Think, for a moment, about everything that’s wrong with America, unnecessary wars, crippling debt, health problems, drug problems, and increasing levels of illiteracy. Think about Facebook: the end of privacy, the rise of narcissism, and teen girls acting all slutty and shit.
Okay, that last one may not be your biggest concern, and you’re probably not hyperventilating over the other things either. But Gary Shteyngart is. As a satirist and a member of fiction’s New Yorker-anointed next generation, it’s his job to find cavities in our culture and perform root canals until it hurts. As a self-identified voice of the Russian Jewish immigrant experience, it’s his fate to be at least a little bit disappointed.
Shteyngart’s new novel, “Super Sad True Love Story,” is essentially a pop-literary version of “Idiocracy” — Mike Judge’s comedy about the dumb America of the future — in which the emotion doesn’t feel forced. In the author’s colorful new dystopia, the U.S. is a broke dictatorship where “Credit Poles” tell you to spend or save depending on your race, people don’t read because books are considered smelly, The New York Times has become The New York Lifestyle Times and Fox News, as Judge’s film also predicted, is doing just fine.
Protagonist Lenny Abramov — a fictional Stern graduate, FYI, which feels both terrifying and reassuring — works in Post-Human Services, trying his best to sell High Net Worth Individuals (HNWIs) on the idea of immortality. Love interest Eunice Park is a brash, naive ingenue who does most of her communicating on GlobalTeens, a site with the ubiquity of Facebook and the trashiness of MySpace.
In “Absurdistan,” Shteyngart’s last novel, the protagonist was an obese Russian immigrant who bumbled his way into the top bureaucracy of a backward former Soviet state and pined for a black girl from the Bronx. Now we have Lenny, a schlubby second-generation immigrant who’s doing about as well as you can do, career-wise, in America-gone-to-shit and who pines for a Korean girl from California. Are Shteyngart’s books autobiographical? I guess it depends on his taste in women. Whatever the case, there’s something very Woody Allen about the way he veers between self-deprecation and wish fulfillment.
What makes the book a “Sad Story” and, ultimately, a “True Story” is precisely what makes it more fulfilling than “Absurdistan,” the Onion News Network and every other doomsday satire short of “Dr. Strangelove”: a search for value. An appreciation for where it lies. Lenny, ensconced as he is in a culture that has been literally and figuratively devalued, falls for the aspects of Eunice, a fellow second-generation immigrant, that come from someplace else. In a world where her “Fuckability Rating” (a solid 800) is public info, Eunice falls hard for Lenny’s blind, old-fashioned devotion. The dollar is either inflated or pegged to the yuan; the human heart — the human body, even in the case of Lenny’s artificially youthful boss — proves priceless.
And boy, is Shteyngart in touch with the human body. To put it bluntly, his writing can be pretty gross. But it’s gross in a beautiful way, a lyrical way; you get the sense that he works really hard to string together unique combinations of inappropriate metaphors, bodily details and emotional profundity, like a master potter who can’t stop making clay penises. Witness one of Lenny’s many ecstatic observations:
“I’ve seen this particular gent publicly crapping before, but the pained expression on his face, the way he rubbed his naked haunches while he shat, as if the June heat wasn’t enough to keep them warm, the staggering grunts he spat at the direction of our city’s cloud-streaked harbor skies, made me feel as if my native street was slipping away from me, falling into the East River, falling into a new time wrinkle where we would all drop our pants and dump furiously into the motherland.”
In a characteristic reference to vagina, Shteyngart (okay, “Lenny”) describes “breathing in the slight odor of something authentic and human.” And that’s essentially what he’s trying to produce with his romance-within-satire experiment: raw, pungent humanity caught between the farts and belches of an overweight empire. It’s entirely to his credit that we can smell it, too.