Super Sad True Love Story

Gary Shteyngart's novel Super Sad True Love Story is set in a future that is nervously close to being. The dollar is pegged to the Chinese yuan, everyone carries around a handheld device, the apparat, much like an iPad, that can instantly ascertain anyone's credit rating or "fuckability." Corporations are now huge--the one airline is called UnitedContinentalDeltamerican. The National Guard is everywhere. Those who read books are viewed with suspicion--"scanning texts" is the preferred mode of gathering information.

Into this dystopia Shteyngart spins a romance, alternating viewpoints between the two characters. On the one hand is Lenny Abramov, a 39-year-old romantic who imagines himself a character from Chekhov. He actually owns books, despite their musty smell, and works as a salesman for a corporation that extends people's lives. While in Rome he meets a Korean-American girl, Eunice Park, who is much younger and with-it. Her narration is told in her account on "Globalteens," a social networking site. She is moderately disgusted by Lenny at first (the daughter of a podiatrist, she is put off by his ugly feet) but eventually moves to New York to be with him.

Shteyngart uses the romance as a backdrop to his rather bleak view of the future, when America is sliding into oblivion, its debt called in by the Chinese and fighting a war in Venezuela. It was interesting timing to read this during the Occupy Wall Street protests, as political protests become a major part of the story, and when communication goes down it becomes impossible to connect with love ones, such as Eunice's parents in Fort Lee, New Jersey. Lenny's boss, a 70-year-old man who looks forty years younger, serves as a kind of benevolent despot in the tale, working behind Lenny's back to steal Eunice away.

If all this sounds grim, it is, but it's also a very funny book. As with his novel Absurdistan, Shteyngart has a magical gift for language. I loved a passage where Lenny springs for the extra money to take Eunice on a "business-class" New York City subway car (a great idea!): "In business class, we had the run of the cozy, already slightly browned sofas and the bulky apparati chained to a coffee table and dusted with fingerprints and spilled drinks. Heavily armed National Guardsmen kept our carriage free of the ubiquitous singing beggars, break-dancers, and destitute families begging for a Healthcare voucher, the ragtag gaggle of Low Net Worth Individuals who had turned the regular cars into a soundstage for their talents and woes."

Or this description of Eunice's mother: "A great spidery web of defeat spread across her face--as if there lived below her neck a parasitic creature that gradually but purposefully removed all the elements that in human beings combine to form satisfaction and contentment."

As with many dystopian novels, from 1984 to Brave New World, Super Sad True Love Story can said to be less science-fiction than a prediction. Here's hoping it doesn't come true.