The Russian Debutante's Handbook

The Russian Debutante's Handbook

NAMED ONE OF THE ATLANTIC 'S GREAT AMERICAN NOVELS OF THE PAST 100 YEARS A visionary novel from the New York Times bestselling author of Super Sad True Love Story and Little Failure . The Russian Debutante's Handbook introduces Vladimir Girshkin, one of the most original and unlikely heroes of recent times. The twenty-five-year-old unhappy lover to a fat dungeon mistress, affectionately nicknamed "Little Failure" by his high-achieving mother, Vladimir toils his days away as a lowly clerk at the bureaucratic Emma Lazarus Immigrant Absorption Society. When a wealthy but psychotic old Russian war hero appears, Vladimir embarks on an adventure of unrelenting lunacy that takes us from New York's Lower East Side to the hip frontier wilderness of Prava--the Eastern European Paris of the nineties. With the help of a murderous but fun-loving Russian mafioso, Vladimir infiltrates the Prava expat community and launches a scheme as ridiculous as it is brilliant. Bursting with wit, humor, and rare insight, The Russian Debutante's Handbook is both a highly imaginative romp and a serious exploration of what it means to be an immigrant in America. "Rowdy, ribald, funny...this superb debut [is] the real thing."— Esquire "As attuned to the exhilarating possibilities of the language as Martin Amis, as deadpan and funny as the young Evelyn Waugh."—Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times "In Vladimir Girshkin, the wisecracking, lovelorn, desperately self-reinventing protagonist, Shteyngart has given us a literary symbol for this new immigrant age, much as Saul Bellow or Henry Roth did in theirs..."—Chris Lehmann, The Washington Post "A brilliant, funny debut describing the vicissitudes of immigration today, as experienced by the hero, a young Russian-American."— Harper's Bazaar "The rampaging narrative is festooned on every page with glittering one-liners, improbably apt similes, and other miniature pleasures."— Elle "If Henry Miller were Russian, this is a book he might have written."— Time Out New York "[Gary Shteyngart's] sense of the exploded past and volatile present suffuses this gifted first novel..." — O. Magazine Gary Shteyngart is the New York Times bestselling author of the memoir Little Failure (a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist) and the novels Vera, Or Faith , Super Sad True Love Story (winner of the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize), Absurdistan, and The Russian Debutante’s Handbook (winner of the Stephen Crane Award for First Fiction and the National Jewish Book Award for Fiction) . His books regularly appear on best-of lists around the world and have been published in thirty countries. PART I NEW YORK, 1993 1. THE STORY OF VLADIMIR GIRSHKIN THE STORY OF VLADIMIR GIRSHKIN-PART P. T. BARNUM , part V. I. Lenin, the man who would conquer half of Europe (albeit the wrong half)-begins the way so many other things begin. On a Monday morning. In an office. With the first cup of instant coffee gurgling to life in the common lounge. His story begins in New York, on the corner of Broadway and Battery Place, the most disheveled, godforsaken, not-for-profit corner of New York's financial district. On the tenth floor, the Emma Lazarus Immigrant Absorption Society greeted its clients with the familiar yellow water-stained walls and dying hydrangeas of a sad Third World government office. In the reception room, under the gentle but insistent prodding of trained Assimilation Facilitators, Turks and Kurds called a truce, Tutsis queued patiently behind Hutus, Serbs chatted up Croats by the demilitarized water fountain. Meanwhile, in the cluttered back office, junior clerk Vladimir Girshkin-the immigrant's immigrant, the expatriate's expatriate, enduring victim of every practical joke the late twentieth century had to offer and an unlikely hero for our times-was going at it with the morning's first double-cured-spicy-soppressata-and-avocado sandwich. How Vladimir loved the unforgiving hardness of the soppressata and the fatty undertow of the tender avocado! The proliferation of this kind of Janus-faced sandwich, as far as he was concerned, was the best thing about Manhattan in the summer of 1993. VLADIMIR WAS TWENTY-FIVE TODAY. He had lived in Russia for twelve years, and then there were the thirteen years spent here. That was his life-it added up. And now it was falling apart. This would be the worst birthday of his life. Vladimir's best friend Baobab was down in Florida covering his rent, doing unspeakable things with unmentionable people. Mother, roused by the meager achievements of Vladimir's first quarter-century, was officially on the warpath. And, in possibly the worst development yet, 1993 was the Year of the Girlfriend. A downcast, heavyset American girlfriend whose bright orange hair was strewn across his Alphabet City hovel as if a cadre of Angora rabbits had visited. A girlfriend whose sickly-sweet incense and musky perfume coated Vladimir's unwashed skin, perhaps to remind