Super Sad True Love Story: A Novel

by Gary Shteyngart

Overview

A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK
 
SELECTED ONE OF 10 BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY MICHIKO KAKUTANI, THE NEW YORK TIMES
 
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY
The Washington Post • The Boston Globe • San Francisco Chronicle • The Seattle Times • O: The Oprah Magazine • Maureen Corrigan, NPR • Salon • Slate • Minneapolis Star Tribune • St. Louis Post-Dispatch • The Kansas City Star • Charlotte Observer • The Globe and Mail • Vancouver Sun • Montreal Gazette • Kirkus Reviews

In the near future, America is crushed by a financial crisis and our patient Chinese creditors may just be ready to foreclose on the whole mess. Then Lenny Abramov, son of an Russian immigrant janitor and ardent fan of “printed, bound media artifacts” (aka books), meets Eunice Park, an impossibly cute Korean American woman with a major in Images and a minor in Assertiveness. Could falling in love redeem a planet falling apart?

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781400066407
Publisher:	Random House Publishing Group
Publication date:	07/27/2010
Pages:	334
Product dimensions:	6.62(w) x 11.08(h) x 1.23(d)

About the Author

Gary Shteyngart was born in Leningrad in 1972 and came to the United States seven years later. His debut novel, The Russian Debutante’s Handbook, won the Stephen Crane Award for First Fiction and the National Jewish Book Award for Fiction. His second novel, Absurdistan, was named one of the 10 Best Books of the Year by The New York Times Book Review, as well as a best book of the year by Time, The Washington Post Book World, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Chicago Tribune, and many other publications. He has been selected as one of Granta’s Best Young American Novelists. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, Esquire, GQ, and Travel + Leisure and his books have been translated into more than twenty languages. He lives in New York City.

Hometown:

New York, New York

Date of Birth:

1972

Place of Birth:

Leningrad, USSR

Education:

B.A., Oberlin College, 1995

Read an Excerpt

Super Sad True Love Story

A Novel

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By Gary Shteyngart

Random House Trade Paperbacks

Copyright © 2011 Gary Shteyngart
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780812977868

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DO NOT GO GENTLE
FROM THE DIARIES OF LENNY ABRAMOV

june 1 
Rome–New York 
Dearest Diary,

 Today I’ve made a major decision: I am never going to die. Others will die around me. They will be nullified. Nothing of their personality will remain. The light switch will be turned off. Their lives, their entirety, will be marked by glossy marble headstones bearing false summations (“her star shone brightly,” “never to be forgotten,” “he liked jazz”), and then these too will be lost in a coastal flood or get hacked to pieces by some genetically modified future- turkey. 

Don’t let them tell you life’s a journey. A journey is when you end up somewhere. When I take the number 6 train to see my social worker, that’s a journey. When I beg the pilot of this rickety United- ContinentalDeltamerican plane currently trembling its way across the Atlantic to turn around and head straight back to Rome and into Eunice Park’s fickle arms, that’s a journey. 

But wait. There’s more, isn’t there? There’s our legacy. We don’t die because our progeny lives on! The ritual passing of the DNA, Mama’s corkscrew curls, his granddaddy’s lower lip, ah buh- lieve thuh chil’ren ah our future. I’m quoting here from “The Greatest Love of All,” by 1980s pop diva Whitney Houston, track nine of her eponymous first LP. 

Utter nonsense. The children are our future only in the most narrow, transitive sense. They are our future until they too perish. The song’s next line, “Teach them well and let them lead the way,” encourages an adult’s relinquishing of selfhood in favor of future generations. The phrase “I live for my kids,” for example, is tantamount to admitting that one will be dead shortly and that one’s life, for all practical purposes, is already over. “I’m gradually dying for my kids” would be more accurate. 

But what ah our chil’ren? Lovely and fresh in their youth; blind to mortality; rolling around, Eunice Park–like, in the tall grass with their alabaster legs; fawns, sweet fawns, all of them, gleaming in their dreamy plasticity, at one with the outwardly simple nature of their world. 

And then, a brief almost- century later: drooling on some poor Mexican nursemaid in an Arizona hospice. 

Nullified. Did you know that each peaceful, natural death at age eighty- one is a tragedy without compare? Every day people, individuals— Americans, if that makes it more urgent for you—fall facedown on the battlefield, never to get up again. Never to exist again. 

These are complex personalities, their cerebral cortexes shimmering with floating worlds, universes that would have floored our sheepherding, fig- eating, analog ancestors. These folks are minor deities, vessels of love, life- givers, unsung geniuses, gods of the forge getting up at six- fifteen in the morning to fire up the coffeemaker, mouthing silent prayers that they will live to see the next day and the one after that and then Sarah’s graduation and then . . . 

Nullified. 

