Book review: Super Sad True Love Story, by Gary Shteyngart

Published on Tuesday 31 August 2010 16:05

Granta Books, £12.99

GARY Shteyngart's wonderful new novel, Super Sad True Love Story, is a supersad, superfunny, superaffecting performance - a book that not only showcases the ebullient satiric gifts he demonstrated in his entertaining 2002 debut, The Russian Debutante's Handbook, but that also uncovers his abilities to write deeply and movingly about love and loss and mortality.

It's a novel that gives us a cutting, comic portrait of a futuristic America, nearly ungovernable and perched on the abyss of fiscal collapse, and at the same time it is a novel that chronicles a sweetly real love affair as it blossoms from its awkward, improbable beginnings.

Shteyngart spent his earliest childhood in Leningrad then moved with his family to the United States. Super Sad reflects his dual heritage, combining the dark soulfulness of Russian literature with the antic inventiveness of post-modern American writing; the tenderness of the Chekhovian tradition with the hormonal high jinks of a Judd Apatow movie.

This novel avoids the pretensions and grandiosity of Shteyngart's last book, Absurdistan, even as it demonstrates a new emotional bandwidth and ratifies his emergence as one of his generation's most original and exhilarating writers.

Super Sad follows a middle-aged sad sack named Lenny Abramov and a much younger beauty named Eunice Park. He is the son of Russian immigrants, she the daughter of Korean immigrants, and for all their differences both are afflicted by a lack of self-esteem - insecurities manifested in Lenny's self-deprecating humour, his compulsive need to try to make others like him, and in Eunice's bouts of anger and self-loathing, her fear that nothing she cares about can really last.

Both are burdened with their striving parents' unbearable expectations, and both are plagued by unlucky experiences in love. Slowly, haltingly, nervously, they begin to forge a partnership they hope will keep them safe in an unsafe world.

Super Sad takes place in the near future, and Shteyngart has extrapolated every toxic development already at large in America to farcical extremes. The United States is at war in Venezuela, and its national debt has soared to the point where the Chinese are threatening to pull the plug. There are National Guard checkpoints around New York, and riots in the city's parks. Books are regarded as a distasteful, papery-smelling anachronism by young people who know only how to text-scan for data, and privacy has become a relic of the past. Everyone carries around a device called an apparat, which can live-stream its owner's thoughts and conversations, and broadcast their "hotness" quotient to others.

It's "zero hour for our economy," says one of Lenny's friends, "zero hour for our military might, zero hour for everything that used to make us proud to be ourselves."

As recounted in Lenny and Eunice's own slangy diaries and their e-mail and text messages, their relationship is like a country song - a ballad of longing turning into love turning into loss. For him, it's a case of love at first sight. For her, it takes a little longer: she has to persuade herself that Lenny's schlubby looks don't matter, that his devotion to her is real. Eunice worries that Lenny's belief that "niceness and smartness always win" in the end is hopelessly naive, while he worries that her oppressive childhood has made her brittle and mistrustful.

"Things were going to get better," Lenny writes. "Some day. For me to fall in love with Eunice Park just as the world fell apart would be a tragedy beyond the Greeks."

In recounting the story of Lenny and Eunice in his super-caffeinated prose, Shteyngart gives us his most powerful and heartfelt novel yet - a novel that performs the delightful feat of mashing up an apocalyptic satire with a genuine supersad true love story.

This article was first published in Scotland On Sunday on Sunday, 5 September, 2010