To begin with, a book that falls under the latter category. An hilariously wonderful story that manages to walk the fine line bordering clever and 'too clever for it's own good' without a single misstep.
A warning for this book in particular- my underlining does not do a single bit of justice to the witty candor of the actual thing.
He knows that people marked for greater things are often the least happy of all.
P. 96
He would have reached, all by himself, the final destination of every immigrant’s journey: a better home in which to be unhappy.
P. 97
During adolescence he dreamed of acceptance. In his brief days at college he dreamed of love. After college, he dreamed of a rather improbable dialectic of both love and acceptance. And now, with love and acceptance finally in the bag, he dreamed of money. What fresh tortures would await him next?
P. 112
“Death!” Vladimir’s Fear-Money gland was shouting. “Death is the opposite of money.”
P. 115
Few knew what to make of him; Vladimir accepted this. And what did Vladimir make of them? Well, to start with, they were a fairly homogenous group--white middle Americans with a fashinable grudge, that was the lowest common denominator. Native-born folks who never had to struggle with the dilemmas of an alpha peasant or a beta immigrant because five generations down the road every affluent young American was entitled to the luxury of being second-rate. And here in fairyland Prava, bonded by the glue of mediocrity, they stuck together as if they had all been born in the same Fairfax County pod, had all suckled the same baby-boomer shewolf like so many Romuluses and Remuses. The rules were only different for obvious outsiders like Vladimir who had to perform some grand gesture--conduct the Bolshoi, write a novel, launch a pyramid scheme--to gain a modicum of acceptance.
P. 214
The Joy was a vegetarian restaurant but beneath it lay a meat market of a disco where perennially hard-up regulars lured unsuspecting backpackers, many still sporting their Phi Zeta Mu T-shirts, into nights of forgetfulness and mornings of waking up on a futon in the nether reaches of Prava’s suburbs, trying to connect with an authority figure back in the States on an antiquated telephone that could barely reach out across the Tavlata. On Sundays they had readings.
P. 243
What fresh pathology was this?
P. 272
"Some even report having a renewed sense of self. Of course, that’s mainly the prose writers. They’ll say anything."
P. 287
The question was whether or not he was a good person.
“I have to preface this by saying I’m drunk,” he said.
“I’m drunk too. Just tell the truth.”
P. 290
This was a wrecked person. How else could some one be so clever and so stumped?
P. 303
“Russians are not keen on psychiatry,” Vladimir explained. “Life is sad for us and so we must bear it.”
P. 309
If there was something wrong with Morgan, what hope was there for a Soviet Jew-child like Vladimir Girshkin? She might as well have been saying that Tolstoy was wrong, that all happy families were not alike.
P. 311
There was a moment of relative calm as she made her way out of the auto, a moment Vladimir used to note that Morgan--despite all her absurd talk of panic attacks and lashing out--was really just a quiet, steady woman in cheap dress shoes.
P. 316
“It is possible to love two women,” Vladimir declared in answer to Plank’s question. “Especially when you only sleep with one of them.”
P. 325
A knowledgeable Russian lazing around in the grass, sniffing clover and munching boysenberries, expects that at any minute the forces of history will drop by and discreetly kick him in the ass.
A knowledgeable Jew in a similar position expects history to spare any pretense and kick him directly in the face.
A Russian Jew (knowledgeable or not), however, expects both history and a Russian to kick him in the ass, the face, and every other place where a kick can be reasonably lodged. Vladimir understood this. His take on the matter was: Victim, stop lazing about in the grass.
P. 347
He ran, absentmindedly wiping the blood off his nose onto the already bloodied hand bandage. He slapped his passport on the desk of the half-awake security team guarding the departure gate. At that formal moment, his briefcase, stuffed with about fifty thousand dollars and a gun, came to mind. “Oh, pardon me,” said the ever-vigilant Vladimir. He hobbled over to the nearest trash can, sheepishly took out the gun, and, with a shrug of the shoulders, deposited that useless item within. “Don’t even ask about the gun," he said to the nice, walrus-mustached gentlemen in dark green. “What a long day!”
“American?” said the security commandant.
P. 445
But, somehow, this city has persevered against the unkind seasons and the storms that gather speed over Lake Erie. Somehow, Cleveland has survived, with her gray banner unfurled--the banner of Archangelsk and Detroit, of Kharkov and Liverpool--the banner of men and women who would settle the most ignominious parts of the earth, and there, with the hubris born neither of faith nor ideology but biology and longing, bring into the world their whimpering replacements.
P. 451
SPOILER ALERT (as they say). The following is a direct transcription of the very last paragraph of the book.
And what of this child?
Will he live the way his father once did: foolishly, imperially, ecstatically?...
No, thinks Vladimir. For he can see the child now. A boy. Growing up adrift in a private world of electronic goblins and quiet sexual urges. Properly insulated from the elements by stucco and storm windows. Serious and a bit dull, but beset by no illness, free of the fear and madness of Vladimir’s Eastern lands. In cahoots with his mother. A partial stranger to his father.
An American in America. That’s Vladimir Girshikin’s son.
