The story of Barry Cohen, New York hedge fund manager, his wife Seema and their three year old autistic son, Shiva. It begins with the bloody unraveling of their marriage and descends to Barry riding out of town on a Greyhound bus as he tries to find a simpler life with an old girlfriend. The book is well-written and very emotional. The story was sad and even depressing as it dealt with a decaying marriage and Barry appearing to almost become unhinged. I couldn't identify with Seema or Barry and their assortment of friends. This book was just not for me.

Lake Success by Gary Shteyngart will be available September 4, 2018 from Random House Publishing Company. An egalley of this book was made available by the publisher in exchange for a honest review.

I'm relieved this satire had some Anti-Trump characters I could relate to, since I had a hard time conjuring any connection with these millionaire hedge-funders. Even though the novel was relatively fast-paced, and somewhat humorous, for me, the best writing was at the end when our main character finally returned home. We had to hear so much about his Greyhound bus adventure, as he was on the bus adventure, then again after the bus adventure was over (I'm sure this was intentional for the satire to show the arrogance of our main character, but once we got to the end, and after ten years had passed, and we see the son with autism at his bar mitzvah, I rather wish we had seen more of the son throughout the novel. When the mother's parents came to live with her (since husband was off on Greyhound trip (notice the repetition? maybe it was to show the main character's autistic-traits of repetition?), we start to see the son interact with his grandpa in ways we hadn't seen earlier in the novel, when the characters seemed more like caricatures than real. It isn't until the end of the novel, when the father actually seems more like a human and less than a tool, but, unfortunately, by then the novel is over, and perhaps this will be a novel that becomes a Netflix movie, and after people see the movie, they may read the novel, and, hopefully by then, Trump will not be in office, but many more of us may have to use Greyhound because the market may tank, and hopefully we won't be thinking about Kerouac and Hemingway, because enough of those two already, and we may remember one of the endless stories about a dude with one ear falling asleep on his lap on a bus, and we will wonder if that was what was what happened, since we had read the book so long ago, but there was something, and it wasn't Van Gogh, but someone, a distant memory of a man who spent millions of dollars on watches and was briefly broke and on a bus.

As a securities trader, Barry Cohen is living the American Dream. But when things are wound too tight, he comes unhinged leaving behind his family, a beautiful Indian American wife Seema, and his autistic son, Shiva. In Trump’s America, Barry embarks on a search for that all-important currency: authenticity. Clutching his stable of luxury watches, Barry sets off on a Greyhound bus ride through “real” America. The dissonance is on overdrive here — the people he meets are doomed to their mediocre fates but as a wealthy man he can do no wrong, his wealth always cushioning any fall or misstep.

A wealthy Wall Street hedge fund trader finds himself in Port Authority bus station, bleeding, bruised and carrying his case of watches. His life is out of control. He no longer loves his wife, his son is autistic, and he longs for something more, so he gets on a bus, seeking out an old flame in his old life, He wife also struggles with her identity, with her culture, her son, and wants something more. This should be the novel of the year, rich with humor, and 2018 sensibility. Shteyngart succeeds again.

I picked it up and put it down. It was not resonating with me at all. The characters felt a little bit cartoonish to me. It didn't seem to reflect the current state of mind in the USA. Maybe at a later time.

In Lake Success, Gary Shteyngart reports on what Philip Roth called “the indigenous American berserk” with sympathy, humor, and pathos. Always funny, Shteyngart encapsulates his deep understanding of contemporary America into the lives, loves, and failures of Barry and Seema Cohen ”during the year 2016, at the start of the First Summer of Trump.” Barry and Seema live in rarefied Manhattan in which the mother of a three-year-old boy worries that ”’If he doesn’t do well, forget Hunter, forget Ethical Heritage, we’re talking maybe Bright and Happy Schoolhouse. And their HYPMS is what?’ ‘PMS?’ Seema asked innocently. ‘HYPMS. Harvard, Yale, Princeton, MIT, Stanford. The good schools can already tell you what percentage of their kindergarten class get into one of those five. Brearley’s is thirty-seven percent.’”

