Hope is unexpected find in Super Sad True Love Story

By Hal Tift

Gary Shteyngart has carefully examined the palm of our contemporary United States, and in "Super Sad True Love Story" he tells us, in hyperbolic fashion, just where this runaway train could be heading.

In Shteyngart’s dystopian world, an indistinct near future, people are more connected than ever thanks to powerful descendents of smartphones called äppäräts. An äppärät is a phone, computer, television and streaming video camera wrapped into one tiny mobile contraption (the newest version, the äppärät 7.5, is a pebble-sized pendant worn around the neck).

Protagonist Lenny Abramov, an unassuming, somewhat pathetic soul on the brink of 40 years old, would be the first to admit that for all their interconnectedness people are often lonelier, more isolated than ever. As he dines with a colleague, for instance, any eye contact is filtered by a “data fog” of äppärät projections, hovering over their table.

The notion of privacy is all but archaic. The common way to socialize at bars is to FAC (Form A Community), which in defiance of its name means to flash statistics about yourself for all to see, concerning mostly your sexual attraction to others in the bar and, of course, their sexual attraction to you; any need for physical interaction with others is essentially gone.

While Shteyngart doesn’t give us a precise year or even decade, there are hints that Lenny’s world is not so far removed from the contemporary world we readers know. Lenny’s parents were adults during the 1991 fall of the Soviet Union, for instance, and he occasionally references then-extinct 2010 staples like NPR or Starbucks. At one point, a rival colleague looks at Lenny’s out-of-date äppärät and scoffs, “What is this, an iPhone?”

Lenny is the bridge to ourselves, to an earlier time and civilization that made sense. He owns and occasionally even reads books (or “nonstreaming Media artifacts”), items that baffle most characters who are confronted with their existence. Even he cannot completely transcend his era though, as he proclaims elegantly in his journal, “I’m learning to worship my new äppärät’s screen, the pulsating mosaic of it, the fact that it knows every last stinking detail about the world, whereas my books only know the minds of their authors.

But before one ever opens the book, there is the inescapable impression that Lenny’s earnest pursuit of happiness is fleeting. The words Super and Sad hang heavy like dark titular clouds over the entire story, injecting even the happiest moments with a deep pathos

You expect their relationship to be as broken as the country is, especially given the age difference and Lenny’s overwhelming shortcomings as they are publicly perceived in this future, but their love for each other consistently amazes you for how genuine it is, especially the love that Eunice returns to Lenny, which catches you off guard; it is an oasis of hope for the reader in a mostly hopeless America. The question is whether the reader can really embrace that hope with such a title looming.