Barry Cohen leaves behind his life of managing $1.5 billion in assets, his residence on the Upper West Side and $20.000 per bottle Japanese whiskey to travel the country on Greyhound busses in pursuit of his college love Leyla. On his journey through the United States, Barry meets prostitutes, befriends a drug dealer, joins forces with a drug addict, migrants and minimum wage workers. He soon realises that life is not perfect, whether it is Leyla’s, his former co-workers’ or that of the people he meets throughout his journey. Barry primarily craves his family’s and colleague’s respect and adulation –which has been central to his life since his childhood and Princeton days.

Hilarious and tragic at once, Shteyngart’s characters are both strikingly realistic and laughably absurd. Barry’s former colleague seems grotesque in his apartment with perfect lighting for female company, and Seema’s parents are adorably flawed. Although many of Barry’s troubles are self-inflicted, we cannot help but empathise with him on his journey of self-discovery and realities in present-day America. While he endures theft, pennilessness, all of which he boasts about at length, in many ways Barry manages to remain in his bubble. One constant remains throughout the book: Barry’s love for his watches.

This book was extremely well-written and immediately pulls the reader in. While often light-hearted and entertaining, Shteyngart also addresses serious topics, such as autism, anti-Semitism and racism.

When I read on Kindle I highlight sentences that grab me, amuse me, help me think about the book. With Lake Success I had to tell myself to stop highlighting – I was marking up too many great jokes, too many great thoughts: sentence after sentence, Shteyngart just keeps turning them out.

This is a marvellous state-of-the nation novel about the USA, and also an absolutely hilarious satire, with wonderful characters in it. Barry is a hedge fund manager who has walked out on his life to go travelling. His life wasn’t looking so hot – medical problems with his son Shiva, fights with his wife Seema, and potential legal and financial problems. So he will travel across the country by Greyhound – he, who could take a private jet – “he could be wheels up in two hours”.

Barry is infuriating, ridiculous, brilliantly clever in some ways and completely lacking in others: he’s tremendously obnoxious, but at the same time you have to like him, even as you wince at the next terrible thing he says or does.

Alternating with his journey, we follow his wife as she lives her wealthy Manhattan life of competitive parenting, and tries to face up to the issues with her son, and wonders where her husband has gone.

Barry is thinking about life as he goes along, and the reader listens in, and then decides if what he has to say is brilliant or nonsensical. He is obsessed with watches, expensive

fancy watches , for himself and for his wife:

He had bought her many timepieces including the 70K Cartier Crash, a watch that, on purpose, looked as if it had been mangled in a car accident

that’s one to the right.

And the watches are a theme throughout the book: Buying them, keeping them safe, maintaining them, watching security.

I have to quote some of the marvellous lines, words, phrases:
[About his wife’s comments] A little fountain pen, its nib soaked in cruelty, always seemed to be at her disposal.
The whiskey-heat of the night.
She worked in graphic web design, which these days was simply a catchall category for anything not involving finance or escorting.
He kept a kindly half-blind sheepdog for a few years, until she died from the melancholy of being a working-class Jewish pet.
The Marriott was an ice pick stabbed into the heart of the city. Black people in suit and tie were serving underdressed white people in the hotel’s lobby.
Barry had always wondered why people who were just upper-middle class in New York chose to stay there, given that they could live like minor dictators in the rest of the country.
[There was a kind of woman] he would see on rare occasions at hedge-fund parties, whenever he’d meet a fund manager who hadn’t remarried for some reason. The wise, older face…
And it made me laugh when Barry couldn’t remember his wife’s best friend’s name: every time:

…Seema’s funny Asian friend (?Tina)
…The woman from Brooklyn. Tina? Lena?
….Tina or Kina …or Lina.

She is actually Mina. This shows the seamlessness of Shteyngart’s writing – it is hilarious in a simple way, but it also shows something about Barry and his world – and everything in the book is like that, without pushing it in your face.

It’s certainly one of the best books I’ve read in the past year, and it made me laugh, and think, and told me about all kinds of American lives. I did think it tailed off just a bit in the final third, stopped being quite so thrilling and transgressive and funny. The author lost me very slightly after a sex scene that didn’t seem to fit. Not because there was anything shocking or bad about it – it was very sweetly done in fact. But for the first time in the whole book it seemed like something another male contemporary American author would put in his novel.

