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The Melancholy Man of Leisure

by Hugh Blanton

If you aren’t familiar with travel writer Gary Shteyngart, you might assume he was overjoyed to be commissioned to write a story on the maiden cruise of the Icon of the Sea, the world’s largest cruise ship. However, there were a litany of reasons that he disliked the assignment, and he in fact ended up titling his story ‘Crying Myself to Sleep on the Biggest Cruise Ship Ever.’ This is part of Shteyngart’s shtick—the bullied, picked upon, oppressed, poor little guy that just can’t catch a break. His first complaint is just the gargantuan gaucheness of it, and if you’ve ever seen photos of the Icon of the Sea, you really can’t disagree with him. It looks nothing like a sleek cruise liner. From some angles it looks like a floating city designed by imbecilic urban planners who wanted something with the color scheme of Skittles, asymmetric and jumbled in one of those power ball air shufflers before being vomited out. Shteyngart says Icon screams for attention, apocryphally calling it the Linda Loman of cruise ships: Attention must be paid! (Linda Loman is a character in the play Death of a Salesman and her line is about her husband who must have attention paid to him, not herself.) Shteyngart claims that one person on the cruise was so cruel they made fun of him for working on the television series Succession (my guess is he was just looking for a behind-the-back way to plug the show).

The long winded introduction to Shteyngart’s The Sensualist: Essays on Pure Pleasure (where the above mentioned cruise ship essay was collected along with seventeen others) goes on for seven pages and illuminates what’s to come: ‘Billionaires have taken over the planet and wish to impose their joyless lives on the rest of us.’ He rants against Mark Zuckerberg and his hoodie. He bemoans the collapse of the country to which he emigrated (the preposition indicates he meant immigrated), placing the blame for the collapse squarely on Donald Trump. (There are no less than ten direct or indirect mentions of Trump throughout The Sensualist.) Shteyngart tells us he is instructing future ‘Sensualists,’ persons who devote their lives to leisure and luxury, but when you find out it requires a huge bank account, or magazine publishers that give you unlimited expense accounts, you realize being a globetrotting man of leisure is well out of reach for most people. In the middle of the intro he suddenly begins referring to himself in the second person and compares his authentic life to the inauthentic life of the wealthy: ‘He has spent time with the billionaires and centimillionaires in New York and knows just how incomplete their lives are. The rich are every bit as boring as the means by which they earn their money.’ (Shteyngart, much like his fellow elite socialist friend Bernie Sanders, earned his wealth through book royalties, a much more acceptable form of riches than the money earned by ‘tech bros.’)

Shteyngart lets us know he’s well ahead of the curve when it comes to cultural trends: ‘I fell in love with capybaras at least two decades before the recent craze.’ If you are unaware of what a capybara is, or that it’s in the center of a cultural craze, it is a large, smelly, flea infested rodent native to South America. (The cover of The Sensualist features a besuited capybara holding a martini glass.) Shteyngart pays a visit to Brazilian ‘capybara influencer’ Luciano Mochinski where Mochinski gives him the grand capybara tour around public parks and housing estates where the rodents congregate. (Public health officials have begged Mochinski, and his social media followers, to stop making contact with the animals whose ticks carry Brazilian spotted fever which is often fatal to humans.) Shteyngart proclaims Curitiba, Brazil as the Mecca for capybara lovers, however the Britannica.com entry for Curitiba makes no mention of it (perhaps they’re simply not as culturally aware as our Sensualist). ‘The capybara was truly earning its bona fides as an animal celebrated by the working class, a symbol of resistance.’ Shteyngart speaks on behalf of the working class here, again like his friend Bernie Sanders, and even likens capybaras to Che Guevara-like revolutionaries because they swim and shit in the private backyard pools of the wealthy.

In addition to taking shots at the wealthy in his essays, Shteyngart also takes the opportunity to sneak in mentions of his traumatic childhood, regardless of the essay’s topic. A reader could even be excused for thinking that the topics are simply cover enabling him to vent about being bullied and unloved. He mentions visiting the capybara exhibit at the Prospect Park Zoo: ‘Of course, I was taken with his ridiculous shape and size, but I was also projecting my past loneliness onto him, the many years I’d spent in the cage of unreciprocated love.’ In a pedantic essay on expensive watches he tells us, ‘During childhood, by best friend was a watch, a Casio H-108 12-Melody Alarm.’ It was his favorite possession ‘until it caught the eye of a Hebrew-school bully.’ His grandmother came to the school the next day and reported the theft to the principal, demanding its return. When he sings karaoke he chooses ‘Suzanne Vega’s child-abuse classic ‘Luka’.’ He often finds himself alone in a hotel room while traveling and he thinks of himself as ‘an alien dust speck that will never know the love of another human being again.’ And after the louts on the cruise ship mocked him for his television script writing, he disembarks in St. Thomas, Virgin Islands only to have a Rastafarian call him a redneck. ‘Writers typically have difficult childhoods,’ he tells us, ‘and it is cruel to remind them of the inherent loneliness that drove them to writing in the first place.’ Perhaps instead of the subtitle being ‘Essays on Pure Pleasure’ he could have chosen ‘Essays on Pure Pity.’

