If you’re a fan of the Netflix series Black Mirror, you know how many of their episodes are simultaneously funny and chilling. This book could have been an extended Black Mirror episode.
Set in a post-literate America, a society dominated by Images and Retail, and where the only measures of one’s value are one’s data — Credit and Fuckability ratings — Super Sad True Love Story is simultaneously hysterical and achingly painful.
Lenny, already “old” at thirty-nine, works for a company whose promise for the ultra rich is immortality. But America has become a police state, where an ultra-right-wing dictator and a single party reign over an economy that has collapsed and is in thrall to the Chinese.
The novel was published in 2010. But it’s uncanny how timely it feels today — in Trump’s America. Round up the immigrants, save the wealthy, dispose of everyone else. It’s as if Shteyngart was channeling George Orwell for 2017 America.
Do I love this novel? No. I find it very difficult to “love” a book when there’s not a single character I care about (not even Lenny, I’m afraid). But the characters here are supposed to be awful, so that’s not a failing of the novel. It’s an extremely smart book, and very well written. And at a time when the absurdities in Shteyngart’s novel don’t seem that much more absurd than our own news stories today, it’s one people should read as a cautionary tale.
It’s not a surprise that Orwell’s 1984 is a bestseller again today. That’s what our society is coming to. Super Sad True Love Story should be next to Orwell’s classic on your shelf.
Set in a post-literate America, a society dominated by Images and Retail, and where the only measures of one’s value are one’s data — Credit and Fuckability ratings — Super Sad True Love Story is simultaneously hysterical and achingly painful.
Lenny, already “old” at thirty-nine, works for a company whose promise for the ultra rich is immortality. But America has become a police state, where an ultra-right-wing dictator and a single party reign over an economy that has collapsed and is in thrall to the Chinese.
The novel was published in 2010. But it’s uncanny how timely it feels today — in Trump’s America. Round up the immigrants, save the wealthy, dispose of everyone else. It’s as if Shteyngart was channeling George Orwell for 2017 America.
Do I love this novel? No. I find it very difficult to “love” a book when there’s not a single character I care about (not even Lenny, I’m afraid). But the characters here are supposed to be awful, so that’s not a failing of the novel. It’s an extremely smart book, and very well written. And at a time when the absurdities in Shteyngart’s novel don’t seem that much more absurd than our own news stories today, it’s one people should read as a cautionary tale.
It’s not a surprise that Orwell’s 1984 is a bestseller again today. That’s what our society is coming to. Super Sad True Love Story should be next to Orwell’s classic on your shelf.
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