Lake Success (Shteyngart) - Book Reviews

Book Reviews
Shteyngart, perhaps more than any American writer of his generation…is a natural. He is light, stinging, insolent and melancholy, to borrow the words the critic Kenneth Tynan kept on his writing desk to remind himself how to sound. The wit and the immigrant's sense of heartbreak…just seem to pour from him. The idea of riding along behind Shteyngart as he glides across America in the early age of Trump is a propitious one. He doesn't disappoint.
Dwight Garner - New York Times


[P]ungent…frisky and so intent on probing the dissonances …that grip this strange land getting stranger.… In Lake Success, Gary Shteyngart holds his adopted country up to the light, turns it, squints, turns it some more, and finds himself grimacing and laughing in almost equal measure.
Jonathan Miles - New York Times Book Review


[F]unny yet resoundingly mournful.…Shteyngart does slapstick as well as ever, but he stakes out new terrain in the expert way he develops his characters’ pathos…. There are some rough edges …but this is nevertheless a stylish, big-hearted novel.
Publishers Weekly


(Starred review) Shteyngart’s latest is a hilarious, melancholic, and rapier-sharp tale for our times.
Library Journal


(Starred review) For all his caustic critique and propulsive plotting, Shteyngart is a writer of empathic imagination, ultimately steering this bristling, provocative, sharply comedic, yet richly compassionate novel toward enlightenment and redemption. —Donna Seaman
Booklist


(Starred review) As good as anything we’ve seen from this author: smart, relevant, fundamentally warm-hearted, hilarious of course, and it has a great ending.
Kirkus Reviews