Book Review: Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart

There may well be a better dystopian, pre-apocalyptic American cultural satire than Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story, but if there is, I’m surely not aware of it. By ruthlessly mocking--among other things--our smartphone fetishism (represented in the book by the ubiquitous uber-iphone “apparat”), trashy consumerism, and entertainment-obsessed, fear-mongering media culture, Shteyngart's brilliant, timely novel touches on seemingly every aspect of the zeitgeist. But despite the sardonic, piercingly funny prose of a writer at the height of his powers, the book’s lasting impression is that of a tender, heartbreakingly real love story.

The participants in the doomed love affair are the down-on-his-luck neurotic Lenny Abramov, an aging Manhattan hipster whose diminishing life prospects mirror that of his crestfallen country’s, and the young Korean-American beauty Eunice Park, a recent college graduate with a degree in “Media and Assertiveness,” who scampers from the states to Rome and back in an attempt to escape both her domineering, abusive father and her own deep-seated insecurities. Although at first not nearly as smitten with Lenny as he with her, Eunice is eventually wooed by the awkward, self-deprecating, yet ultimately sweet and harmless son of Jewish-Russian immigrants.

But just as the unlikely couple are on the verge of overcoming one another’s insecurities; as Lenny is finally able to scale Eunice’s dual walls of familial angst and digital-obsessiveness, and the stubborn young beauty is ready to look past our hero’s anachronistic love for “smelly old paper-bound books,” the world’s last superpower seems finally ready to crumble under the weight of its own hubris. The “Chinese Central Banker” is making his long-dreaded stateside visit to take stock of what, if anything, might be recouped from a bankrupt America, the national guard has taken to gunning down “LNWIs” (low net worth individuals) with the gall to protest their squalid living conditions in Central Park, and the country’s ill-fated war with Venezuela has taken a severe turn for the worse.

Shteyngart has clearly drawn on his own experience as a Russian immigrant (the author moved to the U.S. from his native Leningrad at age three) in creating the lovable loser Lenny, and the biting satire with which he observes a collapsing empire is mixed with a newcomer’s awe and admiration for the hectic, glorious-in-her-contradictions melting pot of America. The passages describing New York City and Central Park are particularly poignant (“We headed south, and when the trees ran out the park handed us over to the city...New York exploded all around us, people hawking, buying, demanding, streaming.”). Only a writer as skilled as Shteyngart could give concoct such a bittersweetly doomed narrative that still somehow leaves us with hope for humanity’s survival in our bewildering new bites-and-bytes driven age.

-Jeff Garrity, December 12th, 2014