‘Who isn’t afraid of death or loneliness or even intimacy?’ – Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart

Super Sad True Love Story is Gary Shteyngart’s third novel, and having finished it, I’m kicking myself that I haven’t already read his first two.  But I’ll postpone my dash to the bookshop to tell you all about the new one, so that you, too, can get as excited as me.  It’s funny and clever and, yes, super sad (if not entirely true), and thought-provoking and a really, really addictive read.   It’s set mostly in New York, in a near-future that isn’t specifically dated but I’d guess to be no more than twenty years from now, in which capitalism has gone into overdrive, corporations and banks have taken over the world (England is no longer England, but HSBC-London), virtual living has massively superseded regular in-the-flesh interactions, scientists are trying to crack immortality, and society, as we sort-of know it, is teetering on the brink of implosion.  America was once a beacon for refugees and entrepreneurs, but now it’s cracking up, the dollar is supported by the Yuan, and China is not-very gently knocking on the door – and meanwhile everybody buries their heads and desperately shops, ‘emotes’ on web-streams, and rates one another’s Credit, Personality and Fuckability on their ever-present iPhone-esque äppäräts.

Our hero is Lenny Abramov, the thirty-nine year-old only son of a pair of Russian emigrés, who’s working as a salesman (or Life Lovers Outreach Coordinator) on the immortality project, the Post-Human Services division of Staatling-Wapachung Corporation, a vast and creepy consortium which seems to pull the strings that trigger a violent political meltdown mid-way through the novel.  Lenny reads books, which makes him a bit weird and a more than a little sinister in this digitised age, he’s nostalgic for the old NYC neighbourhoods, ethnic groups mingling, America the Golden Land – but more than anything, Lenny’s afraid of dying.  He needs cash, and plenty of it, if he’s to reap the benefits of the dechronification treatments offered by his workplace, but he’s not a good salesman and he’s just been demoted.  Life’s looking down, and death is looming closer, when he meets Eunice Park and falls in love.  Eunice is twenty-four, the elder daughter of an abusive Korean podiatrist and his wife, she’s got a useless degree in Images and Assertiveness, she wants to work in Retail, the holy grail of attractive, wealthy, intelligent young women, and men flock to her – but really she’s lonely, insecure, afraid and worried about her responsibilities towards her family.  Then along comes Lenny – older, unattractive, clingy and ideologically suspect – and, to her friends’ and family’s dismay, she falls slowly in love with him.  With Lenny, Eunice feels safe, understood and accepted – and Lenny adores Eunice and can’t believe his luck.  She’s the stunning passport to social acceptance that’ll make his life, finally, turn around, and he’s her clumsy, awkward, lovable ‘brain-smart nerd-face’.  But with political tensions rising and outbursts of violence throughout the city, it’s hard to live a normal life – Eunice becomes involved with a group of activists fighting alongside the disenfranchised poor (Low Net Worth Individuals) to topple the fascist capitalist government, while Lenny becomes suspicious that his friends are government spies and afraid that Eunice will get hurt.  When the revolution comes, who’ll survive, and will Eunice choose Lenny or her family?     

The book is super sad, because, like Romeo and Juliet, our couple seem doomed and so does their world, and because the characters’ lives are saturated with fear – fear of death, fear of loneliness, fear of intimacy.  It’s a love story, and not only between Lenny and Eunice, but between Eunice and her family, between Lenny and his Russian heritage, between Lenny and the American and European past, between America and capitalism and between the whole world and the American free-market capitalism dream.  And it’s a true story, because though Lenny and Eunice are fictions, it’s pretty easy to see our world morph into their world.  And who isn’t afraid of death or loneliness or even intimacy?  Though it’s a love story, it’s also, in the grand tradition of 1984, a pretty dystopian narrative.  Shteyngart’s use of branding throughout to show the intensity of this über-capitalist society reminded me of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, where even the years themselves have a corporate sponsor (‘Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment’ always stuck with me).  The teen-speak that most of the characters employ is an exaggerated distortion of the text-speak and internet jargon that does the rounds of Facebook and message-boards today – acronyms a-plenty, and empty signifiers (‘ha ha’) tacked randomly on the end of sentences.  And the frantic Retail and Credit obsessions reminded me a little of Ballard’s later work – Lenny and Eunice living in a hollow, materialistic society that silences all dissenting voices.  It’s scary and incredibly believable; it made me look askance at my own iPhone (but only briefly, poor innocent gadget).  Lenny’s boss, Joshie, who set up the dechronification enterprise, is, like his whole country, trying very hard to stay young and fresh and relevant, while denying the visible cracks in his project.  At the end (spoiler alert) America is no more, and Joshie and all the others on his immortal bandwagon have suffered gruesome ends.  There’s no such thing as eternal youth, says Shteyngart; life moves forward, people age and die, and it’s time to shoulder that responsibilty and cease running away from it.  It’s not for nothing he has Lenny recite scenes from The Unbearable Lightness of Being to Eunice.  But in that respect, regarding responsibility, Eunice is the real heroine, not Lenny; her moral debate (family versus personal ambition) is the one her world refuses to acknowledge – self-centred narcissism isn’t a good strategy for life.  Interestingly, Shteyngart chose to tell the story through the characters’ hacked online accounts, so we get Lenny’s diary working in counterpoint to Eunice’s emails to her friends and her mother, and her archived instant messenger conversations with her little sister.  Despite the ultra-modern context, then, it’s a pretty old-fashioned format – the epistolary novel – which I liked, because it showed that no matter unrecognisable life might seem to become, it’s still linked to the past.  Eunice might be wary of Lenny’s volumes of Tolstoy, but her own communications aren’t very different from those of Pamela or Clarissa.

Any Cop?: I guess you’d want to like a bit of science fiction and techno-jargon – if you’re a hardcore Banville or Proust fan you might not like the frenetic pace and up-to-the-minute social commentary on digital life, social media, blogging and online shopping.  But otherwise?  Everybody, stick your thumbs up and then go read this.  It’s smart and poignant and very funny and should be sitting on your bookshelf right now.  

Valerie O’Riordan