Gary Shteyngart, Super Sad True Love Story

In many respects, Gary Shteyngart’s third novel, Super Sad True Love Story, is very similar to The Russian Debutante’s Handbook and Absurdistan. Once again, Shteyngart’s main protagonist, Lenny Abramov, is a nebbish who seems pitifully underequipped to deal with the world around him. As with his earlier novels, Shteyngart describes that world with what has become his trademark combination of exaggerated humor, absurdity, and biting political satire, a combination that often threatens to exceed the author’s control, but which he in fact pulls off beautifully. And once more, the novel is something of a bildungsroman, as the protagonist, who in many ways is painfully immature (despite being in his late 30s), struggles to grow up and achieve a measure of success, independence, and happiness. With all this said, there are a couple of aspects of this novel that make it a major departure for Shteyngart. For example, locating the novel in a near future where America has been reduced to a virtual subsidiary of China, the only global superpower left on the planet, allows the potential targets of Shteyngart’s satire to grow exponentially: consumerism, our addiction to networked information, the way that information defines who we are and how we relate to other people, the dominance of global corporations, the violence that underpins social order, and our overweening narcissism all come in for their fair share of criticism.Typically for the incurably romantic Shteyngart, the one potential bulwark against the escalating chaos that he portrays so vividly might seem to be love, but this is where he makes another major innovation in his writing. In his previous novels, Shteyngart’s protagonists hog the entire stage in first person narratives that reduce everyone else (even their love interests) to bit parts. In Super Sad, however, Lenny must share the stage with Eunice Park, his Korean girlfriend, as the novel alternates between Lenny’s diary entries and Eunice’s social media outpourings to her friends and family. This gives the reader a distance from the male protagonist that Shteyngart's other novels do not possess (or not to the same extent), thus lending a very interesting new dimension to his work. Some readers may feel that Shteyngart is more successful at realizing one character than the other (no prizes for guessing which!), but doubling the narrative voice in this way makes this novel, at least for this reader, the most enjoyable and ambitious undertaking of Shteyngart’s career thus far.