Super Sad True Love Story

Super Sad True Love Story
By Gary Shteyngart
352 pp.
Random House (July 2010)

I turned to his book because I was feeling a craving to read something very contemporary. After reading James’ The Portrait of a Lady, I felt fairly eager to leave the territory of classic novel behind. Super Sad True Love Story is a good literary accompaniment to everything I learned and read from the first year seminar I took at UVa that was called “Exploring the Future.” In that seminar we read a slew of texts that opened my eyes to the fact that, whether I am aware of it or not, in the larger picture there are scientific advances that altogether aim to extend our lives, bring humans closer to immortality and farther away from death. That course inculcated the impression that in the none too distant future we, as the human race, are going to live significantly longer lives, probably achieving this extension by substituting the human aspects of ourselves—our flesh and blood bodies—with scientifically advanced, mechanic, robotic, and basically unnatural elements.

Shteyngart’s novel satirically paints a picture of this world, where HNWIs (“high net worth individuals”) have the means to achieve life extension/eradicate aging and death by paying for dechronification treatments; e.g. injecting “smart blood” into one’s system to regulate bodily operations. In this dystopic world, books are culturally irrelevant and essentially obsolete in the face of ubiquitous “äppäräts” owned by everybody, which are essentially iPhones with invasive, highly detailed search capabilities (but not really much more invasive than some institutions like Facebook currently allow us to be, or rather how they enable individuals to allow others to invade their privacy).

I’m learning to worship my new äppärät’s screen, the colorful 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.

…

My hair would continue to gray, and then one day it would fall out entirely, and then, on a day meaninglessly close to the present one, meaninglessly like the present one, I would disappear from the earth. And all these emotions, all these yearnings, all this data, if that helps to clinch the enormity of what I’m talking about, would be gone. And that’s what immortality means to me…it means selfishness. My generation’s belief that each one of us matters more than you or anyone else would think.

After the Exploring the Future seminar, my prevailing sentiment was in agreement with the thesis of the essay “Why the future doesn’t need us,” written by Bill Joy, co-founder of Sun Microsystems, which was essentially that the human race, and in particular the scientific community, needs to practice self control and restraint when it comes to exploring certain advancements. Like in the canonic English lit text, Shelley’s Frankenstein, the point is that we become so enveloped and consumed with the operations of a machine larger than our daily existence; the momentum is so much greater than the scope of the choices we make individually that we run the risk of not seeing where we are headed, and even when we do, are unable to arrest the inertia that is in motion. Super Sad True Love Story is a fantastic read because of the high intensity and humor that Shteyngart deploys in every single sentence—his style is incredibly full of energy, warmth and wit. At the heart of the novel is advocacy for relinquishment. In its depiction of such an absurd society, Shteyngart’s novel argues for electing to stay human and imperfect rather than hurtling towards a frightening future of life extension and the pursuit of immortality. At the heart of the novel and embedded in its protagonist, Lenny Abramov, is an intense self-consciousness and anxiety over one’s own defects combined, irrevocably, with a deep-rooted respect and admiration for humanity in its ‘defective’ condition and its creative endeavors.

What kept the sculptor here, in a city useful only as a reference to the past, preying on the young, gorging on thick-haired pussy and platefuls of carbs, swimming with the prevailing current toward his own nullification? Beyond that ugly body, those rotting teeth, that curdled breath, was a visionary and a creator, whose heavyhanded work I sometimes admired.

Lenny’s perspective of the sculptor emulates the reader’s perspective of Lenny and his outdated inclinations—reading literature (ostracized for his “smelly” books) when everyone else is glued to their shiny, new äppäräts which never betray any scent of age or animal decay. Shteyngart’s novel constantly reminds the reader of Lenny’s unattractiveness and insistently makes it clear that Lenny’s striving to shed his flaws is doomed to fail, and yet in failing Lenny is protected from a graver error, as illustrated by the choices made by the false paternal figure of Joshie Goldmann. Super Sad True Love Story gives us a picture of a dystopian society consumed with the pursuits of immortality and perfection, driven by those two themes that Rousseau proclaimed were deeply entwined: vanity and self-loathing, and driven by the fear of the loss of self, though selfhood is already undermined and occluded by the preoccupation of the fear of its loss.