Of course the reader knows how Barry’s summer is going to end: this is very much set during the 2016 Presidential election campaign. Barry, a natural Republican, considers ‘bundling for Hillary’, in order to get Seema a job with the attorney general after Hillary wins… ‘Were all men separated from their children and wives by an invisible ribbon of cluelessness?’ Seema thinks when she hears this. Elsewhere she thinks about women talking together about their partners:
their song of anger and surprise which could have been subtitled “We Have No Idea Whom We Married.”
Lake Success is not perfect, but it is tremendous.



Because of the magazines I read, I frequently see adverts for fancy watches, and occasionally get a supplement entirely devoted to timepieces. The illos for these are so much a specialized artform, and so much a picture of Barry's world, that I have chosen some examples to illustrate the book.

A road trip through contemporary America, amusing and tragic in turn, Gary Shteyngart’s latest novel is a tour de force and immensely enjoyable. It tells the story of obscenely rich hedge-fund manager Barry Cohen, once a master of the universe, now finding his life imploding around him, so he leaves his wife and newly diagnosed autistic son to embark on a Greyhound quest to find….well, what does he want to find? His former girlfriend might be the ostensible goal, but there’s no redemption in the past when the present can’t be escaped. The novel is a roller-coaster of a ride for both Barry and the reader. This is Gary Shteyngart, it’s not going to be a book of understatement and great subtlety, of nuanced characterisation and delicate dialogue. But I found it a powerful and rewarding social satire, an exploration of what happens when financial riches turn to financial ruin, when relationships becomes shallow and superficial, when the two extremes of fabulous wealth and extreme poverty exist side-by-side and when social inequality leads to the election of Trump. This is a road trip novel unlike any other and one I found immersive and compelling.

Lake Success is a long read about one man’s quest to find himself and work out where his life is going.

Barry is a successful - he has a huge amount of wealth from his job in finance; he’s married to Seema, a lawyer; they have a son, Shiva, who’s profoundly autistic. One night, at a lavish party, Barry ups and leaves, taking the iconic Greyhound bus across America.

This is a story about wanting more, about not wanting what you have and following a path of self-destruction. On his journey, Barry meets a different side to the human race; he gets threatened in a violent part of a city; he smokes crack; he moves in with ex-girlfriend, Layla, and her map-obsessed son. He dodges metaphorical bullets in Juarez, Mexico, over the border from El Paso, Texas.

Eventually Barry travels back to New York. His marriage to Seema doesn’t survive but his financial self flourishes. Alongside this, his love of watches dominates his life, perhaps a metaphor for his existence - time marching on, each tick of the hands significant.

This is a good read - one doesn’t perhaps like Barry or Seema and Shiva is elusive to readers, perhaps as he is to his father. In some ways, it’s a sad tale - Barry has it all but it isn’t enough so he throws it all away.

An American road trip, a satirical swipe at modern America, a state of the nation novel…. Whatever you want to call it ‘Lake Success’ plays out the fall and rise of Barry Cohen, a super-rich hedge fund manager, against the backdrop of the 2016 Presidential election and the election of Donald Trump.

This was my first experience of a Shteyngart novel and whilst I found it quite well written and reasonably amusing at times, I wasn’t convinced by the narrative and the characters are pretty unlikeable. Suffering a minor breakdown, Cohen flees his wife and autistic son, is on the run from the FBI investigating his financial affairs, and embarks on a Greyhound bus journey across the entire landmass of the USA. This gives Shteyngart enormous scope to explore issues of wealth, race and society in general in an America tearing itself apart with political division. On the way Cohen ditches his mobile phone and his bank cards, becoming so destitute that he has to resort to begging on the streets for his bus fare. His journey concludes with a pilgrimage to his father’s graveside in San Diego – but there is no cosy redemption here, for the headstone doesn’t even mention the son. The novel then, in my opinion, tries too hard to reach some sort of resolution. Cohen is fined and not imprisoned for his financial mismanagement, and the novel then races through years of some kind of flashforward as the characters speed through 10 years in a small number of pages. The final image, of Cohen rebuilding one of his beloved watches for his son, is an obvious metaphor for his fall and apparent coming to terms with his new situation: divorced, trying to rebuild his relationship with his son – but still insanely rich. As he surveys his handiwork on the watch he thinks: ‘he had made a beautiful thing whole again.’

I see that other reviewers have called this in the tradition of the so-called Great American Novel. For me, this isn’t. It was a diverting enough read, and does take a bitterly satirical swipe at some of the less salubrious sides of 21st century American society and politics, but maybe it is too early for writers and novelists fully to be able to address the impact of Trump – distance is often better with these things. I felt that the book lacks heart, and warmth, and whilst it is well-written I couldn’t really engage with it. But then again, maybe that’s how we are meant to react to the characters?

