Vladimir Girshkin, a likeable Russian immigrant, searches for love, a decent job, and a credible self-identity in Gary Shteyngart's debut novel, The Russian Debutante's Handbook. With a doctor-father of questionable ethics and a manic, banker mother, Vladimir avoids his suburban parents and their desire that he pursue the almighty dollar as proof of success. Vladimir gets by as an immigration clerk, eking out a living in a cruddy New York City apartment while accumulating an array of quirky acquaintances, from a wealthy but disheveled old man (who claims his electric fan speaks to him) desperate for citizenship to Challa, a portly S/M queen. As a love interest, Challa is replaced by Francesca, a graduate student whose friends welcome Vladimir for the status he brings their bohemian clique, and whose parents encourage them to shack up (she lives at home) as visible proof she can maintain a steady relationship.

The Russian Debutante's Handbook is a quirky amalgam of dead-on American absurdities, albeit with somewhat stereotypical characters. While Vladimir flounders with how to improve his state, he becomes an expatriate in a trendy European city, becomes somewhat of a mobster himself, and generally has a good time. While many of the central characters remain elusively thin, Vladimir is a delight, and Shteyngart's wit is merciless: Russian women wear "wedding cakes of blond hair" and graduate students lounge in a bar "as if waiting for funding to appear." Reminiscent of Gogol and other Russian satirists, The Russian Debutante's Handbook is a genuine, sublime social commentary. --Michael Ferch

From Publishers Weekly
Orwell once remarked that the narrator of Tropic of Cancer was so far from endeavoring to influence the future, he simply lies down and lets things happen to him. Shteyngart, whose sensibility is allied with Miller's, takes a passive character, Vladimir Girshkin, and makes him briefly proactivewith disastrous resultsin his smart debut novel. Vladimir is the son of immigrants who came to the U.S. via a Carter administration swap (American wheat for Russian Jews); his father, a doctor prone to dreams of suicide and complicated medical schemes, and his mother, an entrepreneur who makes fun of her son's gait, give him the inestimable gift of alienation. In true slacker fashion, Vladimir, at 25, is wasting his expensive education clerking at the Emma Lazarus Immigration Absorption Society. A client, Rybakov, bribes Vladimir to get him American citizenship, confiding that his son, the Groundhog, is a leading businessman (in prostitutes and drugs) in Pravathe Paris of the nineties in the fictional Republika Stolovaya. Vladimir fakes a citizenship ceremony for Rybakov in order to curry favor with the Groundhog. Then, because he has unwisely repelled the sexual advances of crime boss Jordi while trying to make some illicit bucks to keep his girlfriend, Francesca, in squid and sake dinners in Manhattan, Vladimir leaves abruptly for Prava. Once there, and backed by the Groundhog, Vladimir embarks on a scheme to fleece the American students who have flocked to Prava's legendary scene. Although the satire on the expatriate American community is a little too easy, Shteyngart's Vladimir remains an impressive piece of work, an amoral buffoon who energizes this remarkably mature work. Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Failurchka Mother's Little Failure is what Vladimir Girshkin's overweening Russian immigrant mother calls her 25-year-old son at the beginning of this picaresque, episodic, and somewhat sprawling first novel. Vladimir is stuck in a dead-end job and saddled with girlfriend Challah, "queen of everything musky and mammal-like." Then through a series of chance encounters, he is catapulted to the eastern European city of "Prava" to find himself welcomed into the fold of powerful Mafiosi. Shteyngart introduces a large cast of exotic characters, mainly twentysomethings meandering from adventure to adventure. Yet this distinctive new voice, which is both richly ironic and often side-splittingly funny, still seems to be seeking the right register. The relentless humor and satire obscure the development of character that is necessary to make readers believe the cast is real and not just being staged. Moreover, one wonders why the author felt the need to (thinly) disguise Prague (Prava) with its river Tavlata (Vltava) and the 1969 (1968) Soviet invasion. Thus, his highly imaginative but at times maddening panorama comes to resemble a dazzling Potemkin village. Though this is not an experimental novel, it is difficult to escape the conclusion that the author is still experimenting with a very large talent he's not entirely sure what to do with. But having gotten a taste, we will eagerly await his next offering, in which less just might be more. Recommended for all literary collections and larger public libraries. Edward Cone, New YorkCopyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
In 1993, communism is just a memory to 25-year-old Vladimir Girshkin, who immigrated to America from Russia as a boy and now holds down a bureaucratic job in a nonprofit immigrant assistance organization. Girshkin, the protagonist of this entertaining, satirical first novel, is caught in his own surreal landscape, which includes his family, his dominatrix girlfriend, and his artsy Tribeca friends. But none of them tops the Fan Man, an elderly, self-professed psychotic Russian whose closest friends are his portable fans and whose sole desire is to become a U.S. citizen. Through the Fan Man, Girshkin is hurtled into an even more surreal scene, the expatriate community of Prava in the Republic of Stolovaya--a fictional Prague--which, as the Paris of the 1990s, attracts a wealthy arts crowd from Europe and North America. It is also prime territory for Russian gangsters, particularly the Fan Man's son, who is the boss of the Russian mob in Prava. Girshkin encounters more misadventures as he finds himself firmly repatriated in both worlds. Frank Caso
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Harper's Bazaar
Brilliant.

