It has been my great privilege recently to read Super Sad True Love Story, the third novel by Gary Shteyngart, winner of the Stephen Crane Award for First Fiction for his first novel The Russian Debutante’s Handbook. His second novel, Absurdistan, was named one of the 10 Best Books of the Year by The New York Times Book Review. He was also recognized as a New Yorker “Best Writer Under 40.”
When Super Sad True Love Story was released in July, it caught my attention when Publisher’s Weekly compared it to my favorite vision of a dystopic future, Cormac McCarthy’s heartbreaking The Road. That starred review went on to call Super Sad a “profane and dizzying satire,” “convincing” and “frightening.”
The book’s cover is unique, reminiscent of ostentatious pop art, calling to mind Lichtenstein and Warhol. I wondered what relation the cover could have to the story, then dug right in.
Super Sad is the story of two lovers living in a near future New York City. Lenny is the son of Jewish immigrant parents from Russia. He’s 39, moderately hip to the decadent, technologically advanced world around him; not too attractive, but making up for it with a credit rating to die for in an America where the dollar is worthless unless it is pegged by the Chinese Yuan.
He meets Eunice Park, a woman in her mid-twenties, while they are both visiting Italy. Eunice, likely named Euny at birth, is the child of Korean immigrants. She is a picture of where America could be headed: a shop-a-holic, dependant on her apparati (a device much like an advanced smart phone), considering majoring in college in such things as Images and Assertiveness. She’s never read a book (in college they scan the classics with their apparati), and her contemporaries show their status by wearing see through jeans and bras with the nipples cut out.
Despite their age differences, Lenny offers Eunice a place to stay, the promise of stability, and an all forgiving worship. Because he loves her deeply, Lenny allows himself to be used by the young beauty while the America their parents knew crumbles. NYC is practically a police state, National Guardsmen on every corner.
The book unravels as alternating chapters in the voices of Lenny and Eunice. A chapter will be an entry from Lenny’s diary, then the next will be various emails and chat sessions (more like texts, which Shteyngart calls “teens”) from the GlobalTeens account of Eunice Park.
My best test for a novel is the 100 pages test. After 100 pages do I want to continue reading? Did I care enough about Lenny and Eunice to finish their tale? Super Sad passes this test, and I’m glad, for it is absolutely the last half of the novel that is the most tense, feverish, and suspenseful. If it’s a sad story, as the cover suggests, you must know how their poignant love affair will end.
It’s Shyteyngart’s amazing writing that also keeps you hooked.
From page 180, the chapter titled “The Sinner’s Crusade”:
The Guard had cleared a part of the park and let in Media. I was watching Noah’s stream as he ambled up and down Cedar Hill, past the remnants of tarps and somber, amoeba-shaped pools of real-time blood on the tired grass, which made Kelly whimper all over her tempeh-covered desk. She was a touchtone of honest emotion, our Kelly. I took my turn petting her head and inhaling her. One day, if our race is to survive, we will have to download her goodness and install it in our children. In the meantime, my mood indicators on The Boards went from “Meek but cooperative” to “playful/cuddly/likes to learn new things.”
Consumerism and a desire for immortality shine brightly in Shteyngart’s caricature of our future. The Pop Art theme rings true. Here, like Warhol promised, everyone is famous for at least 15 minutes. People who work in Media stream reality shows of their own lives from their apparati, complete with product placement ads spoken aloud as they live on camera. Your credit score is broadcast everywhere you go, and everyone shops like mad, especially Eunice.
From page 280, the chapter titled “Anti-Inflammation”:
…She went over to a circle of black, identical looking dresses and started clicking through them. Click, click, click, each hanger hitting the preceding one, making the sound of an abacus. She spent less than a full second on each dress, but each second seemed more meaningful than the hours spent on AssLuxury viewing the same merchandise; each was an encounter with the real. Her face was steely, concentrated, the mouth slightly open. Here was the anxiety of choice, the pain of living without history, the pain of some higher need. I felt humbled by this world, awed by its religiosity, the attempt to extract meaning from an artifact that contained mostly thread. If only beauty could explain the world away. If only a nippleless bra could make it all work.
Even the Wall Street Journal piped up about this book, saying, “Finally, a funny book about the financial crisis.” But I was more afraid than amused.
My favorite aspect of the novel are the emails from Chun Won Park, Eunice’s Korea-born mother, to her daughter Eunice Park. Mrs. Park begs her daughter in broken and oft misspelled English to keep the mystery between herself and male suitors, to study hard, and be a good role model to her younger sister. Mrs. Park makes excuses for her husband, who beats her, and clings to ideals of Christianity and family while the modern world around her goes to hell in a handbasket. Where Shteyngart got the amazingly authentic voice of an aging Korean mother, I’ll never know, but in it I heard my own mother’s voice and wanted to cry (and she’s not Korean!).
Eunice, the tragic, nearly self-loathing leading lady, deserves to be studied in High Schools and colleges side by side with other literary lovers such as Pip from Great Expectations, Stella, and Gatsby’s “great” love, Daisy. What makes them act the way they do?
What stuns me about Super Sad True Love Story is how it manages to be so many things at once. Academic, romantic, hilarious, painfully truthful, a science fiction epic on par with Blade Runner, and at last a story about two people the reader will never forget. David Mitchel said it best, calling the novel “intoxicating” and saying, “The American novel is safe in Gary Shteyngart’s gifted hands.” I whole-heartedly agree.
