In Gary Shteyngart’s “Super Sad True Love Story,’’ books stink. They literally do. They bear the faint odor of rot and decay — the jaundiced smell of a decomposing past or just “wet socks,’’ as someone puts it. No one wants to touch them. Or own them. Or read them. They’re affronts. An entire generation in Shteyngart’s novel — his third — has emerged without them. And the results are uproarious but grim. Here Americans exist solely through their äppäräti — smart-phone-like apparatuses used by an increasingly diminished people. One of the devices’ apps turns private information into public dazzle.
Apocalypse now
In this sometimes shaky, dystopian love tale, America’s obsessively plugged-in, consumer focus has yielded a nation financially, intellectually, and emotionally in ruins
Newspapers, magazines, and the reporting and evaluation they delivered are gone. Except for FoxLiberty-Ultra and FoxLiberty-Prime, TV is over, too. The nation’s biggest shows are just live rants streaming into äppäräti, which people also use to shop, stalk, and otherwise stagnate. Ladies wear transparent jeans. Corporations exist as merged monoliths: ColgatePalmoliveYum!BrandsViacomCredit. There is an American president, but it’s the secretary of defense who appears to run things. An antiaging firm is the new hedge fund — investors hedging against death. Plus, the dollar’s worth now depends wholly on the Chinese yuan. Poor colored folks and jobless financial dudes live in a militarized shantytown formerly known as Central Park.
Shteyngart’s book is about the end of America — or rather, the ending of America. Yes, it’s a touch postlapsarian, loosely post-apocalyptic, and wistfully patriotic. But apocalypse really is now. With exclamatory mordancy, the novel proclaims that we have so overeaten, overspent, and over-communicated that we’re flatulent with the contents of our consumption. We’ll go up in an altogether figurative mushroom cloud. The knell of our destruction is the sound of passing gas. Rome fell. America farts.
Yet for all its sardonic thoughts about national collapse, its persuasive dolorousness, and its atomic disdain, “Super Sad True Love Story’’ is modest in ambition. It harrumphs but doesn’t hulk. It tsk-tsks but doesn’t tower. It is, in other words, a strangely manageable disaster epic: Don DeLillo after gastric bypass. That’s still a spectacular thing. Shteyngart sends up the way we live now without forsaking solemnity. At its best, his satire is appallingly funny but never less than personal, a tour de force of ridiculous appropriation and conflation — college dining-hall life meets reality television, “Rent,’’ and Milan Kundera.
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