An apocalypic ‘Love Story’ as only Shteyngart can write it

America, as imagined by Gary Shteyngart in “Super Sad True Love Story” (Random House: $26), is teetering on the edge of apocalypse. Eternal life is available if you are rich enough, thanks to the invention of “smart blood,” but the U.S. government is so broke that the dollar is pegged to the yuan and the State Department is selling off its embassies to foreign oil conglomerates. No one but “the saddest, most destitute Albanians” wants to come here anymore. 

Shteyngart, author of “Absurdistan” and “The Russian Debutante’s Handbook,” is unique in American letters. Born in 1972 in what was then still called Leningrad, he came to the United States with his family at the age of 7. His new book is about America, but there is an unmistakably Russian strain of black humor at work here. Although we are invited to imagine the story taking place at some unspecified point in the future, Shteyngart is actually showing us the here-and-now in a funhouse mirror, and every absurdity and excess seems all too plausible.

“EUROPEAN CYNICISM,” Shteyngart writes at one point in a slightly different context, “or VERY SCARY TRUTH???”

The book is styled as the diary of Lenny Abramov, a “Life Lovers Coordinator (Grade G) of the Post-Human Services Division of the Staatling-Wapachun Corporation,” that is, a purveyor of immortality to those who can pay for it. “Not physically attractive, but at least well educated, decently paid, working at the frontiers of science and technology,” as he describes himself, “even though I have the same finesse with my äppärät as my aged immigrant parents.”  (An “äppärät,” we are given to understand, is a kind of portable computer that has, once and for all, replaced “media artifacts” like books, whose very odor is now offensive to the younger generation.)

Lenny’s passion is the quirky young Eunice Park. “On Planet Eunice Park, these attributes clearly did not matter,” he confesses. She is a “nice Korean girl” who thinks she is “probably a lesbian” and rules out a love affair, at least at their first encounter. “She told me I was a nerd, but a nerd who made her laugh.” When we read Eunice’s online account of the affair, as rendered in something like post-Twitter-speak, there is a glimmer of hope: “He was nice, kind of dorky, although he thinks he’s so Media cause he works in biotech or something.” Between these two parallel narratives, and against a through-the-cracked-looking-glass landscape of the not-so-distant future, the story of their romance unfolds.

But the real glory of “Super Sad True Love Story” is the wacked-out cultural and political milieu that Shteyngart has concocted. The distortions in the world we know now are slight and yet sufficient to be almost phantasmagoric. When Lenny walks into a bar, he is digitally scanned and assessed by women using their äppäräts; his MALE HOTNESS rating is a dismal 120 out of 800. Central Park is filled with “young Euro couples, pressing devalued dollars into the hands of T-shirt and trinket vendors,” or at least until rioting breaks out among the “Low Net Worth Protesters” and the National Guard is deployed. The Army is off fighting America’s latest war in Venezuela while enemy missile frigates are sailing up the Potomac.

Shteyngart’s sense of humor — and his real genius — is rooted in his ability to capture the way language distorts perception and, to put it more plainly, to show us the lies we are told and the lies we tell ourselves. At the airport — “a landscape of forlorn, aging terminals heaped atop one another like a vista of some gray Lagos slum” — the runways are patrolled by tanks, and cautionary signs are posted: “IT IS FORBIDDEN TO ACKNOWLWEDGE THE EXISTENCE OF THIS VEHICLE (‘THE OBJECT’) UNTIL YOU ARE .5 MILES FROM THE SECURITY PERIMETER OF JOHN F. KENNEDY INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT. BY READING THIS SIGN YOU HAVE DENIED THE EXISTENCE OF THE OBJECT AND IMPLIED CONSENT.” And he manages to sustain the inventive wordplay that is his trademark as a writer throughout “Super Sad True Love Story.”

Lenny and Eunice find themselves caught somewhere between love and death, “at the end of the busted rainbow, at the end of the day, at the end of the empire.” Lenny sustains a faint hope: “For me to fall in love with Eunice Park just as the world fell apart would be a tragedy beyond the Greeks,” he muses. “Things were going to get better. Someday.”

But nothing quite prepares us for the way the dystopian romance in Shteyngart’s book actually ends, a final act of self-invention that turns the whole remarkable world he has created on its head.

Jonathan Kirsch, author and publishing attorney, is the book editor of The Jewish Journal. He blogs at