Absurdistan by Gary Shteyngart
To be sure, Shteyngart is a good writer.
He succeeds in making a fat, entitled, child of a Russian gangster sort-of sympathetic. The book is vaguely reminiscent of A Confederacy of Dunces in that respect.
There’s also some sort of satire going on here in the fictional country of Absurdistan, with the very real characters of Halliburton and oil and “rebuilding” and government contracts and oh who knows what else.
This story is both amusing and disturbing and often gross (seriously… I don’t need to ever read again such detailed and vivid descriptions of the body of an enormously fat man ever again).
But really… the man is a good writer.