Hi there. I'm Jason Gatz, and you're listening to Think Again, a Big Think podcast.

Gary Steingart's new novel, Lake Success, is the evil doppelganger of the Simon and Garfunkel song America.

In what is surely destined to become one of those legendary novel openings right up there with It Was the Best of Times, It Was the Worst of Times, we meet Barry Cohen, a man with $2.4

billion of assets under management in a Greyhound Bus Terminal at 3.20 a.m. bleeding from his

face and drunk on $20,000 of Japanese whiskey.

Steingard is one of my favorite writers ever. In the three books I've read, a memoir and two novels,

We are sad, basically good-hearted schmose,

twisted into balloon animals by an uncaring world.

Or wait, the world is made of us, so how good-hearted are we, really?

Born in the USSR,

Steingard emigrated to Queens as a kid. In his memoir, Little Failure, he describes his first experience of American cereal,

quote, it tastes grainy, easy, and light, with a hint of false fruitiness.

It tastes the way America feels. It tastes the way America feels.

Like Paul Simon in the song, Barry Cohen has walked or stumbled drunkenly off to look for

America. By almost any measure, he is a horrible person. He is also a sad, basically good-hearted

schmo twisted into a balloon animal by the world. And maybe America is a false fruity mirror

in which the harder you look, the more you end up seeing yourself. Welcome to think again, Gary.

Great to be here.

Thanks.

And thanks for enduring my overwrought beginning.

No, I loved it. I think I love the balloon animal.

I think what really strikes me about Barry Cohen is that, you know, there are so many reasons that I have to kind of dislike him.

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