Note: this review originally ran in August of 2010. We are posting it today, May 3, to coincide with the paperback release.
For all the pre-release expectation burdening Gary Shteyngart’s newest novel—his previous books, The Russian Debutante’s Handbook and Absurdistan, were critically praised, and this star-studded book trailer fanned the hype-beast as much as a (rare) trifecta of starred reviews from Booklist, Kirkus, and Publisher’s Weekly—perhaps most telling is the season into which it lands. It is summer, after all, and while we’re always hungry for the next great American something or other, we could all currently use a laugh.
Regarded among our country’s greatest satirists, Shteyngart is capable of shouldering such hype. And the novel’s immediate success is testament to Shteyngart’s acrobatic balancing act between humor and heartbreak. Here we have a dystopian world in which our current habits of social networking and consumption are pushed to their horrifying, but easily recognized, ends. And, as with all satire, part of the novel’s goal is rhetorical, a process that begins with its title’s nicely audacious claim.
It is a love story after all, one which finds, as Michiko Kakutani glowingly writes, “its Romeo and Juliet, its Tristan and Iseult,” in Lenny Abramov, 39, and Eunice Park, 24. The drama of the novel’s early sections is contained in Lenny’s clumsy attempts to woo young Eunice, a process he attaches to her “need of consolation and repair.” Despite the age gap, they appear right for each other: shallow, damaged, and manipulative as they are (“Why do attractive people have to be anything but themselves?” Lenny asks his diary; “I think I might have to stay over at that old guy Lenny’s house,” Eunice writes a friend). Both, though, speak of Lenny’s “very serious love” for Eunice as true and “EARNEST” force.
This EARNESTness is what causes Lenny, upon realizing that a friend’s “love” for his partner is a sham, to wonderfully diagnosis the situation thus: “They were together for the obvious and timeless reason: It was slightly less painful than being alone.” But with Lenny’s continuous references to “needing” Eunice, and wanting to “save” her from an abusive past, why should we view his "love" any differently? And what exactly does it mean when our nation’s de facto book critic of record treats such a superficial, performative, and radically childish “love story” as if it were the genuine, moving article of legend and lore? Has she been duped, or snookered?
More likely, it’s a testament to the place where she dwells. If there is in fact a heart beating inside Shteyngart’s novel (which I believe there is), it beats not for its characters, or their ill-advised abandonment of privacy, or even the frightening dilution of “truth” in their world, but for the capital-C City. Ah, New Yorkers! Our nation’s most enthusiastic regional authors! What, we might wonder, is the rest of the country doing while New Yorkers are watching their City fall? Aside from super brief reports from Los Angeles and passing mention to D.C., who cares!? Though to be fair, Shteyngart’s lines dedicated to New York are surely his most beautiful and touching, offsetting the ruckus with a quiet sentimentality that functions as far more than mere adornment.
But troubling still is the vagueness of effect illustrated by Kakutani’s, and others’, embrace of Shteyngart’s “genuine super sad true love story.” The reader who finds Lenny and Eunice (with their competing “dead smiles”) shallow, needy, and egotistical, and thus sees their “love” as an expression of terrible neediness and thinly veiled egotism, will have a vastly different experience with this novel than the reader who, like Kakutani, buys into their alleged love, feeling sadness with the characters rather than merely for them.
Rarely can today’s cultural objects be neatly classified as either “ironic” or “genuine.” And this contemporary blurriness of designed effect harkens back to a much older discussion of creativity itself, and the possibility of achieving real emotion through the manipulation of what’s fake. Today’s audiences demonstrate their comfort with such issues by, for instance, flocking to see Leo DiCaprio and Ellen Page’s quest for genuine “catharsis” inside of Inception’s deepest, and most fabricated realities.
Super Sad is “sometimes uproarious, other times poignant,” rightly notes Rayyan Al-Shawaf on The Millions. But Shteyngart stumbles when his uproar swings directly and violently against his sources of potential poignancy, which, if we're to believe the title, are “sadness,” “truth,” and ”love,” concepts that matter only inasmuch as we grant their signifiers (language) meaning. In terms of rhetoric, one of Shteyngart’s central points is look how shallow we’ve become: how we've abused language, stopped valuing literature, even forgotten how to talk deeply to one another in person (in the book it’s “verballing,” a kind of final social resort). A reader’s experience of a novel depends almost exclusively on the author’s choice of language. Here, Shteyngart has handed off language to several first-person epistles, relating their versions of truth in time-collapsing summary far more often than showing in close, real-time scenes.
Thus are Lenny and Eunice’s voices vital to the novel’s success, and also why the novel’s epistolary structure ends up working against itself. The vagueness buck runs, like all good bucks, straight to the top. Consider how, in Christopher Nolan’s film, doubt is thematic and necessary. In a novel such as this, though, where social values find themselves on a sort of public trial, such lack of authority can only (in my eyes) register as weakness. We can refer generously to a hands-off quality in Shteyngart’s narrative, yes, and appreciate the playfulness of the novel’s several first-person points of view, each rife with linguistic quirks. But satire is always at least potentially important, and here’s where things become tricky.
At its weakest moments, Super Sad’s version of satire can be seen as a kind of shield or authorial excuse: oh, it’s just a joke. Don’t take it so seriously. And this is why satire, especially when stretched to a novel’s length, can begin to feel…empty. When the primary force of a narrative is diagnostic—look how shallow, see how unhealthy our consumption—it’s only natural that we look harder for the author to suggest treatment toward a cure.
What Shteyngart offers instead is the cataclysmic final third of his novel, wherein true sadness finally raises the novel’s stakes from ironic hyperbole (“Things were going to get better,” Lenny says. “Someday. For me to fall in love with Eunice Park just as the world fell apart would be a tragedy beyond the Greeks”), to genuine pain and its effects. And while Lenny can only view the downfall from his own selfish point of view (“I’m so scared. I have no one. Eunice, Eunice, Eunice. Why must you break my heart, again and again?”), Shteyngart's dedication in this third act to the external world allows readers to see beyond these two shallow characters, into a realm of actual consequence.
Super sad, this book is not. Nor, quite obviously, is it true; and we could indeed have a long debate over its claim to love. But story, yes absolutely, this much is certain—and a rollicking one at that. Shteyngart’s third novel will certainly compel and even force you to think, though perhaps not as hard as it might have. But shit, man, it’s summer. Are we not entertained?
Kyle Beachy (www.kylebeachy.com) grew up in St. Louis and set his first novel, The Slide (Dial Press, 2009), in the city. The book earned the Chicago Reader’s “Readers’ Choice” award for “Best Book by a Chicago Author in the Last Year” in 2009, and Beachy has received fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and The Danish Arts Council. He teaches writing and literature at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the University of Chicago’s Graham School, Roosevelt University, and The University of Iowa’s Summer Writing Festival.
Cover image courtesy of Random House
