Reviewed: “Super Sad True Love Story” by Gary Shteyngart

Random House, 2010

352 Pages

Nobody wants to die, but sooner or later, we have to give in and realize that it’s going to happen. But while all of our bodies vanish from the Earth, there are certain people lucky enough to have their names etched into history, inscriptions in libraries, park benches with plaques, the titles of life-prolonging medications they helped discover, and so on.

There is one bright spot: history saves a space for people who do extraordinary things. Do something great and the lifespan of your name doubles.  Obviously writers are no different.  I’m doubtful that anybody sets out to write a great novel, get on the New York Times best seller list, and then die (à la Stieg Larsson), only to be forgotten in twenty years.  The sad reality is that very few writers can produce the sort of works that live long after they’ve passed on.  And even fewer get to have an eponym in their honor: Orwellian, Kafkaesque, etc. With his third novel, Super Sad True Love Story, Gary Shteyngart writes of a dystopian future that could go alongside 1984, Brave New World, and Fahrenheit 451 on your bookshelf, and has done it in a very Shteyngartian way.

Steeped in the subconscious or not, Super Sad True Love Story (S.S.T.L.S. from here on out) is Shteyngart’s grab for immortality.  From the first sentence, when his character proclaims “I am never going to die,” you have to wonder if he’s making a Freudian slip,  or is it a brilliant set up for the satire we’ve learned to love?

Three books in, the self-hating, Russian Jew has become Mr. Shteyngart’s calling card, and he plays that card here.  Still, S.S.T.L.S. is a different book than his previous two, which felt very similar in tone.  The Gogol-throated giggle from a wide-eyed immigrant that made him famous has been replaced by the nervous, critical and pessimistic outlook of someone who has lived in New York for too long. In this nightmare, Lenny is possibly the last sane person left in an America whose glory days are long behind it.  He’s pathetic, sure, but he actually values intelligence, unlike the folks who seem to be the non-flesh eating cousins to the zombies in Dawn of the Dead, another fantastic satire of our sinking cultural values.  They roam the streets of New York, living off their smart phones, buying everything they can on credit, and acting like sexist pigs.  It’s the sort of scenario that would terrify any reasonable person to the bone, mostly because it could already be happening. A dystopia is always a utopia for someone else.  Here, I feel that Shteyngart has gone ahead and written a novel about the troubles he sees now in our world, and the roads to nowhere we are headed down.  Is that a problem?  Absolutely not. In the hands of one of the best writers of the last ten years, we should consider this commentary a gift. But Shteyngart’s own plot twist raises one interesting question: if a book this good predicts a future where nobody cares about reading, how will Shteyngart’s name live forever?  He may have just written himself out of history if the future he creates comes to life.