The author of two critically acclaimed novels, The
Russian Debutante’s Handbook and Absurdistan,
Gary Shteyngart has risen to the top of the fiction world.
Now, in his hilarious and heartfelt new novel, he envisions
a deliciously dark tale of America’s dysfunctional coming
years—and the timeless and tender feelings that just might
bring us back from the brink.
In a very near
future—oh, let’s say next Tuesday—a functionally illiterate
America is about to collapse. But don’t tell that to poor
Lenny Abramov, the thirty-nine-year-old son of an angry
Russian immigrant janitor, proud author of what may well be
the world’s last diary, and less-proud owner of a bald spot
shaped like the great state of Ohio. Despite his job at an
outfit called Post-Human Services, which attempts to provide
immortality for its super-rich clientele, death is clearly
stalking this cholesterol-rich morsel of a man. And why
shouldn’t it? Lenny’s from a different century—he totally
loves books (or “printed, bound media artifacts,” as they’re
now known), even though most of his peers find them smelly
and annoying. But even more than books, Lenny loves Eunice
Park, an impossibly cute and impossibly cruel
twenty-four-year-old Korean American woman who just
graduated from Elderbird College with a major in Images and
a minor in Assertiveness.
After meeting Lenny on an
extended Roman holiday, blistering Eunice puts that
Assertiveness minor to work, teaching our “ancient dork”
effective new ways to brush his teeth and making him buy a
cottony nonflammable wardrobe. But America proves less
flame-resistant than Lenny’s new threads. The country is
crushed by a credit crisis, riots break out in New York’s
Central Park, the city’s streets are lined with National
Guard tanks on every corner, the dollar is so over, and our
patient Chinese creditors may just be ready to foreclose on
the whole mess. Undeterred, Lenny vows to love both Eunice
and his homeland. He’s going to convince his fickle new love
that in a time without standards or stability, in a world
where single people can determine a dating prospect’s
“hotness” and “sustainability” with the click of a button,
in a society where the privileged may live forever but the
unfortunate will die all too soon, there is still value in
being a real human being.
Wildly funny, rich, and
humane, Super Sad True Love Story is a knockout novel
by a young master, a book in which falling in love just may
redeem a planet falling apart.
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