“By Any Means Necessary”: Corporate Capitalism and Pathological Narcissism in Gary Shteyngart’s Fiction

<p>Ranked as a liberal globalist writer in Caren Irr’s overview of the canon of US fiction today, the literary output of contemporary American writer Gary Shteyngart (<em>Absurdistan</em>, 2006; <em>Super Sad True Love Story</em>, 2010; <em>Lake Success</em>, 2018; <em>Our Country Friends</em>, 2021), which involves diverse narrative, stylistic and genre conventions, shares an overarching theme that runs through all these texts: all four novels foreground the narcissistic nature of the wealthy, directly inscribing these traits within the dominant and inescapable paradigm of globalisation and late capitalism within and beyond America. In these novels, such narcissism often reaches pathological extremes, as it can become the main driving force in a character's portrayal. To date, this thread has not been pursued in depth across Shteyngart’s oeuvre. This article examines the entrepreneurs and achievers in these four novels as embodying various forms of (sometimes pathological) narcissism that relate to and draw from the conditions of corporate capitalism and digital era technologies, in the light of recent theories by sociologists, political scientists, philosophers and cultural critics who have examined how the contemporary human condition is impacted by the forces of globalisation in its numerous ramifications.</p>