Lake Success is the story of a clueless hedge fund multi-millionaire who self-destructs his family and hits the road on a Greyhound bus to see America and try to recover his college days.
Lake Success flies through a lot of topics: Wealth, status, parenthood, lost relationships, autism, America, etc.
It tracks the mid-life crisis of Barry Cohen, a “struggling” hedge fund manager with a crumbling marriage and a severely autistic three-year-old son.
“I think it’s ultimately a book about time, and how it only moves in one direction, forward. Once the main characters accept the forward motion of their lives, they are truly able to live,” a reviewer commented in goodreads.com.
The author, Gary Shteyngart, is an American writer born in Leningrad. Much of his work is satirical and relies on the invention of elaborately fictitious yet somehow familiar places and times.
Shteyngart’s first three novels — The Russian Debutante’s Handbook (2002), Absurdistan (2006) and Super Sad True Love Story (2010) — were fundamentally immigrant stories.
The Russian Debutante’s Handbook received the Stephen Crane Award for First Fiction and the National Jewish Book Award.
Lake Success takes place over the final months of the 2016 campaign, and in the early months of Donald Trump’s presidency.
