You've never seen an author photo quite like this one. Every chapter of Gary Shteyngart's new memoir, Little Failure (Random House, $27), opens with a photograph of Shteyngart from the corresponding time period, but it's the picture from chapter four, "Moscow Square," that captures your imagination. Shteyngart—this was before his name was Americanized, so here he's still named Igor—is standing on a ladder and smiling at us. He's all ears and he's dressed in the style for Soviet boys of the time. And the caption reads:

To become a cosmonaut, the author must first conquer his fear of heights on a ladder his father has built for that purpose. He must also stop wearing a sailor outfit and tights.

In some ways, Little Failure feels like a heavily annotated slide show, with thousands of words of sheepish and self-conscious explanation buffering the photographs of Shteyngart wearing ghastly shirts, making awful hair decisions, and proudly showing off a gigantic digital watch that played tinny renditions of "The Star-Spangled Banner" and the Russian song "Little Guelder Rose." But that description doesn't do justice to the quality of the prose. Shteyngart's nonfiction is at least as vivacious as his fiction: "Coming to America after a childhood spent in the Soviet Union is equivalent to stumbling off a monochromatic cliff and landing in a pool of pure Technicolor."

Little Failure moves forward, sharklike, in straight chronological order, although it lingers heavily in memories of childhood. Some readers might become impatient for Shteyngart to stagger out of his awkward Young Republican phase and into puberty. But after Shteyngart discovers drugs at Oberlin College and is welcomed into the publishing industry with surprising ease in the book's final third, you understand why Little Failure focuses on the Little part of the journey: Shteyngart understands that his writing lends itself to commenting on the raptures and disillusionments of childhood. Moreover, here and there throughout the last third of Little Failure, Shteyngart casually mentions that this or that situation led directly to a scene in his novels Absurdistan or The Russian Debutante's Handbook. His adult life has already been processed and related to us by way of fiction. Little Failure, with its childlike account of the Cold War and the Soviet Union's criminal treatment of its Jewish citizens, feels like the fable that unfolds before the novels can begin.