The truth about Super Sad True Love Story

Super Sad True Love Story is a brilliant new satirical novel, set in the near future, built on what writer Gary Shteyngart realized was the crucial difference between the great futurist novels Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley, and l984, by George Orwell (of course). 

As Shteyngart points out in this typically great interview with Teri Gross, as a novel of ideas, Brave New World is a superior book. But we don't remember it very well, because we don't connect with the characters. In l984, by contrast, even though it's really just a thinly disguised Stalinization, we do remember the book, because Julia and Winston are passionate lovers, pitted against a brutal future. Because their love is on fire, the novel — despite the thinness of its vision — sticks with us still. 

The love in Super Sad True Love Story isn't as passionate, but it's real, and funny, and through the eyes of nerdy Lenny and cruelly practical Eunice, we experience the crushing of our hopes for the future of our world. Amusing and harrowing, as Jane Smiley said in her review. It deserves its best-seller status. 

But the deeper truth is that the writer Gary Shteyngart is as close as we come today to an Oscar Wilde. 

Most writers at a reading stammer on for half an hour or so, and offer a few spiky answers to questions, and they're gone. Shteyngart read for about fifteen minutes, and then took "questions and complaints" for forty-five minutes, delightfully, with no sign of flagging. 

He's so much funnier in person than his books, as amusing as they are, that it wouldn't be too surprising if in the not-so-distant future, as his wit overtakes the interest people have in reading media artifacts, (aka books), he becomes famous for his quips, and no longer need write at all.  

After all, how well do we remember Oscar Wilde's plays, compared to his remarks? 

Here are a couple of examples of his wit, harvested from a reading witnessed at the Skirball Center in L.A. a month or so ago. The overarching topic was America in decline. 

American fiction is great. It would be nice if somebody read it. 

The Netherlands was once a great mercantile empire. Now it's just a great place to get stoned. We can still hope to grow up to be Santa Cruz writ large. 

The painful truth that Shteyngart is wrestling with in the book is not political. He doesn't really care about politics. He cares about books, and sees that that we are moving towards a "post-literate" Google/Facebook/TV future in which no one really reads or even watches movies (though, perversely, everyone wants to be a writer). 

Being a good writer, Shteyngart doesn't tell us this so much as show it to us, by dividing his novel between one half, written by a nerdy fortyish brilliant character named Lenny, in diary form, which resembles what we think of as literature. The other half of the story, written by his much younger girlfriend Eunice, is in the form of emails to her mother, sister, and best friend. She writes in the harsh glaring style that forms so much of text/email discourse. It's a dramatization of now versus soon. 

A couple of examples; here's Lenny in his diary: 

I glanced at [his former coworkers, in the immortality company]…How perfect they looked. How absolutely striking and up-to-the-minute and young. even in the middle of calamity, their neuro-enhanced minds were working with alacrity, trying to solve the puzzle, trying to get back in [to the company that would guarantee their future]. They had been prepared from an evolutionary perspective to lead exalted lives, and now civilization was folding up around them. Of all the rotten luck! 

And here's Eunice, who's Korean by the way, "teening" to her best friend about life with Lenny:

And now my mom will know I'm dating an old hairy white guy. So I told Lenny he can't tell my mom that we're going out and he got really upset, like he thinks I'm ashamed of him or something. He says that I'm trying to push him away because I'm substituting him for my father, but that he won't let me, which is pretty ballsy for a nerd-face…Things have been pretty up and down with us, although he finally had some Magic Pussy Penetration Time and it wasn't bad. What he lacks in looks he more than makes up for in passion. I thought he was going to explode. 

More on the ideas of this satirist novel in shorter future posts. Suffice to say this book is brilliant, but if you're one of those five percent of the population who reads ninety-five percent of the books, because you love the elegance of literature, the sharpness of this novel will be painful, quite painful, at times. 

For a lighter look at the book, here's a hilarious promo for it, scripted by Shteyngart himself: 

At the reading he said he loved the movies. Wouldn't be too surprising to see him write one.