Time
A satisfying skewering all-round.

Entertainment Weekly
A wholly original delight.

The New York Times
Uproarious and highly entertaining...

Los Angeles Times
Energetic, sparkling...impressive.

New York Observer
Mr. Shteyngart has introduced himself as one of the most talented and entertaining writers of his generation.

Esquire
Rowdy, ribald, funny...This superb debut [is] the real thing.

Wall Street Journal
Not to be missed.

The New York Times
[An] uproarious and highly entertaining story...

Elle
The rampaging narrative is festooned on every page with glitering one-liners, improbably apt similes and other miniature pleasures.

Book Description
This is 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).

About the Author
Gary Shteyngart was born in Leningrad and moved to the States with his family when he was seven. He currently teaches fiction writing at Hunter College.

FROM OUR EDITORS

The Barnes & Noble Review from Discover Great New Writers
Gary Shteyngart's debut takes readers through the end of an era of exuberance and uncertainty, seen through the eyes of one of the most engaging protagonists in recent fiction. Vladimir Girshkin, the child of immigrant Soviet Jews, is prepared to spend the rest of his life at the bottom of the American socioeconomic heap. But when he becomes the recipient of the attentions of an uncomfortably rich girl, this perennial loser is sparked into a sudden, potentially disastrous quest for fame, fortune, and a new identity.

Shteyngart relentlessly trains his gimlet eye on the slackers, posers, and perennial adolescents of modern-day New York and the fictional eastern European city of Prava, the laid-back flip side of dot-com fever. But The Russian Debutante's Handbook doesn't actually deliver on the title's promise to lay out the rules for Vladimir to follow; watching our bumbling buffoon of a hero figure out that there seem to be no rules at all is the considerable pleasure this enchanting novel provides. (Summer 2002 Selection)

FROM THE PUBLISHER

"Vladimir Girshkin - twenty-five-year-old Russian immigrant, "Little Failure" according to his high-achieving mother, unhappy lover to fat dungeon mistress Challah (his "little Challah bread"), and lowly clerk at the bureaucratic Emma Lazarus Immigrant Absorption Society - is about to have his first break. When the unlikely figure of a wealthy but psychotic old Russian war hero appears and introduces Vladimir to his best friend, who just happens to be a small electric fan, Vladimir has little inkling that he is about to embark on an adventure of unrelenting lunacy - one that overturns his assumptions about what it means to be an immigrant in America." The Russian Debutante's Handbook takes us from New York City's Lower East Side to the hip frontier wilderness of Prava - the Eastern European Paris of the '90s - whose grand and glorious beauty is marred only by the shadow of the looming statue of Stalin's foot. There, with the encouragement of the Groundhog, a murderous (but fun-loving) Russian mafioso, Vladimir infiltrates the American ex-pat community with the hope of defrauding his young middle-class compatriots by launching a pyramid scheme that's as stupid as it is brilliant. Things go swimmingly at first, but nothing is quite as it seems in Prava, and Vladimir learns that in order to reinvent himself, he must first discover who he really is.

FROM THE CRITICS

Time Out New York

This picaresque debut...transcends its personal genesis to become an all-around great American story.

Vanity Fair

... a terrifically charming tale of a young Russian immigrant's capitalist and carnal aspirations.

Harper's Bazaar

A brilliant, funny debut describing the vicissitudes of immigration today, as experienced by the hero, a young Russian-American.

O Magazine

... [a] tender and hilarious éemigré's romance.

New York Times