(With thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for an ARC of this book in return for an honest and unbiased review.)

Lake Success contains some interesting themes and I can see why the critics are eating it up. It's also a good candidate for any number of literary awards. That being said, this is just the kind of bland emotionless literary book about obnoxious people that I have never been able to get into.

I've gotten the occasional finger-wagging telling off in the past for daring to suggest that smart literary books that offer some clever satire on our current society should be emotionally engaging. It seems that some people feel that certain books - because they are "literary" and "important" - should be approached by packing up our emotions and caging our boredom. I don't agree. I think many books that fall under the snooty umbrella of "literature" are, in fact, some of the most emotional and compelling books of all time. Whether it be Dostoyevsky, Atwood, Murakami or Morrison.

This is not, in my opinion, one of those books.

One of the many things on his marriage checklist was to marry a woman too ambitious to ever become fat.


Barry Cohen is something of a Trumpian figure-- he has billions of dollars of assets under management, he is married to a beautiful and younger immigrant, and he is largely clueless about what's going on in the America outside of his 24 carat gold bubble. When his three-year-old is diagnosed with autism, he runs away on a cross-country Greyhound bus, leaving his wife to handle their son.

As Barry goes on his journey, buoyed by memories of an old girlfriend from college, his wife, Seema, begins an affair with a Guatemalan writer. Meanwhile, the 2016 presidential campaign and election play out in the background.

It's a book that may be somewhat interesting to analyze but is difficult to enjoy. The characters are virtually all insufferable and I don't feel like Barry's worldview changed much over the course of the novel. Lake Success is evidently supposed to be a satirical look at American capitalism and materialism. It is arguably a book about how the twinkling exterior - of a person, a family or, indeed, a nation - can often mask something broken within. Yet I enjoy this idea of the book far more than I ever enjoyed reading it.

The prose through the eyes of these characters, especially Barry, is deliberately unpleasant and overwritten. It is done to emphasize the ugliness of excess, such as when Barry "eye-sodomized" Seema "over a plate of tuna tataki hors d’oeuvres". Additionally, the weak and - sometimes, it seemed - random plot is often broken up by discussion of Barry's Hedge Fund business, which is as eye-glazingly dull as it sounds.

Occasionally, timely and insightful snippets broke through that made me sit up and take notice. It is very much a book for right here, right now, which is most evident when Barry observes:

It wasn't America that needed to be made great again, it was her listless citizens.


And then Seema wonders:

A man that rich couldn't be stupid. Or, Seema thought now, was that the grand fallacy of twenty-first-century America?


Sadly, though, these moments were few. I'm glad I tried a Shteyngart book, but I think I can conclude his work is not for me.

Lots of other reviewers have said what this is about so I will not waste your time repeating the story line.

I have found previous books by Gary Shteyngart to be well thought through, intelligent, complex, funny and beautifully written.

To a large degree I can say the same about "Lake Success" which seemed to be trying to become another in a long list of "Great American novels."

I enjoyed it stylistically and sort of empathised with the main character but it jumped around a lot and I never felt totally engaged but like everything else by this wonderfully talented author, it was well worth reading.

Barry Cohen, the main character in Lake Success, is an incredibly deluded individual. When Barry's life is hit by both financial humiliation and a catastrophic family row he decides to light out for the territories. Barry sees his journey across the United States by smelly Greyhound bus as a picaresque, where he is the wise and devil-may-care hero.
Instead, this is the American Dream gone toxic. Trump, a cosmic joke, is running for office in the background. Populism is on the rise. Barry, whose best idea for years has been a set of billionaire-themed trading cards, is on a mission to rekindle a lost romance. Whether she likes it or not.
His most prized possessions are a collection of stupidly expensive watches. His most prized belief is that poor people would not know what to do with money. In his own mind, Barry is an American titan and a great romantic. His wife, Seema, doesn't care if she never sees him again.
This is a very funny and also heartbreaking book about the difference between how people think they are, and how they are really. Barry is a man who only thinks about others in relation to him, and what they can do for him. I think in Barry's case it is a genetic inheritance as well as an environmental one, which is why he runs away from his young son.

Barry is hit by both a personal crisis and a professional one so he goes on the run from his life. This novel takes us on a road trip and delves into issues of politics, relationships, parenthood.