Humor gets no respect. Funny novels aren’t easy to write—you try keeping the jokes coming for a few hundred pages—but when they succeed, they give readers unrivaled delight. Occasionally, awards juries surprise everybody and reward such books: Paul Beatty’s provocative satire about race in America, The Sellout, won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction 2016, and in 2018, Andrew Sean Greer took home a Pulitzer Prize for Less, about a midlist gay novelist having a midlife crisis. More often these books are championed by booksellers and book clubs, passed from hand to hand by passionate readers in the know.
Gary Shteyngart, who appears on the cover of the July 15 issue of the magazine, has been writing funny novels (and one uproarious memoir) since The Russian Debutante’s Handbook in 2001. His latest is Vera, or Faith (Random House, July 8), narrated by a precocious 10-year-old whose observations of the dysfunctional adult world around her are both comic and touching. Shteyngart’s best-known novel, Super Sad True Love Story (2010), took home the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize, a U.K. award given to a book that’s “captured the comic spirit of P.G. Wodehouse.” In that madcap vein, the winner receives a jeroboam of champagne, a set of books by Wodehouse, and a Gloucestershire Old Spot pig named for the winning book. Just Google “Gary Shteyngart pig.”
Six of Shteyngart’s seven books to date have received Kirkus stars (pigs not included)—a pretty good track record. In a recent interview with contributor Marion Winik, he reflected on his career with and teased some upcoming projects. Until his next book comes along, here are some recent comic novels that will keep readers laughing.
Blob: A Love Story by Maggie Su (Harper/HarperCollins, January 28): The premise of this debut novel tells you all you need to know: A college dropout on the rebound from a failed relationship finds a pile of goop in the alley behind a bar, brings it home to her apartment, and discovers that it’s sentient. Why can’t it be molded into the perfect boyfriend? Our reviewer calls it a “funny, tender, unexpected—though somewhat flimsy—bildungsroman.”
Sky Daddy by Kate Folk (Random House, April 8): If romance with a sentient blob isn’t bizarre enough for you, the narrator of this first novel (“Call me Linda,” she begins) loves airplanes. I mean really loves airplanes—longing for “whichever plane would finally recognize my worth and claim me as his bride in orgasmic catastrophe”—what regular folks “‘vulgarly’ refer to as a ‘plane crash.’” Our starred review calls it an “utterly confident and endearing portrait of a woman unlike anyone readers have met before.”
The Greatest Possible Good by Ben Brooks (Avid Reader Press, July 15): As this dryly funny novel opens, the lives of the Candlewicks are about to go pear-shaped. A package addressed to 15-year-old Emil is discovered to contain LSD and MMDA, while 17-year-old Evangeline, deep in a book about “effective altruism,” finds her well-off parents falling short. Then dad Arthur imbibes the drugs, reads the book, and decides to give away their fortune—much to the dismay of all concerned. “The pleasures of this novel’s writing, characters, and plot are fully equal to its good intentions,” according to our starred review.
Tom Beer is the editor-in-chief.