But not me, dear diary. Lucky diary. Undeserving diary. From this day forward you will travel on the greatest adventure yet undertaken by a nervous, average man sixty- nine inches in height, 160 pounds in heft, with a slightly dangerous body mass index of 23.9. Why “from this day forward”? Because yesterday I met Eunice Park, and she will sustain me through forever. Take a long look at me, diary. What do you see? A slight man with a gray, sunken battleship of a face, curious wet eyes, a giant gleaming forehead on which a dozen cavemen could have painted something nice, a sickle of a nose perched atop a tiny puckered mouth, and from the back, a growing bald spot whose shape perfectly replicates the great state of Ohio, with its capital city, Columbus, marked by a deep- brown mole. Slight. Slightness is my curse in every sense. A so- so body in a world where only an incredible one will do. A body at the chronological age of thirty- nine already racked with too much LDL cholesterol, too much ACTH hormone, too much of everything that dooms the heart, sunders the liver, explodes all hope. A week ago, before Eunice gave me reason to live, you wouldn’t have noticed me, diary. A week ago, I did not exist. A week ago, at a restaurant in Turin, I approached a potential client, a classically attractive High Net Worth Individual. He looked up from his wintry bollito misto, looked right past me, looked back down at the boiled lovemaking of his seven meats and seven vegetable sauces, looked back up, looked right past me again—it is clear that for a member of upper society to even remotely notice me I must first fire a flaming arrow into a dancing moose or be kicked in the testicles by a head of state. 

And yet Lenny Abramov, your humble diarist, your small nonentity, will live forever. The technology is almost here. As the Life Lovers Outreach Coordinator (Grade G) of the Post- Human Services division of the Staatling- Wapachung Corporation, I will be the first to partake of it. I just have to be good and I have to believe in myself. I just have to stay off the trans fats and the hooch. I just have to drink plenty of green tea and alkalinized water and submit my genome to the right people. I will need to re- grow my melting liver, replace the entire circulatory system with “smart blood,” and find someplace safe and warm (but not too warm) to while away the angry seasons and the holocausts. And when the earth expires, as it surely must, I will leave it for a new earth, greener still but with fewer allergens; and in the flowering of my own intelligence some 1032 years hence, when our universe decides to fold in on itself, my personality will jump through a black hole and surf into a dimension of unthinkable wonders, where the things that sustained me on Earth 1.0—tortelli lucchese, pistachio ice cream, the early works of the Velvet Underground, smooth, tanned skin pulled over the soft Baroque architecture of twentysomething buttocks—will seem as laughable and infantile as building blocks, baby formula, a game of 

“Simon says do this.” 

That’s right: I am never going to die, caro diario. Never, never, never, never. And you can go to hell for doubting me. 


From the Hardcover edition.

Continues...

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Excerpted from Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart Copyright © 2011 by Gary Shteyngart. Excerpted by permission of Random House Trade Paperbacks, a division of Random House, Inc.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Reading Group Guide

1.     What elements of Shteyngart’s dystopian near-future do you see in our contemporary world?

2.      In that same vein, do you feel that we really are in, or are headed for, a post-literate age? Have a media-saturated environment and short attention spans affected our ability to read and appreciate books?

3.      Lenny and Eunice come from two opposing cultures and have different ethnic backgrounds. While he is a ruminative book reader, hers is the generation of the instant and fleeting. For all their differences, why do you think Lenny and Eunice are drawn together? What do they share in common in terms of their personal history?

4.      After a trip home to Long Island, Lenny contemplates an existence that is “at the end of the busted rainbow, at the end of the day, at the end of the empire.” What does he mean by this? Do you feel that we are at the end of an era?  

5.      Lenny’s employer, Post Human Services, offers the promise of life extension for High Net Worth individuals. How do you think losing the assurance of death, a great equalizer, would affect the dynamic of society? If you had the option, would you seek out immortality?

6.      Super Sad True Love Story is an epistolary novel—one written as a series of documents. Discuss the how Shteyngart’s use of diary entries and digital exchanges impacted your reading experience.

7.      One target of Shteyngart’s satire is the value placed on youthfulness. Discuss how this preoccupation manifests itself in the novel—consider Eunice’s relationship with Lenny and Joshie, The Post Human Services, and representations of the elderly.

8.      Lenny has been described as a twentieth century man in a twenty-first century world. How, specifically, is he anachronistic to the “new” New York?

9.      Shteyngart includes elements of science fiction, romance, and dystopian fantasy.  How do you think each of these genres manifests itself in the novel?  Why is each important? 

10.  Super Sad True Love Story treads into dark territory—mortality, heartbreak, the demise of a culture—yet, as a satire, it relies heavily on humor for its social criticism. In your opinion, how important is humor in evaluating and responding to the world in which we live? 

11.  Though Super Sad True Love Story  is set in the (very near) future, there is a strong immigrant presence that also harkens back to the American past.  Discuss the portrayal and significance of immigrants in the novel.

