Rating: 
Summary: Different, but not hilarious
Review: Shtenyngart follows a young man from New York to "Prava," an invented city in Eastern Europe. Our hero is not particularly moral, and gets into many interesting adventures as a result. Masquerading as a highschooler leads him to flee the country and begin a new life of pyramid schemes among a kind of Russian mafia. The book is wonderful because it is different and wholly original. It is a story that has not been told before, and I enjoyed it as such.
However, the book advertises itself to be hilarious, and I rarely found myself laughing and only occasionally smiling. I was amused, but quietly. For me, the book was funny at times but hardly the height of comedy.
Rating: 
Summary: Utterly original and infused with comic lunacy
Review: Gary Shteyngart has written a great first novel, filled with idiosyncratic characters and their over-the-top experiences. With the Russian Debutante's Handbook, he has established himself as a master of social critique and comic lunacy. One of the beauties of this novel is how it skillfully juxtaposes two worlds. The first half of the novel explores the peculiarities of New York City through the eyes of Vladimir Gershkin, an immigrant Russian Jew working as an assimilation facilitator at an immigrant absorption clinic. The second half of the novel follows our hero to the loosely-fictitious eastern European city of Prava, bubbling with the onset of capitalism and infused with comic relief by the budding expat community. Shteyngart, himself a Russian immigrant, ideally trained by his own experience and uniquely equipped with a gift for observation and expression, exposes the hilarious quirks of each world and pokes sharply yet playfully at their shortcomings. Much has been said about Shteyngart's gift for language. It is not an exaggeration to say that one could literally open this book to any page and find an utterly original turn of phrase, or a combination of words that beg you to stop and ponder. This is a truly fresh voice in the literary world.
Rating: 
Summary: Hilarious!
Review: Gary Shteyngart's first novel, The Russian Debutante's Handbook, is a provocative yet hysterical story about a young Russian American nobody who gets caught up in the mob scene of "Prava", a Russian sort of Paris-wanna-be where the Russian gangsters and pseudo-intellectual students from Ohio rub elbows (if you can imagine such a place). His characters and their subsequent situations were right out of a Henry Miller novel, yet there is a youthful tenderness that emerges, ala Brighton Beach Memoirs. Reading it was a nice change of pace. I will keep my eyes open for the next one. A promising young writer.
Rating:
Summary: Many in-jokes, picaresque Mafia Portnoy's Complaint...
Review: I read this for the section dealing with expatriates in Prague-- here called "Prava." If you spent any time there in the nineties, you'll see a lot of in-jokes and satire that may cause you to chuckle-- the Prague Post here named Prava-dence, Cafe Radost called Joy, and so on.
But in truth that section is not what the book is "about" (nor is there a lot of detail about it)-- it's a comic/dark fantasy coming-of-age that takes on America, Russia, Central Europe-- none of it terribly deeply. It's sort of a Russian Philip Roth-- Girshkin's ruminations on women and sex take up a lot of the book and they are remarkably unerotic; sex seems to be all animal smells and bodily fulids.
The story of an American/Russian boy (Like the author, the protagonist moved to America as a child) who for complicated reasons ends up in Central Europe as an entrepreneurial mafioso is episodic, wordy, intermittently funny but ultimately oddly uninvolving.
This got ecstatic reviews and awards when it came out, and there's no doubt that Shteyngart writes well, but the comparisons to Waugh are misplaced. Waugh was concise-- Shteyngart goes on, and on, and on. This book would be a lot more fun if it were a solid 150 pages shorter.
As it is, had I not been interested in the Prague satire, I think i'd have stopped reading-- this kind of blood-and-semen boy-into-man comedy is not something I usually enjoy.
Like Philip Roth, whose Portnoy's Complaint is so well written but kind of gross, I will keep an eye on Shteyngart and read him again. If you like that kind of story, you'll like this too.
Rating:
Summary: Shteyngart is a word smith indeed
Review: Although Shteyngart's novel weaves an incredibly entertaining story, bordering on the insane, it is his writing that deserves 5 stars. Both his vocabulary and his sentences are rich and expressive--as a reader I find myself re-reading passages just to let his style sink in.
This book is a must read for anyone who enjoys creative writing on all levels, not just on plot and character alone.
Rating:
Summary: Cheap laughs made up for by real hilarity
Review: "I like this novel because..." This is a real "twentysomething" novel, a bit of a guilty pleasure and the sort of book I pretentiously thought I should have stopped reading by now (I'll be ... in January). I thought the first part, still taking place in Manhattan, was wonderfully entertaining, but that it slightly (but only slightly) lets down afterwards. Shteyngart overdoes the satire a bit in the main section of the book, set in Prava: it would seem he relishes the part of the clever-clever, more-worldly-than-the-other-expats (who are trying much harder) narrator a little too much. The "marshmallow target" for satire that is the eager young English-speaking expat community has been pointed out here before. There's a superiority to his drawn-out ridicule that goes beyond just the benefits of having an "outsider's eye". I think his humor works best in his descriptions of Rybakov, the Russian sailor (loved the phoney, staged naturalization ceremony). The dialogues between Vladimir and Rybakov are some of the funniest in the book. Renders the collected work of Arnon Grunberg (Dutch-Jewish novelist of "Blue Mondays" and "Silent Extras") almost redundant.
