In the near future (say next week or so) America is facing an economic crisis, and yet everyone is more interested in their personal devices and getting laid. Super Sad True Love Story is about the relationship between two people, and yet the most important parts seem to be more subtle, waiting for the reader to see that there is something wrong with the book’s setting.
This book is about Lenny Abramov, 39 year old son of Russian immigrants to America. Lenny works for an agency dedicated to extending the lives of its rich clientele, yet his time is never thought to be unlimited. He meets Eunice Park, a pretty young Korean girl whom is inexplicably attracted to Lenny and his nerdy ways. They live together in America during a time of economic collapse as its Chinese creditors are at the end of their patience for the nation.
When I started reading this book last after realizing that doing a book report meant reading the book, I was determined to finish it quickly so that I could write the review. Initially I skipped over smaller details and focused only on the key details of story of Lenny. While reading this way I noticed the word apparat appearing frequently. An apparat is a personal media device similar to out smart phones. During the story it is made apparent that while this world is set in present day technology has taken an even stronger hold over humanity then it has in reality.
Technology drives this world, replacing literary artifacts known as books and the chore known as a proper conversations can easily be avoided by burying oneself into their apparat. Yet technology hasn’t helped mankind, and relying on it more and more will only make us crash harder when we find out it doesn’t work.
The agency Lenny works for has been researching nanotechnology that would repair the bodies cells and restore it to an younger state. In the end of the book enough time has passed that Lenny’s boss Josh (whom had this technology used on himself ) has discovered that the technology isn’t successful in the long term and nature will take its course on the human body. This isn’t the only time technology fails humanity. Late in the story during the rupture, when America begins to collapse, everyone’s apparat all fail at the same time and remain offline for awhile before the network is restored. Despite these obvious failures, I considered the true failure of technology to be what it did to society while their apparats were online. Throughout the book Lenny is constantly reminded of how weird he is for owning a large collection of books, which are now referred to as printed bound media artifacts. There was a really weird line were the book breaks the fourth wall and refers to you as reading the book on a screen, as to say that books have disappeared from our world as well. That’s not technically true, at the spot I was thinking of its really referring to a character in the story but it felt like it was being directed at me when I read it. Not only is reading from paper non-existent, proper social interactions have fallen by the wayside. There was a point where Lenny and Eunice were in spending time alone together and Eunice would pay more attention to her apparat then Lenny. These apparats also calculate stats on people constantly and rank them in categories like personality, fuckability, and attractiveness against other nearby people. Whenever Lenny was in a crowded social area he would check his apparat to see that he was generally ranked as one of the least attractive males in the area, unless he had his arm around his sexy young Korean girlfriend.
The usage of these apparat are an exaggerated version of how my use our phones nowadays. In addition to saving us from the harsh world of social interaction they also do pretty much everything else we’d ask of them, such as streaming the news keeping track of the collapsing economy. During the section where the apparat all go offline people are stated to be a mess without them, some not being able to live in a world without their device.
Initially I ignored all the rampant over-usage of the apparat to focus on the love story between Lenny and Eunice, though eventually the world around them became weird enough that it seemed more important then their relationship, which was doomed to failure from the beginning (that isn’t even a spoiler, its pretty much given away in the title.) Whether Gary Shteyngart meant for the world to be more important then the story is up for debate, it is the most memorable part of the book left when all is said and done.
P.S. The author for this book looks like the biggest hipster I’ve ever seen.