“Little Failure,” Big Ideas
Oct. 17, 2014
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Gary Shteyngart talks to students in The Whitman Auditorium for a First Year Common Reading event.
Gary Shteyngart is nothing if not self-deprecating. Earlier this month, after the esteemed author strolled to his seat on a landing at The Whitman Auditorium, he promptly announced to the students gathered for a reading of his best-seller, Little Failure: A Memoir (Random House, 2014), that "the best thing about the book is the cover."
After reading the tome, named after the sobriquet Shteyngart's own mother lovingly gave to him, the crowd was expecting this brand of humor. The freshmen gathered for the First College Year Common Reading event laughed heartily.
First semester students were required to read his memoir as part of the common reading program, in which students write their own memoirs or other critical responses to the work, participate in a panel discussion by faculty members, and take part in other shared intellectual experiences.
Shteyngart, sporting a five o-clock shadow, blue jeans, and a dark plaid shirt, kept the jokes coming, displaying the timing of a comedian with lines like: "I was sentenced to eight years of Hebrew School for a crime I didn't commit."
Beneath all of the humor was a probing discussion that delved into many issues the book addressed, and the students could clearly relate to, like coming of age as a first-generation immigrant in America and grappling with identity.
In the book, the Russian-born writer talks about attending Hebrew school in Queens in the 1980s and being mocked as a "Red Gerbil" because he came from the "evil empire," something that prompted him to try to pass off his accent as German.
"You know things are bad when you have to convince Jewish kids you’re German," he told the students, looking up from a rumpled collation of pages he was reading from.
Shteyngart is the author of three highly-praised novels, bursting on the writing scene more than a decade ago with his debut, The Russian Debutante’s Handbook (Riverhead 2002), which won the Stephen Crane Award for First Fiction and the National Jewish Book Award for Fiction. He followed with Absurdistan (Random House 2006), and Super Sad True Love Story (Random House 2010), both also well-received novels that earned him book of the year nods from multiple prominent publications and the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for comic literature. He has also written for The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Slate, Esquire, and GQ. The Manhattanite currently teaches writing at Columbia University.
Shteyngart was asked if, considering all of his literary success, his parents still considered him a "little failure" for not going into law, medicine, "or that strange new category known only as computer," as he writes in the book.
"Well they call me Big Failure now," he told the students. "When the books came out and did fairly well, my mom said, 'You have a best-selling book. Maybe now you can get into Harvard Law School.'"
