Rewriting the American Dream for the Trump Era and Beyond in Gary Shteyngart’s Lake Success (2018)
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.28914/Atlantis-2022-44.1.09Abstract
This essay analyses Gary Shteyngart’s Lake Success (2018) as an inquiry into the formative narratives of the American identity—the American Dream and self-making—through the story of a hedge-fund manager, Barry, who abandons his wife and child with autism to travel across the US just as the country is about to elect Donald Trump as president. Building on the intertextual connection with The Great Gatsby (1925), this essay contextualizes the ongoing corruption of these narratives within the culture of unbridled individual advancement, arguing that Trump’s victory has further normalized opportunism and the dissociation between individual success and collective well-being. Although this hollowing out of the American Dream and self-making renders a rather bleak picture of contemporary US, the novel suggests the possibility of change, both for Barry and America, as it calls for the re-insertion of the other into the formative narratives of American identity, thus expanding their current limits.
Downloads
References
Adams, James Truslow. 1931. The Epic of America. Boston: Little, Brown, and Company.
Ahmed, Sara. 2006. Queer Phenomenology. Orientations, Objects, Others. Durham and London: Duke UP.
Bérubé, Michael. 2016. The Secret Life of Stories. From Don Quixote to Harry Potter. How Understanding Intellectual Disability Transforms the Way We Read. New York: New York UP.
Biden, Joe. 2020. Victory Speech. Full Transcript. The Associated Press, November 8. [Accessed online on November 10, 2020].
Bloom, Harold. 2009. Volume Introduction. In Bloom, ed. 2009, xv-xvi.
—, ed. 2009. The American Dream. Bloom’s Literary Themes. New York: Bloom’s Literary Criticisms.
Bryla, Martyna. 2018a. “Narrating Oneself, Narrating America: Gary Shteyngart’s Little Failure: A Memoir (2014).” In Hernández, Brito and Monterrey 2018, 89-96.
—. 2018b. “Tracking the Transnational Trickster: Gary Shteyngart and His Protagonists.” Nordic Journal of English Studies 17 (2): 1-28.
Cabanas, Edgar, and Eva Illouz. 2019. Manufacturing Happy Citizens. How the Science and Industry of Happiness Control our Lives. Polity Press. Kindle edition.
Callahan, John F. 1972. The Illusion of a Nation: Myth and History in the Novels of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Illinois: Illinois UP.
Cawelti, John G. 1965. Apostles of the Self-Made Man. Chicago: The U of Chicago P.
Charles, Ron. 2018. “Gary Shteyngart Takes Aim at White Male Privilege.” The Washington Post, August 28. [Accessed online June 24, 2020].
Churchwell, Sarah. 2018. Behold America: A History of America First and the American Dream. Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle edition.
Cullen, Jim. 2003. The American Dream: A Short History of an Idea that Shaped a Nation. Oxford UP. Kindle edition.
Dallman, Antje, Eva Boesenberg and Martin Klepper, eds. 2016. Approaches to American Cultural Studies. Abingdon: Routledge.
Di Placido, Dani. 2018. “‘Trump: An American Dream’ Plays Like a Supervillain Origin Story.” Forbes, April 12. [Accessed online on October 7, 2020].
Douglass, Frederick. 1872. “The Self-Made Men.” Monadnock Valley Press. [Accessed online on September 2, 2020].
Fitzgerald, F. Scott. (1925) 1991. The Great Gatsby. Harlow: Longman.
—. (1920/1922) 2011. This Side of Paradise and The Beautiful and Damned. Knoxville: Wordsworth Editions.
Frank, Robert. 2018. “Who is the Real-life Barry Cohen in New Gary Shteyngart Hedge Fund Novel?” CNBC, September 21. [Accessed online on July 8, 2020].
Franklin, Benjamin. (1793) 2008. The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin: 1706-1757. Bedford: Applewood Books.
Giroux, Henry A. 2017. “White Nationalism, Armed Culture and State Violence in the Age of Donald Trump.” Philosophy and Social Criticism 43 (9): 887-910.
Hamilton, Geoff. 2017. Understanding Gary Shteyngart. Columbia: U of South Carolina P.
Hearne, Kimberley. 2010. “Fitzgerald’s Rendering of a Dream.” The Explicator 68 (3): 189-94.
Hernández, María Beatriz, Manuel Brito and Tomás Monterrey, eds. 2018. Broadening Horizons: A Peak Panorama of English Studies in Spain 38. La Laguna: Universidad de La Laguna.
Hofstadter, Richard. 2009. “Abraham Lincoln and the Self-Made Myth.” In Wilentz 2009, 3-39.
Hufbauer, Benjamin. 2016. “How Trump’s Favourite Movie Explains Him.” Politico Magazine, June 6. [Accessed online on October 2, 2020].
