Little Failure: A Memoir, by Gary Shteyngart
“In order for me to be born,” Gary Shteyngart says early on in his memoir, “all four branches of my family have to end up in Leningrad, trading in their tiny towns and villages for that somber, canal-laced cityscape. Here’s how it happens.”
Voice, more than anything, can drive a story and make a book impossible to put down. The immediacy, the candor, the variations in tone that can run from ironic to wry to the insightful and even lyric—as readers, we hear the words more than read them, and the best narrative voices create a persona in which there is no discernible line between the speaker’s character and the reader’s ear. The voice in Little Failure achieves this with ease. It’s all there, candid, skewed and idiosyncratic, a knowing, examining, confessing self that doesn’t hold back. And Gary Shteyngart is a master storyteller, one who examines his own and his family’s history in all its facets.
Shteyngart is the author of three previous books—the novels The Russian Debutante’s Handbook, Absurdistan and Super Sad True Love Story. Little Failure is his first book of nonfiction, and tracks the family history that led to Gary, along with the central story is one of immigration, assimilation, and the coming-of-age story of a writer.
The memoir’s title is taken from the pet name his mother bestowed on him, a mash-up of Russian and English, Failurchka, meant affectionately. Its derivation can be traced back to the endearment Soplyak, or Snotty, which came via his father, and inspired by the runny nose that plagued Gary in childhood. This layer of disappointment beneath love drives the memoir’s voice and the tone, a humming tension beneath the portrayal family love and its complexity.
The book is also about growing up as an outsider in the boroughs of New York. It’s 1979, and young Gary (or Igor, as he’s still going by his Russian name), has arrived in Queens with his parents and grandparents:
The first momentous thing that happens to me in Kew Gardens, Queens, is that I fall in love with cereal boxes. We are too poor to afford toys at this point, but we do have to eat. Cereal is food, sort of. It tastes grainy, easy and light, with a hint of false fruitiness. It tastes the way America feels.
The voice is central to the young, sensitive and impressionable Gary. “A writer,” he says, “is just an instrument too finely set to the human condition.” As the only child, he is both the center of his parents’ world and a stranger to it. “I needed my mother,” he writes, “needed her company and her dark hair to braid during the moments when I was too tired of reading a book. But I felt the explosive nature of my father’s love for me…and his fire both scared and entranced me.”
We see Gary enter Hebrew school, and he doesn’t dress or speak or act like his classmates. “Here, at age seven, begins my decline.” He makes friends whose glorious American homes he “lacks the vocabulary to describe.” It’s this exposure, one that comes with going to school, that separates and defines immigrating generations, a divide that occurs between Gary and his parents—beginning with Hebrew school in Queens, then the prestigious Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan, to Oberlin College.
Sure, there’s plenty of irony, and 1980s culture, amid the experience of leaving Cold War Russia and navigating the alarming wonder of capitalism. But it’s also a family story, and the story of a writer. Near the memoir’s end, Shteyngart writes:
After finishing the book you hold in your hands, I went back and reread the three novels I’ve written, an exercise that left me shocked by the overlaps between fiction and reality I found on those pages, by how blithely I’ve used the facts of my own life, as if I’ve been having a fire sale all along—everything about me must go!
Learn more about Gary Shteyngart here.
—Lauren Alwan
Lauren Alwan’s fiction and essays have appeared in The Southern Review, ZYZZYVA, Nimrod International, and other publications. Read her column at Catapult, “Invisible History,” a chronicle of family stories of heritage and belonging and the complexities of her bicultural experience. More at www.laurenalwan.com