Super Sad True Love Story, Gary Shteyngart's latest, is about a lot of things, mainly life, love and death. If this sounds like a tall order, it is, but in my view he pulls it off, although I have to confess that I had a hard time getting into the story, which begins with the first of several entries from the diaries of Lenny Abramov, an engaging, overweight--or so he says--late '30s son of Russian immigrants. Lenny is a "Life Lovers Outread Coordinator (Grade G) of the Post-Human Services division of the Staatling-Wapachung Corporation," an enterprise aimed at extending life, or even defeating death. It's sometime in the too-near future and the United States is on the decline, China on the rise, and Shteyngart gives his readers a dystopia, an Orwellian nightmare of a world that precedes to disintegrate before our very eyes. In the midst of the chaos Lenny falls in love with Eunice Park, a much younger woman of Korean descent who loves him back, but who can't quite accept his old-world values, such as clinging to his books when the rest of the world has moved on to electronic media. Books are so dirty, don't you know, and they smell!
In short, it's not a great world out there, and it quickly gets worse as New York is invaded and turned into a dog-eat-dog world. Lenny and Eunice survive, thanks to the mysterious power of the head of Lenny's corporation, but in the end--I won't give it away--Lenny has escaped to Tuscany to reflect back on the collapse of the American Empire.
There were moments when the book reminded me of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaiden's Tale in its depiction of a Dystopia--the gimickiness of which can get tiresome--but in the final analysis what makes it live, and what caught me up, is the convincing depth of Lenny's Chekovian despair, his knowledge that death defines life and his final acceptance of this as part and parcel of the human condition. Another aspect of the novel, which is so clever on the surface, is Lenny's relation to his immigrant parents, and his recognition that he is them, that they define him with their love and with the tragedy of their lost world and their inability to turn themselves into Americans. In other words, for all its seeming slickness, this is a good, old-fashioned novel, updated perhaps, but essentially, at heart, as much the child of Chekhov as of Milos Kundera, whose Unbearable Lightness of Being plays a role in one scene of the novel, when Lenny finds that it does not provide what he needs in an exploding world.
