Problematizing the Fantasy of the Good Life in Akhil Sharma’s Family Life (2014) and Gary Shteyngart’s Little Failure (2014)

The American Dream is a potent if illusive idea which is frequently evoked, yet hard to define. In common parlance, it is associated with upward mobility and thus with what Lauren Berlant (2011) terms “a fantasy of the good life.” While the Dream is said to be possible within the framework of American meritocracy—where economic outcomes and social status are meant to reflect individual achievement rather than inherited privilege—there is a caveat to it. The responsibility for fulfilling the Dream lies with the individual, who is expected to make the good life for themselves through industry and effort. There is something cruel in the optimism that drives the Dream and the system which it underwrites (Berlant 2011), for its insistence on individual responsibility makes little room for trauma, precarity, bad luck—forces that disrupt the linearity and onwardness that the Dream presupposes. It is precisely this tension between the promise and the lived experience that this article is interested in. To this purpose, it explores Akhil Sharma’s semi-autobiographical Family Life (2014) and Gary Shteyngart’s memoir Little Failure (2014), focusing on those moments in their narratives when the fantasy of the good life and the life itself collide. Despite being strikingly different in style, both works expose the good life myth as contingent upon the factors beyond the characters’ volition, problematizing the meritocratic ideal in the process. Moreover, by adopting the perspective of child immigrants, Sharma and Shteyngart provide intimate insights into immigrant households, where the weight of failed expectations materializes in conflict and trauma, which, especially in Sharma’s work, call into question the cost of the fantasy which has driven the emigration. Ultimately, these coming-of-age stories reveal the American Dream as an ambivalent construct, whose optimistic promise of individual success through hard work must be constantly adjusted to the characters’ lived realities as part of their immigrant families, which, in turn, are embedded in a meritocratic system marked by inequity.