Barry’s a ”a man with 2.4 billion dollars of assets under management” , an owner of ”a batch of the forty-eight-year-old Karuizawa single cask whiskey. . . thirty-three thousand dollars a bottle, if you can find it,”, and he’s a veritable market basket of obsessions. He’s from a modest middle-class background, Princeton-educated, and self-made due to a combination of his obsessive determination to learn how to make friends and his obsessive mathematical skills. Barry’s no natural with other people: referring to the Hong Kong-born physician who invited Barry and his wife to dinner, ”in the five hours they would spend together, Barry would never remember her name; he never remembered women’s names”. He takes pride in mentoring the bros who work for him in his hedge fund, perhaps even more than in his hedge fund’s once outstanding AUM and RoI’s. He seeks solace in his obsessive collection of unimaginably expensive wrist watches: his Universal Genève Tri-Compax from the early 1940s, his Nomos Minimatik, his Audemars Piguet pink-gold Royal Oak, his Patek Philippe Calatrava 570, his F. P. Journe, and his Bao Dai Rolex. Unfortunately for Barry, the IWC Pilot’s Watch that he yearns for just isn’t for him, because despite his ”wide swimmer’s build, his thick shoulders” he has ”his two feminine wrists, a liability at any point in history, but never more so than during the year 2016”. Kicked out of his home, injured, bleeding, Barry wanders to Manhattan’s Port Authority bus terminal in the middle of the night—I mean, who in their right mind would go there in the middle of the night? Barry’s falling apart and knows it: ”Like your first ankle monitor bracelet or your fourth divorce, the occasional break with reality was an important part of any hedge-fund titan’s biography”. Barry embarks on a 2016 road trip like none other, from New York City to Baltimore, Richmond, Raleigh, Atlanta, El Paso, and then to Phoenix and finally San Diego, all on the omnipresent Greyhound buses, surviving ”on pork rinds and off-brand coffee” and ”learning about America” all the way. Until the very end of Lake Success, Barry finds more comfort trying to recreate his memories of the past than forging a new life.

Barry’s an interesting and nuanced character, with his obsessions, his rigid rules for making friends, his touching desire to connect with his son and his former girlfriend’s lonely son by teaching them to swim, and his cockamamie idea to start an ”Urban Watch Fund for inner-city kids morphing into ”a map-drawing program for shy suburban kids.” But Shteyngart’s true triumph in Lake Success is Barry’s wife Seema, her parents, their relationships with each other, and with Seema and Barry’s son Shiva, a boy who’s ”not just ‘on the spectrum’ but on the ‘severe’ end of it”. Seema’s a Yale Law School graduate, clerking for the Eastern District: ”Unlike white wives, she could wear many grams of gold around her neck, the miraculous hue of her skin catching its glow. She was, Barry sometimes noted in disbelief, a twenty-nine year old beauty with whom only one person in the universe had failed to fall desperately in love, that person being himself.”

Seema’s mother, an immigrant from south India like her husband, displays the ethnic status hyperawareness so typical of striving immigrant and first generation parents: ”Freshman year in high school she had drawn Seema a chart of the social acceptability of her friends. Jews and WASPs fared at the very top, one had ‘money (increasing)’ and the other ‘social power (decreasing).’ The Asians were separated into several tranches, with the Japanese—who had bought up so much of our country just the previous decade—leading the pack. Tamils hovered several blank spaces above Hispanics, who themselves rested on the shoulders of blacks. Her mother circled ‘Jews’ times and wrote ‘accessible,’ ‘liberal,’ ‘emotional,’ and ‘sober’ next to it.” Seema ”loved her mother just enough; she loved her father ninefold.” In Lake Success, Seema’s father—with his innate ability to relate to Shiva and understand his totally Americanized daughter—may be the father that we all yearn for and the father that we want to be. And Seema’s mother represents the mother so familiar to many of us: ”’Oh, Mommy,’ Seema said, ‘I wish you could say a nice thing right now.’ ‘Try to be a better daughter,’ her mother said. ‘That’s not a nice thing.’ ‘Nice is not my specialty. Call your father if you want to hear something nice.’” And then there’s Seema herself who, after Trump’s elected, finds that ”With her country dying, she found herself wanting to be a little less American and a little more Indian, to search for her roots the way her mother had her whole life. She needed to nail down who she was. Barry wasn’t the only one who could pursue that privilege. She tried to learn Sanskrit for the millionth time, attempted to memorize her father’s favorite slokas, and took a car service out to Flushing once a week to feast on upma at the Ganesh Temple Canteen.”

Lake Success is full of wonderful bits, some comic, some perfectly reflective of today’s America. Barry’s relieved when he discovers that Seema’s lover the novelist has an ”Amazon ranking—1,123,340—and after reading one page of his novel, Barry could see how the ranking came to be”. And here’s an exchange in Atlanta between Jeff Park, Barry’s hedge fund colleague, and Barry: ”’That guy didn’t even care about ogling my car in front of his girlfriend. I wasn’t a threat to him, because I’m an Asian man.’ It took a while for Barry to unpack that statement. ‘In this town, you’re either black or you’re white,’ Jeff Park said.”

