Six novels with charming, workshy anti-heroes

Peter Mann grew up in Kansas City. He teaches history and literature at Stanford and is a past recipient of the Whiting Fellowship. He is also a graphic artist & cartoonist and draws the online comic The Quixote Syndrome. The Torqued Man is his first novel.

At The Strand Magazine Mann tagged six favorites books featuring charming, if feckless, layabouts, including:

Ivan Goncharov, Oblomov:

In this 1859 Russian classic, featuring a tubby, lamb-gentle aristocrat who rarely leaves his recumbent state, Goncharov shows us the hard labor and anxiety of laziness. Ilya Oblomov is a young burn-out who couldn’t bear the bureaucratic rat race of St Petersburg, and has since fallen into a pathological indolence. Meanwhile, his busy friends pay him visits, his estate crumbles, and the world passes him by.

What precious little energy Oblomov has goes into berating his surly manservant and gorging on soups, pastries, and the ubiquitous glass of kvass. The edition put out by Yale University Press even includes a culinary glossary for the English reader who, like me, delights in the ins and outs of fictional gluttony.

If you have a tendency to dream up grand plans yet put them off for a snack, a nap, and a fit of wallowing melancholy, then Oblomov will cut you to your lazy bone. I suppose he’d be a revolting figure of slothful entitlement—and, indeed, that’s how many critics at the time read him, as symptomatic of the quietism of the Russian nobility—if he weren’t also such a sweetie pie. But Goncharov, like his fellow writer Turgenev, is a benevolent satirist, armed with as much love as mocking laughter for his hero. It’s through Oblomov’s eyes that we see his hurried, career-chasing compatriots as sleepwalkers who have lost touch with the humanity that he, for all his faults and irredeemably tragic condition, still clings to.

And if you want a modern update to Oblomov, as the obese gourmandizing heir of a Russian oligarch, check out Gary Shteyngart’s hilarious 2006 novel Absurdistan.

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue