Imagine an extremely fat Russian. He wears Adidas track suits and loves rap. He is very rich and in this 30s. His name is Misha Vainberg, and he’s the hero, in a way, of Gary Shteyngart’s novel “Absurdistan.”

Misha, who is exiled in St. Petersburg, spends his days dreaming of New York City and his ex-girlfriend from the Bronx: “And the girls! Oh, how they disturbed me. Each with a little bit of my Rouenna in her — a plushy nose, a gangsta-shaved eyebrow, a plump lower lip glistening beneath a mound of gloss … And every once in a while, in an answer to most of my dreams, their thick, fleshy armpits came into view, and I squinted to discern a trail of shaved crinkly hair, the phantom of a formerly rich tuft, for I belong to the school that equated armpit hair with untrammeled sexuality.”

Oh Misha. I feel your pain! Literally.

He was circumcised in his late teens, which permanently damaged his sexual organs, “[it] looked more like an abused iguana.”

Before his exile, Misha attended “Accidental College,” a liberal arts school in the Midwest, where his major was “multiculturalism.”

This is also very funny, especially if you’ve attended a liberal arts college in the past 10-15 years, like me. Shteyngart is playing with the idea that these ultra-liberal colleges have instilled this idea of “diversity” with a manic fervor. We became very conscious of differences, whether they be ethnic, sexual, or racial — which was important, but also a bit strange because there is still absolutely no diversity of any kind in these colleges.

Misha will eventually travel to the country of “Absurdistan” near the Caspian Sea, which has become filthily rich from deep oil reserves: “We passed shops of unmistakable wealth, if somewhat curious provenance — an outlet that sold the nightmare products of American conglomerate Disney, an espresso emporium names Caspian Joe’s … an Irish themed pub names Molly Molloy’s … After Molly’s, the boulevard turned into a canyon of recently built skyscrapers beating corporate logos of ExxonMobil, ChevronTexaco, Kellog …”

Aside from the circumcision scene (which I couldn’t leave out), Shteyngart is satirizing the odd world we live in right now, viewed from the outside.

This is a perspective we seem to lose sight of. Specifically, what aspects of American culture is leaking into developing countries? Many of us have wandered through third-world countries and seen young kids wearing Nike T-shirts and CocaCola hats.

But what about counties like Russia, where our beautiful Misha is from? What aspects of our culture do they adopt? Many times, it is our sense of entertainment and music. In the ‘90s, perhaps the most commercial form of music was rap. And who would have guessed that you would have rich Russians suddenly emulating hip-hop artists rhyming about housing projects in the Bronx, selling drugs, riding around in Range Rovers, getting into gun fights.

Of course hip-hop is a lot more than this. At the same time, this was the stereotype of the movement, and it’s always the simplified, stereotypical versions of things that spread, unfortunately. The same thing has happened with the French and their interest in “The Wild West” and Native American culture.

This whole conversation can then be refracted toward the more blurry question of: Well, if America is going to share it’s artistic culture, do we have anything authentic to actually share? Country Music? Nascar? Rock ‘n’ roll? Perhaps hip-hop is as representative as anything.

Then we have the descriptions of Absurdistan — the mixture of American consumerism and oil corporations.

Does it not seem almost fictional the amount of money that people are making off oil? A friend who visited the Burj hotel in Dubai, which claims to be the only seven-star hotel in the world, said, “It’s like they took the most lavish five-star hotel, and just dumped gold all over it.”

Add Misha Vainberg to the mix, his track suits, his pinning for his ladyfriend, and much more, and you have “Absurdistan,” one of the funniest books I’ve read in a long time.