Novelists are catching up with the times, framing their stories against the contemporary backdrop of economic and political turmoil. The hero of Jess Walter's excellent 2009 novel The Financial Lives of the Poets loses his job (in journalism, natch), his home and his wife...maybe. In Sam Lipstye's acclaimed comic novel The Ask, a man loses his job and begins a downward spiral. The main character of Paul Auster's recent Sunset Park is employed as a "trasher," part of a bank-employed team that goes through foreclosed properties to salvage what the unfortunates leave behind. Gary Shteyngart's new novel, Super Sad True Love Story, goes further. It's set in the future, "say, of next Tuesday" according to the book's jacket, to suggest where our culture and politics may be headed.
The practice of using social and political satire in novels is as old as Gargantua and Pantagruel. Like thousands of science fiction tales before it, Super Sad's twist is to take its story into the near future. But Shteyngart's tale is not science fiction even though it contains some yet-imagined technological advances. It's three-fourths of a boy-meets-girl story, set among slightly plausible, highly exaggerated political and social circumstances in a world on the brink.
Like all great satire, Sad True spares no one. Those on the right and the left will feel a certain discomfort (as will the wired, socially connected crowd) as they read through accounts of yuan-pegged dollar, the now truly-national National Guard and the all-powerful mega-merger corporations including (and we do mean including) AlliedWasteCVSCitigroupCredit.
In Shteyngart's world, right and left no longer matter. A simplified caste system is in effect, dividing the population between HighNetWorth Individuals and LowNetWorth Individuals. There are three types of employment: credit, media and retail. Only those in credit have a chance of becoming HighNetWorth and then only if they're desirable enough.
The Bipartisan Party, led by Defense Secretary Rubenstein (its slogan, “Together We’ll Surprise the World!” is uncomfortably suggestive of “We Will Win the Future”) is in control in partnership with the "American Restoration Authority " (ARA). The National Guard, fresh back from a disastrous action in Venezuela are reluctantly cooperating. Thanks to budget cuts (the Chinese are threatening to foreclose and the IMF is demanding change), the Guard isn’t getting what they’ve been promised. Media is mostly personal, broadcast generated from bar stools and toilet stalls. Sure, you have your choice between FoxNews-Prime and FoxLiberty-Ultra, networks that still focuses on gay marriage even as the forced relocation of LowNetWorth Individuals from Manhattan turns violent. But the surviving major networks don't seem to care that a lot of Americans have suddenly become disposable. Sound familiar?
The social networking generation comes in for special derision. People use their "apparat" to constantly monitor their all-important credit ratings at as well as the “Personality” and sexual desirability ratings of themselves and those around them. They're constantly “teening” and ordering the latest fashions from AssLuxury. Everyone is constantly churning data about everyone, privacy be damned. When service is interrupted, suicide skyrockets.
Shteyngart's hero in all this, Lenny Abramov, is a sort of misfit. He still reads those disgusting things known as "books." He falls in love for seemingly right reasons but with the wrong person. Told in text messages and diary entries (so quaint in the world of next Tuesday), Super Sad True Love Story is ultimately about our own mortality. There's no escaping it. The question is whether or not we can escape the demise of society and our own humanity satirized in Shteyngart's engaging tragi-comedy. Apparently, we have only until next Tuesday to turn things around.
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