"Dearest Diary,
Today I’ve made a major decision: I am never going to die. Others will die around me. They will be nullified. Nothing of their personality will remain. The light switch will be turned off. Their lives, their entirety, will be marked by glossy marble headstones bearing false summations (“her star shone brightly,” “never to be forgotten,” “he liked jazz”), and then these too will be lost in a coastal flood or get hacked to pieces by some genetically modified future-turkey. Don’t let them tell you life’s a journey. A journey is when you end up somewhere. When I take the number 6 train to see my social worker, that’s a journey. When I beg the pilot of this rickety United-ContinentalDeltamerican plane currently trembling its way across the Atlantic to turn around and head straight back to Rome and into Eunice Park’s fickle arms, that’s a journey."
Partly because the title is so tongue in cheek, partly because I had seen the book trailer (below) and partly because someone particularly unromantic recommended this book to me - I did not expect for this novel to actually contain any semblance of a love story...or at least one that would have absolutely any affective qualities. Don't get me wrong, this novel is also hilarious and ridiculous and terrifying. It takes place in a dystopian future in which everyone is constantly attached to their apparati - a device that lets anyone and everyone see what you are buying, how much money you have and allows each person to rate each other person according to fuckability and other such profound personal details. In this future the smell of books is embarrassing and eternal life is thought to be achievable. In fact, our would-be semi science fiction, comically clueless hero Lenny Abramov works for the Post Human Services division of the Staatling-Wapachung Corporation, a company whose seventy year old CEO has successfully maintained the appearance of a man in his thirties through the wonder of science. Lenny has heretofore been fairly uninterested in the prospect of eternal life, but when he meets Eunice Park, his view of the whole endeavor is transformed.
Lenny's long, painfully self conscious diary entries are contrasted strongly with Eunice Park's correspondence on GlobalTeens with her friends and family. Her messages are clipped, overly crafted with slang and obscenities, revealing absolutely nothing and everything all at once. Communication is an almost insurmountable feat for Eunice, for everyone really, so focused on the constant flow of information coming through the apparati that their genuine engagement with one another or themselves almost seems passe and quaint, a luddite's feeble quirk.
This world is rife for Shteyngart's brand of satire, and poke he does, lampooning the vapid consumerism that characterizes each interaction. Essentially, the population is so self obsessed and preoccupied with their fuckability ratings and apparati that the global capitalist complex has successfully produced the end of the American empire and the expansion of transnational powers. In this context, you would expect to hate the characters that are a product of this world, especially Eunice since her youth makes her all the more vulnerable to its influence. Instead, Shteyngart restrains the bitterness that so often accompanies satire, and crafts two incredibly heartbreaking figures attempting to build connections against this claustrophobic backdrop. Lenny clings to literary culture and believes wholeheartedly, in spite of all that has happened to him, in true love and romance. Eunice tries in vain to bridge the gaps between her devastating family members and searching for connection even as it becomes increasingly apparent that she is incapable of intimacy. Watching them struggle is both the beauty and the difficult of this novel, hence the super in the Super Sad True Love Story.
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