Lake Success

By Gary Shteyngart, Hamish Hamilton, £16.99

Review by Dan Brotzel

The new novel from Gary Shteyngart, best-selling author of Super Sad True Love Story, is a brilliant blend of pathos and satire, political insight and belly laughs.

It tells the story of Barry, a hedge-funder with a beautiful wife, Seema, a retinue of staff, a palatial condo in Manhattan (among other homes) and a watch collection worth seven figures. But his fund is down hundreds of millions, he’s days away from an indictment for crude mis-selling and at home he has a severely autistic son that neither he nor his wife — despite all their expensive therapies and specialists — have any idea how to deal with. Things kick off with Barry walking out on his gilded life. Chapters alternate between soon-to-be-ex-husband and wife, as Seema takes up with a novelist and Barry goes in search of a purer, more authentic life (which he associates with his college sweetheart Layla).

Seema’s struggles raising a child with special needs are portrayed with great insight and compassion, while the arc of the story follows Trump’s unexpected ascendancy, which lends the book an acute social conscience.

You should know this is also a very funny book; sometimes satirical, sometimes dialogue-driven, sometimes more poignant.

And most of it centres on Barry, at once the heart and the hole around which the whole book builds. There is a generosity to his narcissism that, like Lake Success itself, is very hard not to love.