Super Sad True Love Story
a look at the accuracy of Shteyngart's dystopia, thirteen years later
Gary Shteyngart was born in St. Petersburg when it was still called Leningrad. He emigrated to the US at the age of seven and became a novelist, known for his signature style of pessimistic social commentary.
His 2010 novel, Super Sad True Love Story, asks what would happen if every worst impulse of the American Order manifests to its entirety. Though not explicit, the story takes place circa 2030, and presents a troubling prediction for humanity’s near-future. Media and Retail professionals run culture, and to be outside of these fields is to be socially irrelevant. Meanwhile, financiers secretly receive the greatest treatment, the finest lifestyles and strongest physical security. Companies merge until they are all one mutant version of their originals. Credit cards are issued by Land o’ Lakes or AlliedWasteCVSCitigroup, and the National Guard is operated by banking institutions. The IMF goes from being a shadow government of global world order to the literal rulers of every individual currency. Our iPhones become ubiquitous and dominant— we cannot see people without them, we cannot understand words but only photos, our net-worth and Fuckability ratings drift above our heads like heinous halos. And lastly, the paradigm between the Chinese and US economies swaps: we are no longer spenders in great debt, but savers so that Chinese citizens may spend. The Chinese Yuan sky-rockets in worth, and US Dollars are only valuable so long as they are Yuan-pegged. Throughout the novel, the value of a Benjamin decreases to zero, and social media influencers scavenge the streets to earn one measly dollar imprinted with the face of the Chinese Prime Minister.
Shteyngart’s novel revolves around two central characters, lovers, who each introduce the other to the half of the world they are missing. Lenny Abramov is a second-generation Jewish man in his late thirties who keeps actual, smelly books in his apartment and takes a year-long sabbatical from work to wander Europe and ‘find himself,’ aka struggle to sleep around and appreciate fine works of classical architecture. He is old-worldly, in today’s terms a 90’s-kid with a nostalgic love language and an enamoration with the written word. He is ugly, poorly dressed, and keeps surface-level friends while lusting after younger women. Lenny works for a cult-leader/finance guru billionaire who founded a lifestyle company which sells eternal youth to other .1-percenters. It is unclear what his role in the company is, but he was there at the founding, and his cult-like younger-looking father-figure seems to be protective of him. Lenny is about my age, born in the late-90’s, and represents a rare stand-out in a generation of internet-bred Gen-Z’ers who have given in to the all-too-easy allure of immersive technology, and in the process have given up Presence in the Real World.
He falls, predictably, for Eunice Park, early-20s, educated but completely devoid of appreciation for the physical world, incapable of reading a full book and obsessed with remaining trendy. Eunice’s secret, besides her seemingly eternal youth, is that she was beaten by her immigrant father and to this day knows the visceral fear of disappointing an abusive loved one. This keeps her, as the older male characters in the book continuously note, “real.” She is street smart, and knows how to look after a lover, knows how to commit and trade romance for security, and when to trade-in for a higher net-worth lover (hence the “sad” of the super-sad-true story).
“Even death, my slender indefatigable nemesis,” writes Lenny to his journal, “seemed lackluster compared with the all-powerful Eunice Park.” Rather than reduce Eunice to the function of her youth, Shteyngart infuses her with life via the use of messages she sends to an old friend, her family, and a crush. He reduces the dominance of his protagonist’s narrative by undermining his experiences and reflections with the alternate take, the thoughts and opinions of his girlfriend. It strikes me as a balanced flow of differing perspectives which doesn’t interrupt the story but still keeps the reader in well-informed territory.
About ten years shy of when the novel supposedly takes place, I want to take a look at how well his dystopia matches up with the current moment.
Some things Shteyngart pretty much nailed timeline-wise:
-the prevalence of smart phones and their ability to wedge themselves between human beings and obfuscate their ability to connect on a wholesome level.
-the merging and conglomeration of seemingly disparate multinationals under parent companies with increasingly messy sway over political factions
-the practice of incessant live-streaming for cultural capital. The book was written years before Twitch, TikTok, or Reels, and features several Influencers with a wide arrange of gimmicks to constantly vie for the attention of faceless followers.
-the trajectory of US / China relations?
-the failure of college students to actually read assigned texts
What did he get wrong*?
