Super Sad True Love Story: A Novel

by Gary Shteyngart
Random House, 352 pp., $26

Setting a literary novel in the near future is a choice potentially rife with pitfalls. Make it too similar to present day, and it feels tepid; create a world too far removed from what the reader knows, and they might confuse it with science fiction. The imagined future is ideally a hazy but recognizable world that follows current trends down logical paths, with a few curveballs thrown in. From there it’s the author’s responsibility to populate that world with characters that feel like they belong there.

Super Sad True Love Story‘s future has no personal privacy thanks to the required and constantly streaming steroidal iPhones around everyone’s necks. Women’s fashion has ended its charade; brands include JuicyPussy and panties from TotalSurrender. The United States – in complete fiscal shambles – is at the mercy of China to remain solvent. In the middle of this tragic and often hilarious world is almost-fortysomething schlub Lenny Abramov and the much younger and thinner Eunice Park. When Lenny isn’t plotting ways to win Eunice’s love, he’s working at Post-Human Services while also trying to earn enough money to purchase the PHS’ supposed cure for death. Eunice meanwhile constantly e-mails and emotes to friends and family as she struggles with her feelings for Lenny and with the increasingly volatile political system that is ready to detonate all around the couple.

Shteyngart’s strength is in creating voices for his characters. Moments of the first-person accounts strike the funny bone while running a shiver up the spine due to the depiction of a very imaginable future (echoes of the underrated Idiocracy abound). Eunice’s text-speak (BTWs, copious capitalization) and self-effacing talk never devolves into caricature, and Lenny’s diary entries are desperate and endearing. What Shteyngart forgets to include in Super Sad True Love Story, his third novel, is an actual love story. The increasingly frustrating duo never graduates beyond conveniently fixing what ails them psychically: Lenny’s desire for eternal life and Eunice’s craving for a positive male figure. Nor do their emotional fumblings come across as love. More evolution in the relationship could have added a bit of levity to the politically dense final chapters. In the author’s finely rendered future, it’s the characters narrating the story that remain two-dimensional.

This article appears in August 13 • 2010.

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James graduated from Columbia University in 2000 and moved to Austin a year later. Ever since, he has followed the arts and video game scene in ATX, editing and writing stories for the Chronicle along the way. Over his more than 20 years with the paper he has climbed the "corporate" ladder from lowly intern to managing editor.