The Search for Eternal Youth in a Yuan-Driven World
Gary Shteyngart is a melancholy Russian, a wandering Jew, an unassimilated American, a Swiftian satirist and a Gogolian taleteller. The voice of his novels is unique: rambunctious, fierce, funny—with a glaze of despair.
In Super Sad True Love Story, he manages to send up everything from America’s dependence on the Chinese yuan to chubby Jewish boys who fall in love with sleek Korean American chicks half their age. The world of Super Sad True Love Story is one in which a person’s youth, sexuality and credit-rating are all-important. Aging men spend their life savings in search of expensive attempts to turn back the clock, administered by a company called Post-Human Services where our hero, Lenny Abramov, works in various jobs depending on how successfully he sucks up to his boss. As if that weren’t enough for one novel, Super Sad also incorporates revolution, counter-revolution, the invasion of America by the People’s Republic of China and a mordant parody of our sexual consumer culture.
Shteyngart’s satire made me laugh out loud and moved me to buy his first two novels, The Russian Debutante’s Handbook and Absurdistan. I read them both, giggling. The cumulative effect of the three books, however, was oddly one of confusion. Shteyngart’s heroes are so similar: Russian-born New Yorkers, perpetually horny and reflexively anti-Semitic. Shteyngart’s anti-Semitism is not political in the least; the West Bank and Goldman Sachs are terra incognita. It isn’t even fresh. His Jews have big lips and noses, devour sturgeon and other greasy foods, sometimes relish being repulsively fat and feel humid lust when they aren’t wallowing in victimhood. They are the adolescents, if not the elders, of Zion, as imagined by Nazis. I get it, but I don’t like it. This kind of stereotyped image of Jews makes me itch. It probably makes Shteyngart itch, too. He’s too smart not to be aware of what he’s doing. But whatever. You can’t censor satire.
Super Sad is much better than either of the previous novels, which got enviable reviews on the whole. It shares with them the satiric provocations, the Russian-Jewish soul, but covers a broader canvas and features more complex and contradictory main characters.
Told in diaries and email, Super Sad gives the lovers, Lenny Abramov and Eunice Park, their own voices, their own ambivalence, their own take on the disastrous civilization Shteyngart has created for our future. And what a civilization it is!
The search for youth is obsessional and expensive. The new world, like our world, is divided into High and Low Net Worth Individuals, HNWIs and LNWIs. What’s left of America has capitulated to China’s economic power and financial super-strength. By the end of the book, the Chinese bankers and politicians are arriving in triumph and studying American emails as if they were literature. All very amusing.
Eunice Park is a middle-class Korean-American beauty from New Jersey who refuses to take her LSATs to please her fiercely ambitious parents. She is also allergic to “texts” and specializes in “images” and “Assertiveness Training” at the fictional Elderbird College. And Lenny is Shteyngart’s stand-in, an insecure, Russian-American Jew looking for love in all the wrong places. Love, for Shteyngart’s protagonists, is a search for “diversity”—as in the first two novels. African-American and Latina girls turn him on, and so do Asians. He’s hot for Caucasian women, too, but the oedipal feelings are too close for comfort. He loves Italians, for example. He adores and fears his Russian Mama, of course.
The plot of the novel parallels Lenny’s search for love—particularly his courtship of the beauteous Eunice, who finds him old, flabby and badly dressed. She likes his adoration, however, and eventually they live together with his smelly books and bookshelves. Cool people prefer electronic “texts.” The satire on old-fashioned book-lovers is fun. You feel it is, alas, coming true.
“After I left New York, I lived in Toronto, Stability-Canada, for the better part of a decade, where I changed my worthless American passport to a Canadian one and my name from Lenny Abramov to Larry Abraham, which seemed to me very North American, a touch of leisure suit, a touch of Old Testament. In any case, following my parents’ deaths, I could not stomach the idea of bearing the name they had given me and the surname that had followed them across the ocean. But eventually I crossed that ocean myself. I cashed in my…preferred stock, gathered all the yuan I had, and moved to a small farmhouse in the Valdarno Valley of the Tuscan Free State. I wanted to be in a place with less data, less youth and where old people like myself were not despised simply for being old, where an older man, for example, could be considered beautiful.”
So there you are. Lenny lusts for Tuscany. Can you blame him? The Valdarno is where all New York writers want to go after Brooklyn.
I have no problem with autobiographical heroes. I like them myself and know few writers who transcend their autobiographical roots. Why should we? They give us our intensity and humor. But I can hardly keep Shteyngart’s heroes straight.
Another thing: Is Shteyngart’s enormous bilingual vocabulary (like Nabokov’s) a cover for his adolescent attitudes? For there is much melancholy here, much identification with Ivan Goncharov’s novel, Oblomov, the eponymous protagonist who is a victim of self-inflicted lassitude. Just as the hero of Absurdistan is supposed to be an enormously fat oligarch whose immense girth does not seem quite believable, the nerdy Lenny of Super Sad seems too nerdy, too clumsy, too unlucky in love to be true.
Of course, Shteyngart is a satirist, and satire thrives on exaggeration. After all, Jonathan Swift neither intended for us to eat Irish babies nor to live with horses rather than human beings. Shteyngart also wants our hearts to break—or at least hurt. Yet his heart hurts mostly for his autobiographical protagonist, rarely for anyone else except his love objects. His verbal prestidigitation leads us to expect more. And since the line between memoir and fiction is wavy and getting wavier all the time, we might as well say, like the French, that we write “autofiction.” That would certainly be a relief. Tolstoy and Flaubert mined their own lives, and why not? This is not criminal. It is only writing about “what you know best.”
Reading Shteyngart makes you long for Tolstoy (called “Tolesoy” by Eunice Park. Her misspelling makes it seem that the great 19th century writer is an organic food.) It also makes you long for Joseph Heller (Catch-22), to whose work Shteyngart’s has been compared. But Heller sometimes knows the difference between empathy and self-pity. Shteyngart doesn’t always. The love in his love story is mostly self-love—which is exactly why it is super-sad. I look forward to what Shteyngart will write when he grows up. Born in 1972, he seems to me like a smart-alecky adolescent who thinks youth and parental praise will last forever.
But he is an entertaining and immensely gifted writer. He has a delight in absurdity which most of his contemporaries lack. He sees the world in a unique way, like those wildly distorted funhouse mirrors. I want to cheer him on despite my caveats. In truth, I identify with him. His eye is sharp. His satire is memorable. His longing for love is real. His exuberance is beguiling:
“They were talking youthfully: ‘…girl-threshing, Phoung ‘Heidi’ Ho,’ the new Vietnamese porn star. They used words like ‘ass hookah’ and teenaged abbreviations like TGV and ICE that brought to mind high-speed European trains. The wrinkle-free, wine-blushing Joshie, his body run through with new muscles and obedient nerve endings, leaned forward like a missile in mid-arc, his mind likely flooding with youthful instincts, the need to connect at any cost. I wondered, heretically, if he would ever miss being older, if his body would ever long for a history.”
Shteyngart longs for history. He longs for a place where you are allowed to grow old. He sees the world as a topsy-turvy dystopia. People talk incessantly on their “äppäräti” and worry about their net worth. When the Chinese invade, we know their empire will fall just like ours. They are as crass and consumerist as we, in their own ways. Shteyngart knows that corrupted ethics damn civilizations to ruin. He makes us know it, too. Our society is, like the Chinese, post-human. Reading Gary Shteyngart we yearn to assert our humanity again.
What more can you ask of a writer?
Erica Jong is a poet, novelist and essayist. She has published 22 books of poetry, fiction, criticism and non-fiction, including Fear of Flying.
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