Rating:
Summary: Easterner in Western Clothing
Review: We in the West have a tendency to be a little smug about our political system and our way of life. We are free and rightfully proud of it, but unfortunately we sometimes seem to take it for granted. The vast number of people who lived under the communist boot in the East for so many decades never had that luxury. As we know, they have recently been liberated. No longer is there a Soviet Empire and no longer does it control their lives. It is over. Or at least it would seem to be, as far as we in the West are concerned. But for those who lived under this system, for those who chafed under it and suffered under it, the transition has been a little bit more complex. This wonderful and hilarious novel is a fine illustration of the mindset of the Soviet expatriate, at loose and at liberty in America.
His name is Vladimir Girshkin. Born to Jewish parents in Leningrad, he and his family are able to flee to New York during the Brezhnevian thaw of 1979. Now it is 1993 and the 25 year old Vladimir is at loose ends. Although educated and intelligent, he can't quite figure out how to be successful, can't quite figure out who his friends are, can't quite figure out much of anything. Smallish, bespectacled, bearded, Russian, and Jewish, he is at sea in loud, colorful, cosmopolitan New York. Finally, he is spurred to action after falling in love with a beautiful American and discovering he can't afford the lifestyle to which she is accustomed. It never occurs to this obtuse Western female that he can't. It never occurs to him how to achieve success in what we would consider the normal fashion: you know, education, hard work, promotion, etc. Instead, he develops schemes. Clever little things that aren't necessarily, shall we say, above-board. They end, quite predictably, in disaster.
He extricates himself from this mess by leaving the U. S., in a bitter and heartfelt scene, after concocting yet another scheme. He ends up in the employ of a Russian mobster in Prague, (called Prava here, for some reason). Now, back in his perceived element, he gleefully and unabashedly achieves success by fleecing the youthful and gullible American expatriates living there. These New York and Prava adventures are the plot, pretty much, and it must be said that it is an absolute comic romp, populated with bizarre, unusual characters: Russian sailors, Israeli taxi-drivers, Hungarian film-makers, Catalonian drug-lords, Finnish rappers, and of course scores of oblivious, well-fed Americans.
The writing is also spectacular, loaded with clever word play, striking imagery, and scads of literary allusions. The underlying foundation is the narrator's dry, deadpan wit, which is always amusing and often wildly hilarious. Here is our hero, in attendance at a fake naturalization ceremony, peopled by American actors pretending to speak broken English and wearing berets, sombreros, and baskets of fruit on their heads. "This part of the Stanislavsky Method I don't quite recognize," says Vladimir.
Here is his vulgar Russian mob boss in Prava, nicknamed the Groundhog, describing his past to both Vladimir and Vladimir's shocked girlfriend, Morgan. "'Many people are doing to him bad thing and so Groundhog is doing to them also very bad thing and, eh, time goes tick, tick, tick on the clock, and after two revolvement of clock needle . . . it is Groundhog who is alive and it is enemies of him who are . . . eh . . . dead.'
'Wait,' said Morgan. 'Do you mean . . .'
'Metaphorically speaking, they're dead,' Vladimir interjected, somewhat half-heartedly." He doesn't quite wish to let his girlfriend know the whole, eh, truth.
But clever and amusing as all of this is, what is truly fascinating is the picture it gives us of the Eastern-bloc mind, conditioned under Soviet communism, with its, "pebble-sized Judeo-Christian conscience." Vladimir sees no problem with bamboozling Westerners because, although he often likes them, he views them with disdain. They are privileged; he is not. They have always been free; he has not. They are living in their home country; he is not. They have not suffered his disadvantages, which makes them susceptible; fair game. This view is of course exacerbated by the socialist system under which he was brought up, this amoral, everyone-for-himself, dog-eat-dog society. "If you grew up under that system," says he, "that precious gray planet of our fathers and forefathers, you're marked for life. There's no way out . . . Go ahead, make all the money you want, hatch those American babies, but thirty years later you'll look back at your youth and wonder: What happened? How could people have lived like that? How could they have taken advantage of the weakest among them? How could they have spoken to each other with such viciousness and spite, much as I am speaking to you right now? And what's that strange coal-like crust on my skin that clogs the shower drain every morning? Was I part of an experiment? Do I have a Soviet turbine instead of a heart?" And more.
What a rich piece of work this is, engaging, blackly sarcastic, clever and moving. At its center is the intelligent yet cynical Vladimir--who can indeed be kind--and whose story exemplifies both the colossal human disaster that was the Soviet Union; and the shallow, decadent West. A brilliant, comic masterpiece.
Rating:
Summary: A treat
Review: I was recommended this book by a friend of mine. She had already read it, and knowing about my love of Russia and Eastern Europe, figured that it would be up my alley. As I started the book, I wasn't so sure, but even if the story does become a bit fantastical, it does make for a good read. In Vladimir, Shteyngart does capture something very universal in his sense of not belonging. Of course, Vladimir assumes that most of this has to do with him being a Russian-Jew immigrant to America, and lacking the kind of hard drive and ambition that his mother has that got the family to America in the first place. When Vladimir gets in too deep with both the finer things and the more base things in American life, he makes it to "Prava" (a slightly fictionalised Prague) of the early 1990's, ostensibly to rip off young American expats whose families have enough money to support the kind of bohemian culture these young people are trying to create there. However, even though a good number of the Americans there fully fit into Vladimir's picture that he's carefully constructed over the years, it seems that every once in awhile, there are people whom one meets that will not fit at all into that perception. And maybe, just maybe there's a chance for Vladimir to find a place in "American" life. For me, being able to read a book in English with the "outside looking in" kind of perspective on the craziness of a lot of Americans, without being mean, was quite fun. Also, it was fun to read a story that really does include the world past the borders of the US.
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