Welcome to Lake Success
Welcome to Lake Success (original title: Lake Success ) is a novel by the American writer Gary Shteyngart from 2018. The German translation by Ingo Herzke was published in 2019. The main character of the novel is a hedge fund manager who, after professional and personal setbacks, takes the greyhound bus travels across the United States and meets very different compatriots. The action takes place in the year of the 2016 presidential election . The novel was therefore also understood as an inventory of America when Donald Trump took office . The title refers to the town of Lake Success on Long Island , the name of which symbolized the American dream of advancement and success for the young protagonist .
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In his mid-40s, Barry Cohen, founder of the multi-billion dollar hedge fund This Side of Capital - named after F. Scott Fitzgerald's This Side of Paradise - experienced several setbacks in his previously meteoric success story, which turned him from the son of a pool cleaner to a multimillionaire. A morally and financially dubious stake in the pharmaceutical company Valupro has thrown the fund into trouble, which Cohen tried to save with insider trading . In addition to the withdrawal of investors, the fund manager is now threatened with prosecution. However, Barry puts even more strain on his private life: his son Shiva, who rejects his father as well as the entire frightening outside world, was diagnosed with autism . As a result, he fell out with his Indian wife Sheema. On the spur of the moment, he packs his greatest treasure, his collection of valuable watches, into a rolling suitcase and goes to the next Greyhound Lines stop to repeat a bus trip with which he had visited his college friend Layla in Richmond , Virginia twenty years earlier .
On the drive, Barry meets very different inhabitants of the USA: a one-eyed Mexican who sleeps on his shoulder in the bus, the drug dealer Javon in Baltimore , who gives him a scoop of crack after initial aggression , his laid-off employee Jeff Park, who is now happy in Atlanta The young Brooklyn hotel worker in Jackson , Mississippi , whose professional mentor he would like to be before he just sleeps with her, lives and only does very conservative financial transactions . After meeting only Layla's parents, a liberal couple of professors, in Richmond, he finally found his college love again in El Paso , Texas , where she ran a Holocaust seminar at the local university and was encouraged by students with racist hate speech on social media - Platforms is tracked. In Barry, the old feelings break up again, even if Layla remains reserved. With their son Jonah, a shy boy with a weakness for maps, he succeeds for the first time in a fatherly relationship. But on a trip across the Mexican border to Juarez , the unprocessed resentments between Barry and Layla break out again.
Barry returns to his family. He thinks the ride taught him to be a father. But Sheema rejects him. In the meantime, she has had an affair with the Guatemalan writer Luis, who does not make a living by selling books, but by being invited to academic circles. She later married an Indian lecturer named Zameer and found the understanding in him that she had always missed from Barry. Sheema has leaked incriminating material about his insider trading to prosecutors in the hope that her husband will finally get the sentence he deserves. But it comes as she predicted: In 21st century America, people like Barry are not seriously held accountable. He gets away with a fine - symbolic for a multimillionaire. Soon he founded the next funds named after Fitzgerald, convinced the investors with his friendliness and his stories in order to run down their capital in the end, not without first having siphoned off enough for his own pocket.
In private, Barry remains alone, living with his watch collection and unfulfilled dreams of showing them to the lost foster son Jonah. Then he is surprised by an invitation to his son Shiva's bar mitzvah . It turns out that he has taken an unexpectedly positive development, is deeply connected to his little sister, communicates via language programs and is even planning to study. And it turns out that he has not forgotten his father, whom he could never show his love, and coined the term “bird father” for him, because Barry kept flying away. As a bar mitzvah gift, Barry repairs his son's Tri-Compax watch that got stuck on the Greyhound trip. After he has succeeded in creating something with his own hands, the Vogel father looks down at New York with satisfaction and flies away.
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- Gary Shteyngart: Lake Success. Random House, New York 2018, ISBN 978-0-8129-9741-5 .
- Gary Shteyngart: Welcome to Lake Success. From the English by Ingo Herzke . Penguin, Munich 2019, ISBN 978-3-328-60069-5 .
- Gary Shteyngart: Welcome to Lake Success. Reading by Shenja Lacher . The Hörverlag, Munich 2019, ISBN 978-3-8445-3235-7 .