12.  In the Super Sad universe, there is no such thing as a private detail. In our world, what do you feel are the benefits and pitfalls of social media? Where should we draw the line in terms of what we broadcast about our personal lives?

Editorial Reviews

Gary Shteyngart is worried about the future. He is worried about the failure of democracy, about the degradation of language, and about our increasing enslavement to technology. He is worried about money. He is worried about death. For anybody who has read his earlier novels The Russian Debutante's Handbook and Absurdistan, this state of heightened anxiety probably won't come as a surprise. Shteyngart writes in an ironic register that, for all its antic humor, belongs to the long tradition of Russian melancholia. It's fitting that with his new novel, Super Sad True Love Story, Shteyngart has devoted himself more fully to his adopted homeland than in either of his previous books. He tends to traffic in provincial nations staving off collapse, and here that role falls to the United States. Lenny Abramov, our hero, is a weak-willed, first-generation American, the son of Russian immigrants with an unwavering faith in their new motherland despite its increasing resemblance to the authoritarian oligarchy they left behind.

Shteyngart specializes in places slightly askance of the real -- the Prague-like Prava of his debut, the hapless post-Soviet state of Absurdistan. This time we are in New York, but a New York some untold years hence, an amped-up version of today's city. Wall Street has consolidated into a small handful of corporate monoliths like LandO'LakesGMFordCredit; America's ruling Bipartisan Party, mired in debt to China, enforces its power with Halliburton-like military contractors; books, now antique objects, draw distaste less for their highfalutin obscurity than for their peculiar smell; and all aspects of life are governed by all-knowing äppäräti. (Think fancier iPhone, but with exponentially higher power and needless umlauts.)  The details of Shteyngart's futuristic universe are at once overwhelming and disconcertingly familiar. For better or worse, it's not all that hard to imagine.

Perhaps to offset the descriptive overdrive of Shteyngart's dystopian vision, Super Sad True Love Story traces the classical arc promised by its title. Narrated in alternating chapters by Lenny and Eunice Park -- Lenny's in diary entries that fall somewhere between retro and archaic, Eunice's via an online social network called GlobalTeens that makes Facebook look as benign and well-meaning as the milkman -- the novel follows the flowering of their unlikely romance. Lenny, on the brink of forty, works for a company that promises eternal life to "High Net Worth Individuals"; Eunice, some fifteen years his junior, is a full-fledged citizen of the new world order. She speaks in acronyms and scrolls through her äppärät for deals on sheer pop-off panties.

As our Virgilian guide to this hyper-modern future, Lenny has too much information to relay to sound authentic -- at least at first. As in his previous work, Shteyngart has trouble knowing when to stop; not every detail of New York in 2030, or whenever it is, needs its moment before the lens for us to understand how this civilization bears up against our present. His failure to filter leaves some jokes that are too easy: a gentrified Staten Island is imaginative, a channel called FoxLiberty-Ultra virtually a given. An old soul wide-eyed at the world he has inherited, Lenny maintains a naïveté that allows Shteyngart to set his stage. Even his friends treat him like a relic, as when one explains the elaborate art of picking up women: "The personality score depends on how 'extro' she is…Check it out. This girl done got three thousand-plus Images, eight hundred streams, and a long multimedia thing on how her father abused her. Your äppärät runs that against the stuff you've downloaded about yourself and then it comes up with a score. Like, you've dated a lot of abused girls, so it knows you're into that shit." It's a narrative convenience, how little Lenny takes for granted.

Shteyngart paints his scenery vividly, but it's the smaller moments that jolt. A lover's "muscles stirring somewhere deep beneath her skin like phantom gears." Eunice taking up a book for the first time, "massaging the book's back, maybe even enjoying its thickness and unusual weight, its relative quiet and meekness." An elephant in the zoo "slowly flick[ing] back one massive ear, like a Galician shopkeeper of a century ago spreading his arms as if to say, 'Yes, this is all there is.'" Shteyngart's eye for the lingering humanity within this sterile world of media and machines is what makes the excessive exposition worth working through, and why his entry into the crowded field of dystopian fiction ranks several cuts above. The novel's transition from knee-jerk satire to something deeper is almost imperceptibly subtle. I first noticed it almost 150 pages in, when Eunice describes a man as "actually quite handsome, tall and Germanic looking." It's a small detail, but "Germanic" is not an adjective I expected from a character whose first words in the novel were "What's up, twat? Missing your 'tard?'"

