Gary Shteyngart - Little Failure

Yes, Atlanta. We have recently heard from some fellow immigrants that the cost of living in Georgia’s largest city is much lower than New York’s, and one can even own a house and a swimming pool in the suburbs of that fast-growing metropolis for about the price of our garden apartment in Queens.

Opposite the celestial body that is Atlanta with its conservative politics and strong retail base shimmers an alien planet named Lopes, sometimes more correctly spelled as Lopez. “Lopes was a hot world. It was a wonder it didn’t explode … It also contained many parrots.” Somehow I have restrained myself from giving the steamy proto-Latinos of Planet Lopez a set of transistor radios to play at full blast, but I did endow them with three legs each.

There is also an evil, wisecracking scientist named, of course, Dr. Omar. “Hello,” Omar says, “I’m Dr. Omar it’s no pleasure meeting you, now if you mind zipping up that big whole in the middle of your face I can show you my discovery.”

Dr. Omar’s discovery is the “Chalenge Machine” that “perhaps will prove which race is the right one ”: the Atlantans with their corporate tax breaks or the Lopezians with their parrots and weak academic records?

As I reread The Chalenge , I want to cry out to its ten-year-old author, Jesus Christ, why can’t you just doodle in the corner of your notebook, dream of Star Wars action figures, and play pick-up sticks with your friends? (Therein, I suppose, lies the answer: what friends?) Why at this young age does it have to already be a race war in outer space and one without the self-deprecating humor of Papa’s Planet of the Yids? What the hell are you talking about, you who have never met a Lopez or an Omar on the wild streets of Little Neck?

The hero of The Chalenge is a space fighter pilot named Flyboy, modeled after a kid who has just transferred into SSSQ, a kid so blond and handsome and retroussé-nosed it’s hard for some of us to believe he’s fully Jewish. Flyboy’s best friend is fellow pilot Saturn, and the love of his life is a fly girl named Iarda. Even at this early stage of my writing career, I realize the importance of a love triangle: “Flyboy smiled his best smile which the other two were jelous off. It of course was clear [Iarda] liked him best.”

“Oh no,” Iarda says. “Fourteen more ships from the other side.”

“Look,” says Saturn. “Twenty more ships in Atlanta battle formachions. Our kind.”

“It hit the electronic scanner shaft and all the scanners and other equipment apart.”

“Well how stupit can people get?” Flyboy wonders.

And then, once the space battle is complete, and our kind has won: “The fourth ship was bound to come. On Atlanta things were going wild.”

I write dutifully, excitedly, asthmatically. I get up every weekend morning even if the Lightman has kept me awake all night, the little pinpricks of light that form his hand spilling out of the cracks between closet door and jamb, reaching out for me, scared breathless on my foldout couch. Five years earlier I had written the novel Lenin and His Magical Goose for my grandmother Galya, who is now six years away from a horrible death back in Leningrad. But now I know to avoid anything even remotely Russian. My Flyboy is as Atlantan as apple pie. And his Iarda, while vaguely Israeli sounding (a reference to the Yordan , the River Jordan?), is also a hot, principled taxpayer who can blow a Lopez or a Rodriguez out of the sky as surely as Ronald Reagan will soon joke, “We begin bombing [the Soviet Union] in five minutes.” Bombing Grandma Galya back in Leningrad, he means, and the rest of us Russian liars.

I write because there is nothing as joyful as writing, even when the writing is twisted and full of hate, the self-hate that makes writing not only possible but necessary. I hate myself, I hate the people around me, but what I crave is the fulfillment of some ideal. Lenin didn’t work out; joining the Komsomol youth league didn’t work out; my family — Papa hits me; my religion — children hit me; but America/Atlanta is still full of power and force and rage, a power and force and rage I can fuel myself with until I feel myself zooming for the stars with Flyboy and Saturn and Iarda and Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger.

There is a teacher at school, a Ms. S, who has just transferred in to substitute for some Mrs. A — Z, and who herself won’t last long within the unique educational environment of SSSQ. Ms. S is as nice to me as the liberals’ son. She has, like almost all the women at the school, an enormous weight of spectacular Jewish hair and a small pretty mouth. On one of her first days on the job, Ms. S asks us all to bring in our favorite items in the world and to explain why they make us who we are. I bring in my latest toy, a dysfunctional Apollo rocket whose capsule pops off with the press of a lever (but only under certain atmospheric conditions, humidity must be below 54 percent), and explain that who I am is a combination of my father’s Planet of the Yids tales and the complicated stories in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine by the likes of Harlan Ellison and Dr. Asimov himself, and that I have even written my own novel. This passes largely unremarked as the latest batch of Star Wars X-Wing fighters and My Little Ponies are paraded around.

Finally, Ms. S holds up a sneaker and explains that her favorite activity is jogging.

“Pee-yooh!” a boy cries out, pointing at the sneaker and holding his nose, and everyone except me laughs a wicked child laugh. Jerry Himmelstein agoofs .

I am shocked. Here is a young, kind, pretty teacher, and the children are intimating that her feet smell. Only me and my two-hundred-pound Leningrad fur are allowed to smell around here! I look to Ms. S, so worried that she will cry, but instead she laughs and then goes on about how running makes her feel good.

She has laughed at herself and emerged unscathed!

After we have all finished explaining who we are, Ms. S calls me over to her desk. “You really wrote a novel?” she asks.

“Yes,” I say. “It is called The Chalenge .”

“May I read it?”

“You may read it. I will brink it.”

And brink it I do, with the worried admonition “Please don’t lose, Meez S.”

And then it happens.

At the end of the English period, when a book about a mouse who has learned to fly in an airplane has been thoroughly dissected, Ms. S announces, “And now Gary will read from his novel.”

His what ? Oh, but it doesn’t matter, because I’m standing there holding my composition notebook straight from the Square Deal Notebook people of Dayton, OH, Zip Code 45463, and looking out at me are the boys beneath their little flying-saucer yarmulkes, and the girls with their sweet aromatic bangs, their blouses studded with stars. And there’s Ms. S, whom I’m already terribly in love with but who I’ve recently learned has a fiancé (not sure what that means, can’t be good), but whose bright American face is not just encouraging me but priding me on.

Am I scared? No. I am eager. Eager to begin my life. “Introduction,” I say. “The Mistirious Race. Before the age of dinousaurs There was Human life on Earth. They looked just like the man of today. But they were a lot more inteligent than the men of today.”

“Slowly,” Ms. S says. “Read slowly, Gary. Let us enjoy the words.”

I breathe that in. Ms. S wants to enjoy the words . And then slower: “They built all kinds of spaceships and other wonders. But at that time the Earth circuled the moon because the moon was bigger than the Earth. One day a gigantic comet came and blew up the moon to the size it is today. The pieces of the moon began to Fall on Earth. The race of people got on their spaceships and took off. They began to search for a planet like Earth and they found one and called it Atlanta. But there was another planet named Lopez with a race of three legged Humanoids. War started soon.” Big breath. “Book One: Before the First Chalenge.”