Super Sad True Love Story

August 30, 2010
In a near-future America that teeters even more desperately on the financial and political brink than it does today, aging 39-year-old Lenny Abramov and alluring 24-year-old Eunice Park build a doomed relationship on a shared need for emotional, physical, and financial security. Adam Grupper perfectly embodies Lenny, a socially awkward intellectual in a world that has no more use for books or philosophy, a man radiating a hunger for love and acceptance. Ali Ahn does well as Eunice, a shopping-obsessed young woman who allows her poor self-esteem issues to rule what could be a generous heart. Both readers also provide vivid portraits of supplementary characters; Ahn particularly shines as Eunice’s mother. A Random hardcover (Reviews, May 3).

Starred review from May 3, 2010
Shteyngart (Absurdistan) presents another profane and dizzying satire, a dystopic vision of the future as convincing—and, in its way, as frightening—as Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. It’s also a pointedly old-fashioned May-December love story, complete with references to Chekhov and Tolstoy. Mired in protracted adolescence, middle-aged Lenny Abramov is obsessed with living forever (he works for an Indefinite Life Extension company), his books (an anachronism of this indeterminate future), and Eunice Park, a 20-something Korean-American. Eunice, though reluctant and often cruel, finds in Lenny a loving but needy fellow soul and a refuge from her overbearing immigrant parents. Narrating in alternate chapters—Lenny through old-fashioned diary entries, Eunice through her online correspondence—the pair reveal a funhouse-mirror version of contemporary America: terminally indebted to China, controlled by the singular Bipartisan Party (Big Brother as played by a cartoon otter in a cowboy hat), and consumed by the superficial. Shteyngart’s earnestly struggling characters—along with a flurry of running gags—keep the nightmare tour of tomorrow grounded. A rich commentary on the obsessions and catastrophes of the information age and a heartbreaker worthy of its title, this is Shteyngart’s best yet.

November 15, 2010

Shteyngart's third novel, following the 2006 LJ Editors' Pick Absurdistan (not currently available on audio), is a satire set in a future world in which people's lives are perversely linked to technology; in which their very worth is based on scores, rankings, and private data that are no longer private but on display to everyone. The book alternates between middle-aged Lenny Abramov's diary entries and young Eunice Park's crude digital communications to her family and friends. Caught up in a Big Brother world, the two find an existence with each other mirroring a country divided by differences in technology, ethnicity, age, and outlook. Actors/narrators Adam Grupper and Ali Ahn bring these characters to life, perfectly voicing their perspectives. Not so much a sad love story about two people as one of an entire world. Recommended. [The Random hc, which was published in July, was a New York Times best seller; see Prepub Exploded, BookSmack! 2/18/10.--Ed.]--Beth Traylor, Univ. of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Libs.

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