Jacoby, Tamar, ed. 2004. Reinventing the Melting Pot: The New Immigrants and What It Means to Be American. New York: Basic Books.
Kerouac, Jack. 1957. On the Road. London: Penguin Books.
Klepper, Martin. 2016. “‘From Rags to Riches’ and the Self-made Man.” In Dallman, Boesenberg and Klepper 2016, 123-31.
Kravitz, Bennett. 2010. Representations of Illness in Literature and Film. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
Lallas, Demetri. 2014. “‘From the People, by the People, to the People:’ The American Dream(s) Debut.” The Journal of American Culture 37(2):162-71.
Lipton, Mark. 2017. Mean Men: The Perversion of America’s Self-made Man. Voussoir Press. Kindle edition.
Loftis, Sonya Freeman. 2015. Imagining Autism: Fiction and Stereotypes on the Spectrum. Bloomington: Indiana UP.
McAdams, Tony. 1993. “‘The Great Gatsby’ as a Business Ethics Inquiry.” Journal of Business Ethics 12 (8): 653-60.
Murray, Stuart. 2008. Representing Autism. Culture, Narrative, Fascination. Liverpool: Liverpool UP.
Naydan, Liliana M. 2020. “The Politics of Alienation in Gary Shteyngart’s Lake Success.” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction. December 1. [Accessed online on January 8, 2020].
Nissley, Tom. 2003. Intimate and Authentic Economies: The American Self-made Man from Douglass to Chaplin. New York: Routledge.
Paul, Heike. 2014. The Myths that Made America: An Introduction to American Studies. Verlag: Walter de Gruyter GmbH.
Pearson, Roger L. 1970. “False Prophet of the American Dream.” The English Journal 59 (5): 638-642+645.
Pinchevski, Amit. 2005. “Displacing Incommunicability: Autism as an Epistemological Boundary.” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 2 (2): 163-84.
Richardson, Mark. 2001. “Peasant Dreams: Reading On the Road.” Texas Studies in Literature and Culture 43 (2): 218-42.
Scorsese, Martin, dir. 2013. Wolf of Wall Street. Paramount.
Shteyngart, Gary. 2004. “The New Two-way Street.” In Jacoby 2004, 285-92.
—. 2008. Absurdistan. London: Granta.
—. 2011. Super Sad True Love Story. London: Granta.
—. 2018a. “Gary Shteyngart’s View from Hedge Fund Land.” Interview by Mary Childs. Barron’s, September 7. [Accessed online on November 5, 2020].
—. 2018b. Lake Success. Random House. Kindle edition.
—. 2018c. “Lake Success: Uncovering the Unhappy World of Hedge Funds: Conversation with Gary Shteyngart.” Knowledge@Wharton, December 20. [Accessed online on November 5, 2020].
Stone, Oliver, dir. 1987. Wall Street. Fox.
Welles, Orson, dir. 1941. Citizen Kane. Warner Bros.
Wilentz, Sean, ed. 2009. The Best American History Essays on Lincoln. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Wilke, Kenneth J. 2000. “Self-Made Man.” Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association 21(2): 1-16.
Wolfe, Tom. 1987. The Bonfire of the Vanities. London: Vintage Books.
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
The authors retain copyright of articles. They authorise AEDEAN to publish them in its journal Atlantis and to include them in the indexing and abstracting services, academic databases and repositories the journal participates in.
Under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial ShareAlike 4.0 International Licence (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0), for non-commercial (i.e., personal or academic) purposes only, users are free to share (i.e., copy and redistribute in any medium or format) and adapt (i.e., remix, transform and build upon) articles published in Atlantis, free of charge and without obtaining prior permission from the publisher or the author(s), as long as they give appropriate credit to the author, the journal (Atlantis) and the publisher (AEDEAN), provide the relevant URL link to the original publication and indicate if changes were made. Such attribution may be done in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the journal endorses the user or their use of the material published therein. Users who adapt (i.e., remix, transform or build upon the material) must distribute their contributions under the same licence as the original.
Self-archiving is also permitted, so that authors are allowed to deposit the published PDF version of their articles in academic and/or institutional repositories, without fee or embargo. Authors may also post their individual articles on their personal websites, again on condition that the original link to the online edition is provided.
Authors are expected to know and heed basic ground rules that preclude simultaneous submission and/or duplicate publication. Prospective contributors to Atlantis commit themselves to the following when they submit a manuscript:
- That no concurrent consideration of the same, or almost identical, work by any other journal and/or publisher is taking place.
- That the potential contribution has not appeared previously, in any form whatsoever, in another journal, electronic format or as a chapter/section of a book.
Seeking permission for the use of copyright material is the responsibility of the author.
Funding data
-
Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad
Grant numbers FFI2017-86417-P
