If it’s not already obvious from the title, this book is a comedy, a satire, a fun-poking tongue-in-cheek romp through Eastern Europe and the Middle East with an over-weight, melacholic, bumbling narrator: Misha Vainberg. Misha is a Russian Jew, educated in America, son of a mobster/oligarch/millionaire. Armed with a frightening amount of prescription medication and his trusted manservent, Misha wants desperately to return to America, though the INS refuses him entry thanks to his father’s evil deeds.So what does Misha do? Travel to Absurdistan to buy a Belgian passport, yearning for New York’s laundromats, restaurants and rap music — oh, and his Latina lover in the Bronx.

Now the action of this Absurdistan portion of the book is great. Very funny, with interesting satire of oil politics, anti-Americanism, budding capitalism, cultural divides, etc. But on the whole, this little book dragged for me. It took Misha forever to get to Absurdistan, almost half of the darn book in order to get to the title location! And then the end jolted me off the train haphazardly. It seemed like the ending was supposed to be portentous and enlightening, but, hmmm, wasn’t. Did I miss something? There was this whole allusion to September 11 that whizzed by my eyes, trying to mean something, point me toward something, but, hmmm, nope. No meaning materialized.

It’s an ambitious book, one I found out about thanks to an article in Modern Drunkard magazine interviewing the author. Shteyngart attempts to create a Russian Ignatius Reilly, bumbling through a strange, misunderstood but startlingly recognizable world and trying to make sense of it, make it better and being very funny in the process. But Misha is no Ignatius. Though I don’t regret reading it, I must say that parts of the book felt like the author was just trying far to hard to be pertinantly comedic, funny in a socially and politically conscious way. He wants to be Jon Stewart with fiction, but he winds up being that amateur comedian whose material is good but timing is off, where the audience claps lightly instead of actually laughing.

Hey, comedy ain’t easy.

Rating: 3 out of 5 stars – Vacation reading