At fifty-three years old Shteyngart is too old to be a Millennial, but he partakes in one of the things that has been popularized by the Millennials—therapy. ‘’They regulate you down,’ my shrink told me a few weeks later as we watched a video that featured superimposed capybaras sashaying down a fashion runway.’ Perhaps this is a therapy custom designed for him; it’s doubtful psychiatrists would prescribe capybara videos like SSRIs. When Shteyngart describes his work as a novelist he says, ‘I believe that a novelist should write for no more than four hours a day, after which returns truly diminish; this, of course, leaves many hours for idle play and contemplation.’ This idleness is more likely what drives his neuroticism than the fairly tame childhood trauma he describes—people putting in long hours at their jobs to keep the bills paid are simply too busy to lie on a therapist’s couch and talk about themselves. His shrink said the election (the 2016 election between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump) had been taking a toll on his patients, but of course the only people who see a psych over politics are people who doomscroll the hours away, believing that the posted opinions of amateur pundits and conspiracy wackos are actually true. I do not think, however, that cessation of doomscrolling would make these type of people any healthier—they’d just find something else to be depressed about. In 2019 Shteyngart wrote, ‘It’s time to let go of the anxiety and dopamine craving and shut my phone down. The real world is waiting for us, and so is the world of the imagination, which is the best world of all.’ A quick check of his X account shows he has given up on ‘the best world of all’ and is back to getting his dopamine hits from social media.

Shteyngart’s sense of humor is that of a middle-aged father; a little less corny than say, Ellen DeGeneres, but not as quick-witted as say, Kat Williams. In a few of the essays here he obliquely mentions a botched circumcision that he had at seven years old, but then finally devotes an entire essay to it. The attempt at humor here is also an attempt to show his vulnerability, but it comes off as gross-me-out teen jokes. The essay, titled ‘My Gentile Region,’ opens up: ‘On August 24, 2020, as I attempted the first pee of the morning, I felt a tightness on the underside of my penis. A tiny hair had formed a tourniquet around a skin bridge on the genital.’ If you’re wondering what a genital skin bridge is, fear not, he describes it thus: ‘In texture and appearance, the bridge reminded me of the Polly-O mozzarella string cheese that got packed in the lunchboxes of my generation.’ In an essay, one cannot rely on reading the crowd to see how well, or how bad, one’s jokes are going over. So Shteyngart plows ahead with embarrassingly overly-detailed descriptions of his penis after numerous treatments from numerous doctors that keep failing. He claims that at one point he decided to fix the problem himself by using Nair hair remover and that he ‘applied the hair-removal lotion with calligraphic precision.’ (Reports of men using depilatories for manscaping indicate an agony so severe, suicide seems the only remedy, so despite Shteyngart’s claims of calligraphic precision it’s possible his Nair treatment was just fictional material for his essay.) As to why he didn’t use a pair of personal grooming scissors with precision that first morning, we’ll just have to speculate. He laid all these travails on poet/memoirist Mary Karr who seemed baffled by the whole thing and asked, ‘Why can’t they slap it between two pieces of glass? As fond as people are of dick, this I can’t believe.’

One of the ways Shteyngart deals with his trauma around the election of Donald Trump is to collect expensive watches. He believes an expensive watch might come in handy some day if he has to bribe border guards while making an escape into Canada. The only action of consequence that a Trump administration could take against him, he believes, is having his taxes, along with all the other wealthy American’s, cut. In the 2016 travel story he wrote about taking a Greyhound bus across America, he took note of the Trump supporters riding along with him and their racist banter, as if they’d been waiting for years to talk like jerks but had to sit silently until they could get a good candidate into office. He called 2016 ‘that most fateful year in recent American history,’ making one wonder if he doesn’t regard 1941 or 2001 as recent history. While he regards Canada as a superior country to America, he is absolutely gushing over China: ‘China is where it’s at, and, with the United States committing suicide, where it will be.’ His essay ‘Beijing 24/7’ sounds like it could have been written by a Chinese Communist Party mouthpiece. He writes of the Uighur waiters in Xinjiang proudly wearing ‘their excellent national hats beneath wall-length scenes of mosques and mountain lakes and a sign that says BEAUTIFUL XINJIANG WELCOMES YOU.’ Of course, those same waiters may have ended up in prisons and reeducation camps, and while he included an update at the beginning of ‘Beijing 24/7’ in this book noting the improvement in air quality in Beijing since he first wrote it in 2014, he makes no mention of the imprisonments of the Uighurs.

Near the end of the book we get an essay ‘How to Love Your Parents Even If You Hate Their Politics.’ This of course is a topic that NPR covers every Thanksgiving. Shteyngart claims many of his friends’ parents suffer from what he calls ‘Early Fox News Dementia’ and he counsels them ‘to orphan yourself.’ He says he did exactly that, so let’s just say he has a unique definition of ‘orphan.’ Shteyngart has not really decoupled himself from his family like he seems to be advising others to do. ‘And so the holidays might be a time of listening to their Foxy rants with a mysterious half-smile on your lips and a faraway look in your eyes.’ He says not to react with anger to those people who did not vote for Hillary Clinton or Kamala Harris, but to ‘respond to them with the sorrow they so richly deserve.’ They should all be so grateful for the gift of sorrow from their betters.