Sorry, but even in the future, nice guys finish last. Nice guy meets girl, nice guy loves girl a lot, girl moves in with nice guy, girl leaves nice guy for an evil charismatic friend-killing youthful 70-year-old boss. Classic. The final chapter of Gary Shteyngart’s My Super Sad True Love Story somewhat redeems protagonist, poor ol’ Lenny Abramov, where he retires in an old Italian village – where youth is not an obsession and he can age comfortably. Up until the final chapter, second generation Russian immigrant Lenny had been a balding 39-year-old Jewish man who loved a less than 90 pound, freckled, 24-year-old Korean girl, Eunice Park. The story takes place in the not-so-distant future, almost uncomfortably close to 2014. Appäräti are the more technologically advanced and complex iPhones of the future which obliterate privacy, more so than now. Information like childhood abuse, credit rankings and mood are available as well as a “Fuckability” ranking. Oh yeah, the future is incredibly sexualized. At one point Eunice mentions watching porn in kindergarten class.
The story begins and ends in Italy, but all the action takes place in economically failing America. Lenny has to bypass a digital otter to return home, who we meet several reincarnations of. Eunice leaves Italy because of her abusive father (a reoccurring theme in the novel, where äppäräti sounds similar to ‘father’ in Korean). She lives with Lenny in NYC, where the super sad true love story begins. Nice guy Lenny cries a lot and though Eunice only expresses spontaneous glimpses of affection, we believe she does love him back. Despite her coldness, she is sympathetic to the Low Net Worth individuals in the park and the elderly women in his building.
Immortality, a salient theme of the novel, is an option for High Net Worth individuals, a business which employees Lenny. His boss, and the man Eunice eventually leaves him for, is undergoing treatments (like dechronification and replacing blood with SmartBlood) to reverse aging. He is in his seventies but looks, as Eunice describes, like Lenny’s hot younger brother. His name is Joshie Goldmann, a powerful figure who we believe kills Lenny’s best friend Noah by blowing up a ferry. It can be speculated he posed as Lenny’s American mama, Nettie Fine, to kill Noah.
The virtual self, the äppäräti, is argued to be so essential to us that it gives us meaning and a sense of worth, depicted as “they couldn’t see a future without their äppäräti” (Shteyngart 270). When the technology momentarily fails, young people commit suicide because they “needed to be ranked, to know [their] place in this world” (Shteyngart 270). Today, the need for ranking is demonstrated by a need for likes, followers, friends, retweets on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. It is this deep connection to technology which is our downfall, where without it, we feel meaningless. My roommate’s voice echoing in my ears: “I would die without my iPhone”. Perhaps in the future, the virtual self will infiltrate our real selves until the two are indistinguishable. Perhaps, it will make life and death indistinguishable. I argue this may already be happening.
Today when someone dies, their virtual self lives on. The deceased’s online profile is inundated with messages. People write on his/her wall, tag him/her in photos and interact with the profile, rendering it an active site of communication. It’s like the online world doesn’t truly recognize death. The account does not die when the person dies. An article in the Huffington Post outlines this through the death of Anthony Dowdell, where friends would tag him at various locations, like he was there too, “as if he were still living” (Kaleem). This phenomena is mimicked when Eunice Park continues to message Grillbitch a.k.a Jenny Kang, who is suggested to have died.
Maybe it will be our online selves that live forever, or perhaps we will become semi-robotic like Joshie, filled with machines and SmartBlood. Modern medicine can already keep bodies alive long after the brain has died. But, with a skewed perception of death, we may inherit a skewed perception of life similar to Lenny’s: “if we have only one life to live, we might as well have not lived at all” (Shteyngart 275). The impending doom of death determines how we live on a day to day basis, if that element is removed, we may feel entirely meaningless. The ephemeral nature of life is suppose to make us seize the day, live every moment, and follow other inspirational quotes found on Tumblr or tattooed on skin. I want my virtual self to remain separate from me.
References:
Shteyngart, Gary. My Super Sad True Love Story. New York, New York: Random House, 2011. Print.
Kaleem, Jaweed. “Death on Facebook Now Common As ‘Dead Profiles’ Create Vast Virtual Cemetery.” Huffington Post 07 Dec 2012. Web.