Gary Shteyngart

We just want to match up to all these metrics and say, done, done, done, check, check, check.

We are the best.

We won.

And that's that.

What's your view of where that came from?

I mean, I think it's, when I look at my students, we're talking about our place in the world earlier.

They're unsure of the world's place in the world.

They don't know what's going to happen next.

Everything is a source of anxiety.

Half of what my students write, if not more, is speculative fiction of one sort or another.

And the speculation isn't that we're going to be living in a utopia in 20 years.

The mood is, the vibes, as they say, are low-key horrible.

It's like we've separated ourselves so much from the possibility of joy that to make it the subject of a book or of a story seems almost privileged.

Like you don't want to touch that anymore.

And I'm not saying that, you know, the Cheever Updike crew didn't write in a solipsistic way about whatever, you know, their own identity is privileged.

wealthy white people in Scarsdale or whatever, you know, obviously there was a lot of that kind of stuff as well, but there was a sense that life wasn't entirely hopeless.

When I read a lot of modern literary fiction, the driving force to me is neurosis.

Yeah.

People being anxious, being unsure, being self-loathing.

I find it very, very, very depressing.