I was very unimpressed with this book, which annoyed me (as it always does, because I assume books intelligent people recommend will be enjoyable). Not getting into whether this was a good book or not, I found it to be a very unenjoyable reading experience. The male lead was a profoundly unsympathetic person and I found myself wishing bad things would happen to him just so he would wake up and grow up.The female lead was more relatable (which is not surprising - she's roughly my age, but one of the marks of a great writer is to invite sympathy across difference), but constantly deluding her audience and herself. Even in the passages where she was, ostensibly, being truthful, I still felt as though she was lying; telling us and herself things on the off chance that might make them true. I didn't believe her.
Which, of course, meant that I found the romance between the two completely implausible.
Shteygart's visions of America were troubling (though I found it amusing that he fell into the Heinlein trap of assuming that racial stereotypes will outlive sexual taboos - a trap that seems far more common among male writers), but in a good way. Once again, my biggest problem was that I doubted their plausibility. We seemed to be in some strange world that merged the 1950s with 2050s and there was no explanation for why certain things had progressed while others regressed. Perhaps Shteyngart felt that the horrible America he envisioned was simply the self-evident end of the road we're currently on, but I completely disagree and so, once again, found myself unable to fully buy into his world.
Which sums up my problem with the book - it was unbelievable in a way that no novel, speculative or realistic, has a right to be. Given what I know about the world, about the characters in it, about the way people behave...events just did not make sense. People did not do what I thought, based on Shteyngart's own descriptions of them, they should have done. And that, for me, kills a book.
There were two other minor points. One was that I did find the book to be surprisingly bad about race and ethnicity. Whether this was deliberate or not is unclear, but the number of characters who were not people but stereotypes was upsetting to me.
Finally, I thought that the ending was a particularly contrived and silly bit of post-modernist fluff. Having the character comment on the text as a published text is fine, if there's a reason to do so. I could not think of a single good reason for the coda and so, arguably, it shouldn't have been there.
In Shteyngart's defense, he writes very well (hence two stars). I just wish I could believe what he had to say.