Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart

“Oh, hi there,” a passage begins.

 It’s Lenny Abramov. You might remember me from our little time in Rome. Thanks for brushing my teeth! Hee hee. So, anyway, just got back to the US of A. I’ve been practicing my abbreviations. I think you said ROFLAARP in Rome. Does that mean “Rolling On Floor Looking At Addictive Rodent Pornography”? See, I’m not that old! . . . Call or write anytime. It was really, really, REALLY great to meet you. I’m committing the constellation of your freckles to memory as I write this (hope that doesn’t make you uncomfortable).

Starting this review with anything but Gary Shteyngart’s prose would be missing the point entirely. Perfectly overwritten and manically expressive, Shteyngart’s prose is the written equivalent of a Roz Chast cartoon: it’s verbal flop sweat. Shteyngart, whose family emigrated from the USSR to Queens when he was seven, may be the last great practitioner of the Jewish-American art of spiel, a Yiddish word that can mean a speech, a pitch, a performance, a hustle or–as it is most often used–all of the above. With its staccato rhythms, propensity for melodrama and anxious tics of capitalization and exclamation, Super Sad True Love Story is. above all else, a three-hundred-page spiel.

Shteyngart’s latest novel is set in a near-future dystopia. We are given very few details about what exactly happened, or what the limits of this dystopia are; we learn new details about the world even in the last ten pages. The world is defined instead by a torrent of neologisms and abbreviations: äppärät, the American Restoration Authority, “verballing,” LandO’LakesGMFordCredit, GlobalTeens, FACing, Mediastud, Columbia-Tsinghua, Credit Poles, minors in Assertiveness, TotalSurrender underwear, bottles of reservatrol, Onionskin jeans, Saami bras, the United Nations Retail Corridor, LNWIs, TIMATOV, PRGV and my personal favorite, the gleefully obscene JBF. The curt ugliness of these words is the framework upon which the dystopia is built. As the vocabulary suggests, it is a world obsessed with youth, looks, money, brute force, vulgarity, calculated social climbing and oppressive exhibitionism; in other words, a world permanently stuck in a stage of adolescence. And, like most adolescents, Shteyngart’s dystopia is fundamentally cruel–a word that forms a minor leitmotif within the novel. In Super Sad True Love Story, the rich trample over everyone else and an increasingly authoritarian American government plunges the nation into a military quagmire and financial disaster. Like most good dystopias, Super Sad True Love Story works because it hits devastatingly close to home.

Ingeniously, Shteyngart’s protagonist, Lenny Abramov, is no John Galt, determined to “stop the motor of the world.” Instead, he’s a sucker: craven, sycophantic and pitiful. As a nastily ambitious co-worker describes him, Lenny Abramov is a “greasy old schlub.” He works for a company that offers immortality to “High Net Worth Individuals,” and his only goal at the beginning of the novel is to make enough money to afford his company’s own treatments. He falls in love with Eunice Park, a shallow and vituperative college graduate who shows virtually no interest in him. He doesn’t want to fight the system; on the contrary, he wants nothing more than to climb to the top of it. What prevents him, in true tragic hero fashion, is his own inborn weakness. He reads too many dusty old books, struggles with the newest trends and slang, and is, in the final analysis, far too gentle to compete with the viciousness required by the world in which he lives.

Abramov’s utter lack of heroic qualities allow Shteyngart to execute the breathtaking about-face of the last third of the novel, which almost effortlessly shifts gears from hysterical satire to gut-wrenching tragedy as Abramov’s world falls to pieces around him. Astonished as Shteyngart pulled real pathos from characters who were mere punchlines in the first half of the novel, I could only marvel at the book’s structure. Super Sad True Love Story often risks ridiculousness because it means to be ridiculous, in the way that anyone truly and honestly “emoting” (to use the parlance of the novel) often is ridiculous. Shteyngart’s propensity for broad satire only serves as a smokescreen for the fact that he is capable of a bracing, moving sincerity that would challenge the skills of any of his New Yorker “20 Under 40” colleagues. In the end, Super Sad True Love Story is a very serious paean to those things that will never quite be cool: the American dream, nebbishness, vulnerability and love.

Reviewed by Dylan Suher

Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart
Random House, 2010.
Cloth, 352 pp., $26.00
ISBN-13: 9781400066407