With Lake Success, Gary Shteyngart has created a memorable and uncategorizable novel well-suited to the contemporary U.S., part satire, part comedy, part acute social observation, and all compelling and affecting.

I would like to thank NetGalley and Random House for providing me with an e-copy of Lake Success in exchange for an honest review.

4.5 stars

I could not stop thinking about this novel once I had read the last page. It haunted my dreams. Two almost despicable main characters, and yet I fell in love with them! Gary Shteyngart is a master of wit and capable of both humor and pathos. Brilliant.

"Lake Success" is the first novel I've read set in the United States under President Trump. Gary Shteyngart, the genius behind "Super Sad True Love Story," one of my favorite dystopian books of the past decade, now turns his attention to the present day. What he sees is a series of huge chasms between men and women, liberals and conservatives, rich and poor. "Lake Success" focuses on Barry Cohen, a Princeton-educated hedge fund manager who bumbles through life making millions of dollars while just barely staying on the right side of the law. Barry's wife, Seema, provides a useful counterweight. She's the daughter of immigrants, deeply intelligent and younger than Barry. Barry and Seema are Manhattan 1-percenters with a perfect apartment, glamorous vacations -- and a young son whose autism presents a challenge neither of them really knows how to meet at first. Shteyngart writes like a dream. The book touches on racism, religion, elitism, abortion, Wall Street and politics without ever feeling preachy.

i am a big fan of Gary Shteyngart and enjoyed this book. It is about a deeply flawed and emotionally stunted character who was very hard to sympathize with. I don’t think this book is as good as his previous ones but very readable and entertaining.

Lake Success follows Barry Cohen, a middle aged hedge fund manager, as he deserts his wife and autistic son for a journey across country on a Greyhound bus. It's the summer of 2016 and Barry is in crisis personally and professionally. We meet him at the Port Authority in NYC looking to board a bus to hunt down his ex-girlfriend from college. Barry is a tone deaf millionaire who is extremely hard to relate to, let alone feel sorry for his current circumstances. There was much to enjoy in this book even as you cringe at the characters lack of personal awareness as they interact with the world.

Barry's cross country trip was the best part of the book. We also see how his estranged wife is coping being left behind with their autistic son. The wife, Seema, copes by having an affair with her downstairs neighbor, a published author. Shteyngart does a great job of showing how people in 2016 were in denial about Trump being a true contender for POTUS. The campaign is background noise in the book and I believe that is how it was treated in real life for most people. Yet the language being employed by Trump was seeping into the vernacular of every day people. When two of the upper class white men are called out for being assholes they both respond with "this is a witch hunt." Maybe this wasn't intentional by the author, but it felt more than coincidental to me.

There is a lot to unpack from this novel, which I feel is Shteyngart's specialty. I would have rounded up to four stars, but I felt the ending dragged on for too long. Thank you to Netgalley, publisher, and author for the ARC.

The writing in this is wonderful, but the story is terrible. It feels like a typical Wally Lamb style sad sack book. The main character is not likable, but more so none of the characters behave consistently enough to allow the reader to become invested in spite of their flaws. The whole story felt a little done, and very pointless. The writing itself was good, the story missed the mark.

While this was certainly a well-written book, it wasn’t for me. I don’t have patience for people who dislike books because they don’t find the main character likable, but while I did dislike Barry most of the time, my problem wasn’t with his dislikability, but rather with how the characters’ flighty, constantly shifting natures prevented me from being invested in them and their outcomes. I found myself barreling toward the end of this book without much care. That being said, Shteyngart’s engaging writing and descriptive passages made up for a bit of the dullness, though my admiration for his writing does make me wonder how he could write so well yet so utterly fail to create compelling—or, simply, interesting—characters. This is the first book I’ve read by Shteyngart, and I will give him a second chance.

Lake Success was a breath of fresh, albeit sardonic, air for me.

I was immediately drawn into the story.

We come upon Barry Cohen, disheveled and bleeding, in the Port Authority Bus Terminal. From the very beginning, it is obvious that he's a colossal idiot, crazy rich, and has no idea how the world actually works.

Despite a disgusting net worth, Barry's life is crumbling around him. His fund is failing, his wife doesn't love him, and he can't deal with his son's diagnosis, so he runs. But not in the way you might expect.

No fancy jets or expensive cars involved. He decides he will flee by Greyhound bus, and it just gets more absurd from there.

Shteyngart's writing is incredible, and that gets him pretty far with me. The story itself is engaging. It's funny and smart, and while I spent a lot of time cringing in embarrassment for Barry, there was part of me that wanted to cheer this idiot on, and hope that nothing too disastrous would befall him.

The one criticism I do have is that many of the characters are too one dimensional. They feel almost like token stereotypes of themselves. Barry and his wife Seema are well fleshed out and nuanced, but the rest feel like placeholders.