Eunice, whose chapters initially seem a facile case study in the numbing effects of technology, gradually emerges as the first genuinely complicated female character Shteyngart has written. The child of an abusive Korean immigrant father and zealously religious mother, Eunice is somebody for whom the diversions of the modern world provide useful, even necessary, cover. Shteyngart's patience in letting her character slowly crystallize is his most remarkable feat. The awakening of her consciousness owes itself, at least in part, to Lenny, a man-child in the vein of Shteyngart's earlier protagonists. For all his anachronism -- or more likely, because of his anachronism -- Lenny is able to provide Eunice with an unquestioning love that re-humanizes her. In the wake of the sudden collapse of the Bipartisan government, a murky political event called "The Rupture" that kills one of Lenny's best friends, Lenny suddenly realizes the extent of her metamorphosis:

She wailed from a place so deep that I could only connect it with somewhere across the seas, and from a time when our nations were barely formed. For the first time since we've met, I realized that Eunice Park, unlike others of her generation, was not completely ahistorical.

In the end, Shteyngart is proven right: we, as readers, need Lenny's nostalgia, and it turns out Eunice does too. His sense of past, and the sense of past he imparts to her, are what give the novel its stakes -- otherwise, the future wouldn't look so terrifying.

The quiet care with which Shteyngart lets his story build on its own terms is what makes it so frustrating when he ends on a cheap note. The novel concludes with an epilogue by Lenny to what turns out to be the published version of his diaries, interspersed with Eunice's correspondence. We have been reading a curated version of their past. (Why books are suddenly fashionable again is not addressed.) "Since the first edition of my diaries and Eunice's messages was published in Beijing and New York two years ago, I have been accused of writing my passages with the hope of eventual publication, while even less kind souls have accused me of slavish emulation of the final generation of American 'literary' writers," Lenny reflects. The reality is, Shteyngart could stand in their company if he would allow himself, instead of giving in to his tendency to burden his novels with increasingly outlandish plots. So why the cop out? After writing what, for all its futurism, is essentially a tragedy in the classic mold, did Shteyngart feel he needed a gesture of deference to that most alluring of contemporary commodities -- hope? Or is he issuing an apologia for the minor flaws of his novel?

Nonetheless, Super Sad True Love Story is an achievement. The author manages at once to satirize the grotesqueries of our era, our hubris and our excess, while sustaining an intense pathos for the individuals forced to bear the fallout, as the best satires do. Shteyngart is a great writer, but only a very good novelist, and one hopes he will soon get the broad architecture of his novels to match the sophistication of the characters who populate them.

--Amelia Atlas

In a near-future America that teeters even more desperately on the financial and political brink than it does today, aging 39-year-old Lenny Abramov and alluring 24-year-old Eunice Park build a doomed relationship on a shared need for emotional, physical, and financial security. Adam Grupper perfectly embodies Lenny, a socially awkward intellectual in a world that has no more use for books or philosophy, a man radiating a hunger for love and acceptance. Ali Ahn does well as Eunice, a shopping-obsessed young woman who allows her poor self-esteem issues to rule what could be a generous heart. Both readers also provide vivid portraits of supplementary characters; Ahn particularly shines as Eunice’s mother. A Random hardcover (Reviews, May 3). (Aug.)

Publishers Weekly

This cyber-apocalyptic vision of an American future seems eerily like the present, in a bleak comedy that is even more frightening than funny. Though Shteyngart received rave reviews for his first two novels (The Russian Debutante's Daughter, 2001; Absurdistan, 2006), those appear in retrospect to be trial runs for his third and darkest to date. Russian immigrant Lenny Abramov returns home to Manhattan of the indeterminate future, following a year in Italy, only to find his career as "Life Lovers Outreach Coordinator (Grade G) of the Post-Human Services division" in jeopardy. Just shy of 40, he is already coming to terms with his mortality amid the scorn of much younger, hipper careerists, as he markets eternal life to those with the wherewithal to afford it. The narrative alternates between the diary entries of Lenny and the computer log of Eunice Park, his much younger and reluctant Korean girlfriend whom he'd met in Italy and eventually persuaded to join him in the States. Lenny's diary is itself an anachronism, since this "post-literate age" lacks the patience to scan text for anything longer than political bromides or marketing pitches. The society at large finds books "smelly," though Lenny still collects and even reads them. "Media" has become an adjective (positive, all-purpose) as well as a noun, and some familiar institutions have morphed into Fox-Ultra and The New York Lifestyle Times. Both Lenny and Eunice are fully fleshed-out characters rather than satiric caricatures, but their matter-of-fact acceptance of Bi-Partisanship masking a police state, and of the illiterate, ebullient and Orwellian American Restoration Authority as a bulwark against the country's collapse (the waiting list to move to Canada exceeds 23 million), makes this cautionary tale all the more chilling. The narrative proceeds in a surprising yet inevitable manner to the outcome the title promises. When Lenny realizes "I can't connect in any meaningful way to anyone," he's writing about not merely a technological breakdown but the human condition, where the line distinguishing comedy from tragedy dissolves.

Kirkus Reviews