Super Sad True Love Story: A Novel
Gary Shteyngart
While I am not inherently predisposed to believe the seemingly universal fawning praises of the mainstream book reviewing media for certain books, neither am I wholly opposed to its opinions. Never, however, can I recall reading a book that received such high reviews but which was so disappointing and, in fact, just plain bad. Such is the case with the way overzealous, way too self-indulgent Super Sad True Love Story which, of all these words, really only contains a "story." This story, however, is underwhelming at best and ruthlessly disturbing at worst, predicated on a whiny older man's creepy obsession with a nearly anorexic 20-something in a thinly disguised dystopian "America" that consists solely of New York City. That Lenny, the book's primary (and alarmingly unsympathetic) protagonist and narrator, is a fairly obvious stand-in for the author, a circumstance that explains his ridiculous and otherwise entirely bizarre obsession with his Ohio-shaped bald spot (no, literally), in no way excuses the entirely wayward attempts of the book's hapless author. Shteyngart seems to confuse excessive, too-much-information detail and whininess with good, evocative description and daring character development; instead, Super Sad True Love Story is, like its disturbing and obsessive main character, a complete and insufferable mess.
There are redeeming qualities to the book, though they are few and far between. There are times when the author does show a true gift for the English language, although these gems are often lost due to the banality of the plot surrounding them or readers' disgust with the characters writing or participating in them. Some of the elements of Shteyngart's self-indulgent stab at dystopian satire are illuminating, such as his half-baked, pseudo-Bradburian vision of a post-book (but not, as the disarmingly false jacket copy so enthusiastically announces, illiterate) near future (one that cannot, despite the enthusiastic protestations of the jacket copy, ever conceivably occur "next Tuesday," given its own internal chronological reference points) and his keen perception of immigrants' affection for an adopted United States, but where the book goes for funny it inevitably falls entirely flat. Jokes and winks, such as they are, are wielded with as blatant an Obvious Hammer as I've ever seen, to the point where any satire in the book becomes completely ineffective as the author's obvious lack of talent for tact or subtlety overrides any poignant points he might actually make given a hint of restraint. Instead, the book reads like the product of a spoiled, indulgent, ne'er-do-wrong, holier-than-thou literary hack whose preoccupation with The Big Questions overrides concern for sympathetic characters, a sensical plot, and/or a setting that could, when treated with any degree of narrative talent, be painfully revealing. Likewise, anything interesting the author may have to say about society is swallowed in woefully self-aware and self-laudatory prose dripping with a look-at-me-I-am-a-literary-darling inaccessibility and pointlessness. The book has unlikeable characters: how daring! No. How insufferably stupid, vapid, and unreadable.
Where, exactly, does Shteyngart go wrong? While an author certainly shouldn't be faulted for attempting to explore what an extrapolation of our current digital-driven communication habits might mean, his attempt at describing an äppärät-driven word is as exaggerated as the unnecessary umlauts, and any salient points he makes about over-sexualization are surely lost in the book's prurient (and, frankly, disturbing) obsession with things like see-through "jeans" and synonyms for a woman's nether regions and unmentionables. Nor is the treatment of government much more cleverly drawn, Shteyngart appealing instead to the rabid anti-Cheneyism that may have worked in 2006 but which now seems laughably out of place. This is a shame, because some of the fears raised in this novel seem legitimately based on a cynical view of current trends, an Orwellian future disturbingly well-linked to our current situation but whose punch is lost in its pure absurdity. Cute little tricks the author seems to find clever, such as representing mega-conglomerations in nearly-unreadable and frankly untenable mashups of brand names (AlliedWasteCVSCitigroupCredit is an impossible name even after the requisite, and unlikely, mergers) or having non-black characters refer to each other as "Nee-gro" with no discernible context, are instead bulky and lazy, drawing attention to the author's brazenly displayed need for recognition.
That Shteyngart is receiving this desperately-sought recognition is disheartening, because among the poorly contrived satirical elements and disgusting main character, the plot and writing are full of holes, the plot holding less weight than the collapsing dollar holds relative to the surging yuan. There is no explanation given for the current political situation above a lazy attempt to scream at readers, "You're all morons! Look what you idiots are doing to yourselves!" and an attendant, implied, "I am the only one clever enough to see this coming! And look at the hip umlauts! Welcome to the future, we're Scandinavian here!" Moreover, though the book's conceit as a dual narrative between creepy Lenny's diaries and messages from object of his unbalanced affection Eunice Park is clever and does balance their two voices, it is inconceivable that any diarist writes in such flowery language. And if, indeed, readers believe dear Lenny does use such elegant phraseology and incorrect tenses in his daily writing, they must be forgiven for despising him even more strongly in the book's epilogue than at its onset, a seemingly impossible task for which Shteyngart must be lauded.
One particularly clumsy oversight has Lenny reflecting that someone who has not at this point in the narrative died, and whom he interacts with on a daily basis, as "always having had" a certain personality quirk, the implication being that the aforementioned party has died. Only someone with extremely severe egomania would ever write this way, and the worst part of the mess is that this is indeed shown to be possible for Lenny in the book's horrific epilogue, in which Shteyngart (in the guise of older, wiser, and thinly disguised (and, don't forget, bald-headed!) Lenny) oh-so-cleverly dismisses his own book as being written without forethought for publication. In doing so, the author not only fails to justify his own overwrought prose but also makes Lenny even more unlikeable than he already is; again, an almost unfathomable achievement.
Not all books must have entirely wonderful characters to be good or to be respectable, but a focus on such relentlessly, egregiously terrible human beings, who are supposed to be sympathetic, simply will not endear readers to a work. Lenny is whiny and dense, and when Shteyngart attempts to cleverly drop hints to readers he forgets that he is having his lead say things like, "Oh, it's odd this other character would talk this way…so suspicious," only to remain completely clueless about the revealed possibility until the post-action epilogue. There is nothing wrong with an author allowing readers to stay one step ahead of characters, but to have narrating characters openly and unambiguously disclose this information, only to seemingly forget it mere letters later, is just terrible and reeks of the laziness that plagues this book. Even the slang, which at first seems clever (not, of course, counting the bizarre and bizarrely äppärät-specific umlauts), is overdrawn by book's end, and more than one gaping plot hole is left to insinuation where some scraps of meaningful societal criticism could still be salvaged. This, of course, discounts the black whole gaping where the promised love story belongs, replaced with a flailing excuse for "love" so feeble it can't even pass for one of Shteyngart's frankly stupid attempts at satire and criticism.
In the end, the boat sails on Super Sad True Love Story the minute it opens, the book a self-indulgent mess masquerading as incisive social commentary. Within its jumbled pages are a series of half-baked ideas and wholly unlikeable situations, painfully rendered in prose stilted not by the deliberate misspellings of its writers (which, surprisingly, musters the closest thing to realism within this book) but by the insistence of its overbearing and ever-present author. In the end, the book fails on every promise offered in its offensively inaccurate jacket description and in its title: make no mistake, this is a flailing, unsympathetic, utterly unbelievable tale that mistakenly equates disturbing and disgusting sexual obsession (and a healthy amount of emotional abuse) with love and, worse, congratulates itself for doing so. Gary Shteyngart's Super Sad True Love Story is not even elegant in its failure, instead representing a terribly self-indulgent literary cesspool receiving admiration for its uncreative pandering to the modern literati rather than for any inherent merit.
Grade: D