Dear Great Book Guru,
Last weekend I was at a delightful dinner with friends (most delicious
butternut squash soup ever!) where someone mentioned a new book about Lake
Success -a neighborhood bordering Queens and Nassau- a place many of us knew.
Are you familiar with this novel?
Dining with Delight
Dear Dining with Delight, LAKE SUCCESS by Gary Shteyngart is
the story of one man’s search for the perfect life. Barry Cohen is a forty-five
year-old Princeton grad who manages a billion dollar hedge fund and lives a
life of incredible wealth and good fortune with $20, 000 glasses of whiskey and
an extensive collection of million dollar watches. When we first meet Barry in
2016, his fortunes have just taken a hit - his perfect wife despises him, his
perfect child has been diagnosed as severely autistic, his perfect hedge fund is
collapsing, and Barry himself is being pursued by the FBI for insider trading. His
solution is to board a Greyhound bus and travel cross country in search of a
long-lost college girlfriend who will make his life perfect again. Barry is a
supremely narcissistic character that both horrifies and fascinates us. This
Master of the Universe offers us a glimpse into a world in which most of us are
outsiders looking on from the shores of a mythical Lake Success. Recommended!