book that is a lot of fun to read. While it's very difficult to root for the protagonist I for some reason kept hoping things would turn out for him. In any case, I breezed through this book not being able to wait to find out what happens on the next page. What more can you ask for? Highly recommended.
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Clarissa
5.0 out of 5 stars Shteyngart at his best
Reviewed in Canada on November 26, 2018
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Shteyngart is writing about hedge funders because New York, where he lives, is packed with them, having driven out the writers and artists. They're horrible people but strangely well-meaning in their own way. A sweet idiot of a hedge-funder travels across America by Greyhound to escape his failures, wife and autistic son. He has adventures. Lake Success is funny, wrenching and dead-on. This is the way Americans live now. Terrifying of course.
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I. G. Alber-glanstaette
4.0 out of 5 stars Great book but not my favorite by this author
Reviewed in Italy on November 17, 2018
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I’ve read all Steyngart books and this was my least favorite. Perhaps I missed his usual humor. I found myself laughing less and cringing more, which I am sure was intentional but still less enjoyable. Nonetheless I recommend it as I do all his books.
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Michael Fuchs
5.0 out of 5 stars Super Sad True Trump Story
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on November 29, 2018
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At the end of every year, I pick out a couple of the most appealing titles from the New York Times Notable Books of the Year list. This choice richly rewarded the practice. An assured, winning, highly entertaining picaresque, this is a timeless novel very much of its time (the beginning of the Era of Trumpism), as well as a moving meditation on loss, longing, regret, bad decisions, the ineluctable weight of the past, sadness, and the terrible difficulty of getting anything right, almost regardless of one's circumstances. A wonderful novel, and a great read.
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Snapdragon
5.0 out of 5 stars Don’t be a banker
Reviewed in Australia on November 29, 2018
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Gary Shteyngart’s new novel follows peripatetic hedge funder Barry Cohen as he bails out of his marriage to beautiful lawyer Seema, a Tamil, and on their 3 yo autistic son Shiva. He takes a road trip on Greyhound busses through Baltimore, Atlanta, Virginia, El Paso and California, losing on the way his phone, his credit cards, his collection of iconic watches and more than one unrealistic fantasy, in particular the one where he reconnects with his college girlfriend. He does reconnect with Layla, now a professor of sociology, but despite fancying himself as something of a writer back in the day, both Seema and Layla point out that his understanding of humanity is somewhat flawed. His adventures play out against a background of the Trump election and what that means plus the ongoing interest of authorities in whether he engaged in insider trading. His fund is going south at an alarming rate, but hey ... you make a few million, you lose a few. The portraits Shteyngart paints of life at the top of the earnings pile are funny and of course, not pretty. Other characters are beautifully drawn, such as Seema’s gentle father and domineering mother, Guatemalan writer Luis and his Chinese doctor wife, the Filippina nanny and so on. Shiva has severe autism and his portrayal is particularly sympathetic. It all ends up happily enough but the lesson is clear: don’t be one of these banking guys.
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