The social commentary and wry telling of the Trump-is-coming political climate is intelligent, thoughtful, and spot on.

I give Lake Success four out of five stars. 

I received an ARC of this book from Random House Publishing Group. The opinions expressed are mine.

Not a fan of this novel. As I was reading it I kept asking myself “what’s the point of this?” I didn’t care for any of the main characters and I felt as if the story rambles aimlessly.

We meet Barry Cohen in the summer of 2016, an early middle aged hedge fund manager. His life is about to implode, and actually has EXploded in a less than civilized way as he flees his enviable digs in the Flatiron District sporting scratch marks on his face, headed for the Port Authority and a Greyhound that will deliver him, he hopes, to a simpler, cleaner, more fulfilling life with his college girlfriend. The fact that the suitcase he has hastily packed doesn't contain changes of clothing, but a prized array of wristwatches costing upwards of $70,000 is an indication of how ill-thought-out this odyssey is.

Gary Shteyngart amps the action with each stop along the way. Barry's encounters on his road to hopeful redemption provide him increasing insight that in some cases is hilariously skewed, kind of like what the country is experiencing as it lurches toward November of that year. Alternating with shorter chapters that follow Seema, Barry's wife, and how her life progresses during his disappearance, the novel brilliantly illuminates the era just before the Trump Administration takes the reins. Exception could be made that their extreme wealth make it possible for these two to forge their paths (e.g., a saintly Philippina nanny sees to their severely autistic three year old son). But Barry deliberately rids himself of the accoutrements of his privileged existence starting with his phone and then his black Amex, attempting to lose himself in "real" America. With mixed results. While I couldn't exactly root for any of the characters, I didn't wish them ill either. Shteyngart's prose carries his trademark wit and snap ("The woman in the mesh ears was talking to a trans woman eating a bag of Lay's with a lot of emphasis." "The best fiction is the fiction of self-delusion. It contrasts the banality of our self-made fictions." "It took a while for Barry to unpack that statement." ".... he looked like he was renting space within his own body.")

In an epilogue that takes Barry and Seema 10 years into the future, Shteyngart wisely does not address the consequences of the Trump era, but does slyly slip in a result of climate change.

It’s rare that I give up on a book, but I just can’t finish this one. I had a hard time investing with the characters and getting on board with the storyline. The writing was the only thing that kept me going as long as I did, so I will likely seek out other work by the author in the hopes of finding something more intriguing in terms of plot line.

In full disclosure, my husband went to high school with Gary so I'm always interested in what he has written. Unfortunately, this book is nothing new: another "comedic" book about relationships and outsiders in America. It's starting to feel a bit tired. I feel like we are supposed to sympathize with the main character but he's awful and I just can't.

2 1/2 stars really, rounded up for some decent writing and an author I really love.
I will preface this by saying I really enjoy Gary Shteyngart's writing. I have a special place in my heart for Super Sad True Love Story. I enjoyed the sad funniness of Little Failure, and was thrilled to meet him years ago. He is expert at writing the sad-sack, clueless, male doofus character, that ultimately becomes lovable along the way. Barry is not that character, though I think that was the intention.

Barry Cohen is a multi-millionaire hedge fund guy, who has made some major financial mistakes. He is married to a beautiful Indian woman, is horrified by the autism diagnosis his toddler son just received, and is obsessed with expensive watches, expensive whiskey and his perceived status. He thinks he can mend his life if he abandons his wife and autistic son, throws away his wallet and cell phone, and embarks on a Greyhound trip to try to win back his college girlfriend. What could possibly go wrong?

The difference between Lake Success and Super Sad True Love Story is that the sad-sack, clueless, male doofus character never becomes lovable. Barry embodies the worst of wealthy, white, American men and never redeems himself because his values never really shift much. The damage is done. I hated Barry from page one, and was waiting for the moment that I empathized, or at least felt sorry for him, which never came. Instead, I truly blame the Barrys of America for a lot of what I find detestable about American culture and I couldn't look past that.

Thank you to Random House and Gary Steyngart for the advance copy of this book. I wish I liked it more.

Shteyngart is one of my favorite social satirists; his satire often features some sort of doofus in an absurd situation. The doofus here is Barry, a wealthy hedge fund manager who has no idea how sexist, racist and privileged he is. Barry takes off to see the country via Greyhound Bus and many strange and awkward encounters ensue.

I honestly cannot finish this book. It isn't holding my interest and what i have read so far is not only depressing but too real feeling for fiction. Maybe I'll come back to it with fresh eyes latter and try again but right now starts feeling like a hatred chore.