Super Sad True Love Story
About Super Sad True Love Story
Gary Shteyngart sets a love story inside an America coming apart. Financial anxiety, social-media pressure, political coercion and the pursuit of perpetual youth shape the world in which Lenny Abramov meets Eunice Park. Lenny's attachment to printed books already makes him an awkward inhabitant of that future. The possibility of intimacy has to compete with the systems through which people measure themselves and one another.
The novel's satire works on two scales at once. A national crisis supplies the public setting; embarrassment, desire and fear of rejection supply the private one. Lenny and Eunice are not simply illustrations in an argument about technology. Their relationship gives the larger argument its emotional stakes: what becomes of affection when people learn to regard both themselves and prospective partners as products?
Status, Technology, and Intimacy
This is a useful book to read beyond the question of which predictions came true. That question can obscure the more durable inquiry into status and mortality. The fear of being left behind, of becoming unattractive or irrelevant, is older than any device. Shteyngart places those familiar vulnerabilities in an exaggerated future so that their workings are difficult to ignore.
Questions for Discussion
For discussion, consider the uneasy alliance between comedy and tenderness. When does the satire bring the characters into focus, and when does it tempt us to judge them from a safe distance? The novel offers a way to think about what literature can preserve when a culture increasingly mistakes information about a person for knowledge of one.
Edition: Random House Trade Paperbacks paperback, 2011-05-03, 352 pages. ISBN 9780812977868. This listing identifies a publisher-documented reading edition; the printing visible in the New York library photograph has not been established.
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