Review by New York Times Review
EARLY in Gary Shteyngart's "Absurdistan" the narrator says he is "almost disabused" of the belief that he can fly. The word "almost" is beautifully exact. Shteyngart's characters never give in to reality all at once. They have immigrant skills and immigrant illusions, and they come from countries that are themselves in the process of migrating: in one novel a Russia that wants to be America, in another an America that imagines it is not Russia. These shifting, desiring nations are not without their counterparts in history, and the same must be said of the scene of "Super Sad True Love Story" - except that the transposition now occurs in time. We are reading the diaries of Lenny Abramov and the e-mails of Eunice Park and her friends and family - well, to be precise, we are reading "from" those texts, we don't know what the unselected matter looks like - and the action of the novel is situated in our future and in Lenny's and Eunice's past. The first edition of their work was published "two years ago" in Beijing and New York, although the story we have been reading took place "so many decades ago." Lenny and Eunice meet in Rome in June of an unspecified year and live out the few months of a semi-affectionate, needy, awkward, deluded affair until, in November, Eunice takes off with Lenny's boss, and Lenny, like his fictional forebear, becomes disabused of his favorite belief: in this case, that he can live forever. Why can't he? The novel's answer, in the end, is the same as reality's. But for most of the book the jury is still out - or rather shut out, refused a hearing. "Those who want to live forever will find a means of doing so" is what Lenny's boss says, a remark identified as "a cornerstone of the Post-Human philosophy." Lenny himself announces at the beginning that he is "never going to die," and he does this not out of pure longing but because he thinks it's a matter of putting in enough energy, money and dieting. He works for something called Post-Human Services, a research branch of a vast corporation that also deals in security and more or less runs the government. This unit is housed in a former synagogue close to Fifth Avenue and is trying to test its way to immortality. Lenny's boss, Joshie, for example, who turns 70 in the course of the novel, has had so many replacements of muscles and organs and blood that he looks younger than Lenny, who has reached the dangerous old age of 39. As Lenny remarks at one point, "the true subject of science fiction is death." There is a would-be vampire story lurking in the science fiction. Both Lenny and Joshie see in Eunice, an angry, beautiful 24-year-old Korean-American - her "usual face" is said to be one of "a grave and unmitigated displeasure" - not only a young person but youth itself, and something they can co-opt, make their own. But Eunice is not going to be anyone else's salvation. Lenny at least realizes that despite appearances (her California background, her addiction to shopping and her college major in Images and minor in Assertiveness), she is "not completely ahistorical." She has her inherited and experienced past (an abandoned Korea, an abusive father), just as he has the ruined Russia and the defensive Long Island of his parents. "How far I had come from my parents," he writes in one expansive passage, "born in a country built on corpses, how far I had come from their endless anxiety. . . . And yet how little I had traveled away from them, the inability to grasp the present moment." History, in this view, is just like time and aging; it doesn't let anyone go, although the dream of escaping its grip is recurring and irresistible. It doesn't let America go, either. The "prematurely old country" of the novel is run as a kind of war zone by the "Bipartisan" secretary of state, Rubenstein, who has installed the youthful Jimmy Cortez as a puppet president. The state of emergency is permanent, tanks are all over the place, and in a particularly brilliant invention, people are required to deny the existence of all the weaponry they see and to consent formally to the act of denial they have just performed. The only thing that keeps people really happy is their credit rating, if they have one that's high enough. Scores are publicly available on screens posted on every street and can always be checked on the devices everyone carries, instruments that work like iPhones designed for Orwell, providing instant background checks on anyone you might like to know, along with helpful ratings like that of your perceived desirability for sex or anything else as compared to other members of the group you're in. The area that used to house the Security Council is now the U.N.R.C. (United Nations Retail Corridor), a mammoth cross between a mall and a North African bazaar. A euro costs you nearly $9, and by the end of the novel this America, with all its "loud, dying wealth" and its quiet and ubiquitous poverty, has been taken over by a combination of Chinese and Norwegian business interests. The novel slows a little during what feel like rather dutiful ethnic encounters - Lenny takes Eunice to see his parents on Long Island, he meets her parents and sister at a "worship service" in Madison Square Garden - and for a while it seems as if a pre-post-human realist novel is trying to sneak into the satirical pages. But the writing is never less than stylish and witty, and the sense of disaster, here as in Shteyngart's other novels, is unfailingly lyrical, performed for full, funny rhetorical orchestra. When Lenny's world ends, when Eunice leaves him, when America's war on Venezuela comes home to Manhattan, when New York City is about to be turned into a spa for the very rich ("the idea is to rebuild New York as a kind of 'Lifestyle Hub'"), we are not exactly laughing, nor are we crying. It's true that Lenny, now Larry Abraham and a Canadian citizen, is still grieving for lost time and lost love, but Lenny likes to grieve, and besides, he's fictional. The sheer exhilaration of the writing in this book - Lenny's confessional tones, Eunice's teenage slang - is itself a sort of answer to the flattened-out horrors of the world it depicts. It's not that writing of any kind will save us from our follies or our rulers; but words are a form of life, and we can't say we haven't been warned. We're at war with Venezuela, and there's an Orwellian iPhone-like device in everyone's pocket. Michael Wood's book "Yeats and Violence" will be published later this month.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [August 15, 2010]
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In a near-future America that teeters even more desperately on the financial and political brink than it does today, aging 39-year-old Lenny Abramov and alluring 24-year-old Eunice Park build a doomed relationship on a shared need for emotional, physical, and financial security. Adam Grupper perfectly embodies Lenny, a socially awkward intellectual in a world that has no more use for books or philosophy, a man radiating a hunger for love and acceptance. Ali Ahn does well as Eunice, a shopping-obsessed young woman who allows her poor self-esteem issues to rule what could be a generous heart. Both readers also provide vivid portraits of supplementary characters; Ahn particularly shines as Eunice's mother. A Random hardcover (Reviews, May 3). (Aug.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Shteyngart's third novel, following the 2006 LJ Editors' Pick Absurdistan (not currently available on audio), is a satire set in a future world in which people's lives are perversely linked to technology; in which their very worth is based on scores, rankings, and private data that are no longer private but on display to everyone. The book alternates between middle-aged Lenny Abramov's diary entries and young Eunice Park's crude digital communications to her family and friends. Caught up in a Big Brother world, the two find an existence with each other mirroring a country divided by differences in technology, ethnicity, age, and outlook. Actors/narrators Adam Grupper and Ali Ahn bring these characters to life, perfectly voicing their perspectives. Not so much a sad love story about two people as one of an entire world. Recommended. [The Random hc, which was published in July, was a New York Times best seller; see Prepub Exploded, BookSmack! 2/18/10.-Ed.]-Beth Traylor, Univ. of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Libs. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
