Before my cats ever read Gary Shteyngart, they wanted to snuggle with him. A bonafide literary celebrity (that ultimate oxymoron) and yet such an adorably hirsute and unassuming man! Then they got their paws on the actual novels, and suddenly those dreams of lazy mammalian spooning became more… complicated. Shteyngart writes so heroically about a certain type of maleness—bungling, self-absorbed, chubby around the waist but a bit starved in terms of morals—that my two girls found frankly shocking. “Is this what they’re like?” they mewled, devouring the picaresque exploits of the men of Absurdistan, The Russian Debutante’s Handbook, and Super Sad True Love Story. “Is this what they think? Is this how they need?” (“Fiction is called fiction for a reason,” I lied, as always desperate to protect them from the real world’s cruel impositions.)

But my girls couldn’t get enough of Shteyngart’s unlucky-in-love bastards. His latest, Lake Success, did not disappoint. Its hero—a hedge fund douchebag, a failed father, a man with more compassion for watches than humans—ditches his own life and takes off on a cross-country Greyhound bus odyssey in pursuit of his own shriveled, absent soul. The reader, desperate to hate this jerk, is forced toward something dangerously close to empathy. “Gary is making us feel emotions that are confusing,” my cats complained, their eyes watery pools of inner conflict. I gave them some ‘nip, stroked their silly little heads, and suggested they unpack those feelings with the man himself. 

—Scott Indrisek

UNI & CHLOE: You’re a teacher—an eager molder of young minds—and you’re also known as someone who loves to blurb. But we imagine that every now and then you’re presented with a dilemma: A writing student who can’t write; a novel that should have been drowned in the lake. How do you go about letting someone down gently without giving them irrational hope concerning their own feeble abilities?

GARY SHTEYNGART: No book deserves to be drowned in a lake. Sometimes political regimes burn books, but that’s kind of a compliment. (Burn my books, please!) I blurb heavily and indiscriminately. Often I’m drunk. And my students are all effing geniuses. Leave my students out of this!

UNI & CHLOE: Okay, but you can’t love every book. How do you decide which ones to purge?

GS: Every book ever written is a cry for help. How can I ignore the cry? What kind of person would I be?

U & C: By necessity, you delight in making shit up—inventing whole countries that kinda-sorta resemble actual places, or birthing characters that are basically just weirdo variants on your own Shteyngartian self. What is...