*This section is not to suggest that he made poor predictions. Dystopia is, at its best, a warning via the interpretation of trajectories. They are not meant to say “we will end up here,” but more, “look what may happen if this gets worse.” Further, the classification of ‘dystopia’ is prescriptive, and the term is never used by Shteyngart within the text. Would the characters in the book say, “damn, this shit is mad dystopic”? Lenny certainly would, but the bulk of characters would moreso think, this is what’s up and that is that, and a few would actually assert that the state of the world in the novel is headed in a positive direction, an economically sound and preferred order.
Anyways:
-the death of books. Covid was amazing for the prevalence of paper-bound books, and although literacy rates are stagnant in the short-term, local sense, they are sky-rocketing globally, long-term1. It feels like a substantial enough subset of the populace will at least pretend to appreciate literature enough to keep the artform alive for several more decades. I feel the same about the Wall-E version of humanity’s future. If you recall, the surviving humans are immobile and grotesque, practically incapable of standing on their own malformed legs because they spend so much time seated and staring at screens (Wall-E was fucked, man). It takes place hundreds of years down the line, but I feel like those athletics-obsessed, constantly active, annoyingly fit people have at least a good thousand years left (and by Lindy standards.. 200,000 years)
-the timing of the death of Paul Reubens (he was about ten years early).
-the powerlessness of political institutions. Sure, the façade is pretty much stripped bare, it is no secret that most of our politics are bought and sold by large corporations. But there is still some semblance of public servitude. In the novel, corporations pretty much wait until the whole system collapses and then flip a switch to take control. In the real world, there was no possibility on, say, January 6th, for Amazon.com to take command of the Senate. Fifty years from now? Maybe. But the Defense budget is still quite a bit larger than any individual megalithic corporation2
-NYC as an unproductive tourist / lifestyle hub. In the novel, any poor people are forcibly removed from Manhattan and all pre-21st century buildings are toppled and replaced with glass towers for international elites to vacation. I don’t think there is much of a precedence for this. When old monolithic cities die, they do so slowly and gruesomely. Look at major tourist hubs around the world. An exception might be, like, Aspen. But the scope of the erasure doesn’t really fit Shteyngart’s model. Athens, Greece is a workable parallel, though instead of shiny new buildings they have ruins as tourist-hubs. But the native, working-class population still resides with vigor within the city’s confines. If the SSTLS-paradigm rings true anywhere, it is Paris, which has both touristic value and is contained enough and stratified enough that it could be, and in some ways currently is being, rid of all low-income individuals and retained for artistic appeal for the wealthy international elite.
-the proliferation of PC Culture / linguistic sensitivity / identity politics / Diversity, Inequality and Inclusion. Amongst the ensemble of liberal, modern characters in the novel, not a single one of them seems concerned with performative deference to minority or oppressed groups, and they constantly use several banned words / exhibit zero nuance in the realm of sexual orientation or gender identity. As this was written around 2008, it is hard to imagine how he missed this. I suspect it was a bit of optimism on Shteyngart’s part, and this could explain his waning prominence throughout the 2010s. Widely identified by casual cultural critics by the 90’s, it is a huge blind spot for him to have failed to capture the most monolithic cultural shift since the Victorian era. He clearly hadn’t read his Kaczynski. Sidenote: if this was intentional, I struggle to understand how. There are a few moments where characters seem to be flagrantly spitting in the face of modern-sensitives, but this doesn’t seem to be in the name of commentary. Please, if I’m completely blind on this one, let me know.
-hipsters moving to Staten Island. Things just haven’t gotten so low, yet.
Shteyngart’s Purview
Shteyngart last two books suggest that his career’s main focus is wealth, not political dystopia. Taken on these grounds, he kinda nails it. This is an undeniably heinous era for wage-workers and the stratification between CEOs and their serfs. There is a systemic erasure of the legal rights and visibility of the lower class and, is it just me, or has there been a recent cultural shift towards the acceptance of poverty-shaming?
SSTLS has in its background the rise of an idiotic, populist president who speaks, as that type often does, to the struggling lower-middle class. When shit goes down he is deposed of in favor of foreign governments and monolithic corporations, which doesn’t seem very far off either.
It’s a troubling but enjoyable read, and we here at the mouse-car moment recommend it as the thought-provoking portrait of our worst impulses that it is. While it dips into geriatric mumbling about “things aren’t like they used to be,” it just as readily counteracts this narrative with youthful, unconcerned voices maintaining sanity in a rapidly evolving social order. In the end, it serves as a reminder that creative pursuit, critical thinking and devotion to loved ones are eternal concepts that can be salvaged in the worst of times, against the worst of odds.
Did you know California and New York have the lowest literacy rates?
US Department of Defense outspends Amazon on R&D by 20,000%