Homage

Last week I read The Russian Debutante's Handbook, as close to a modern-day Bellow picaresque as one can get. Unlike many first novels published by sub-thirty somethings, this one delivers. (If another person claims, "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius is, like, the best book I've ever read," I am going to resort to violence.) Even in the final pages, unlike White Teeth, an otherwise engrossing novel that falls apart. (Although I hope Shteyngart's second novel fulfills his promise more than Autograph Man.)

I wax paranthetical.

A thought of Augie March a lot while Vladimir Griskin bounced around New York and Europe -- both tossed about by gangster characters and their love/need of women. The opening of Bellow's great American novel, "I am an American, Chicago-born," congeals with the penultimate sentence of Shteyngart's book, "An American in America." The two writers are both inside and outside the American experience, Bellow as a Jew, Shteyngart as a Russian-Jewish immigrant.