Review by New York Times Review
EARLY in Gary Shteyngart's "Absurdistan" the narrator says he is "almost disabused" of the belief that he can fly. The word "almost" is beautifully exact. Shteyngart's characters never give in to reality all at once. They have immigrant skills and immigrant illusions, and they come from countries that are themselves in the process of migrating: in one novel a Russia that wants to be America, in another an America that imagines it is not Russia. These shifting, desiring nations are not without their counterparts in history, and the same must be said of the scene of "Super Sad True Love Story" - except that the transposition now occurs in time. We are reading the diaries of Lenny Abramov and the e-mails of Eunice Park and her friends and family - well, to be precise, we are reading "from" those texts, we don't know what the unselected matter looks like - and the action of the novel is situated in our future and in Lenny's and Eunice's past. The first edition of their work was published "two years ago" in Beijing and New York, although the story we have been reading took place "so many decades ago." Lenny and Eunice meet in Rome in June of an unspecified year and live out the few months of a semi-affectionate, needy, awkward, deluded affair until, in November, Eunice takes off with Lenny's boss, and Lenny, like his fictional forebear, becomes disabused of his favorite belief: in this case, that he can live forever. Why can't he? The novel's answer, in the end, is the same as reality's. But for most of the book the jury is still out - or rather shut out, refused a hearing. "Those who want to live forever will find a means of doing so" is what Lenny's boss says, a remark identified as "a cornerstone of the Post-Human philosophy." Lenny himself announces at the beginning that he is "never going to die," and he does this not out of pure longing but because he thinks it's a matter of putting in enough energy, money and dieting. He works for something called Post-Human Services, a research branch of a vast corporation that also deals in security and more or less runs the government. This unit is housed in a former synagogue close to Fifth Avenue and is trying to test its way to immortality. Lenny's boss, Joshie, for example, who turns 70 in the course of the novel, has had so many replacements of muscles and organs and blood that he looks younger than Lenny, who has reached the dangerous old age of 39. As Lenny remarks at one point, "the true subject of science fiction is death." There is a would-be vampire story lurking in the science fiction. Both Lenny and Joshie see in Eunice, an angry, beautiful 24-year-old Korean-American - her "usual face" is said to be one of "a grave and unmitigated displeasure" - not only a young person but youth itself, and something they can co-opt, make their own. But Eunice is not going to be anyone else's salvation. Lenny at least realizes that despite appearances (her California background, her addiction to shopping and her college major in Images and minor in Assertiveness), she is "not completely ahistorical." She has her inherited and experienced past (an abandoned Korea, an abusive father), just as he has the ruined Russia and the defensive Long Island of his parents. "How far I had come from my parents," he writes in one expansive passage, "born in a country built on corpses, how far I had come from their endless anxiety. . . . And yet how little I had traveled away from them, the inability to grasp the present moment." History, in this view, is just like time and aging; it doesn't let anyone go, although the dream of escaping its grip is recurring and irresistible. It doesn't let America go, either. The "prematurely old country" of the novel is run as a kind of war zone by the "Bipartisan" secretary of state, Rubenstein, who has installed the youthful Jimmy Cortez as a puppet president. The state of emergency is permanent, tanks are all over the place, and in a particularly brilliant invention, people are required to deny the existence of all the weaponry they see and to consent formally to the act of denial they have just performed. The only thing that keeps people really happy is their credit rating, if they have one that's high enough. Scores are publicly available on screens posted on every street and can always be checked on the devices everyone carries, instruments that work like iPhones designed for Orwell, providing instant background checks on anyone you might like to know, along with helpful ratings like that of your perceived desirability for sex or anything else as compared to other members of the group you're in. The area that used to house the Security Council is now the U.N.R.C. (United Nations Retail Corridor), a mammoth cross between a mall and a North African bazaar. A euro costs you nearly $9, and by the end of the novel this America, with all its "loud, dying wealth" and its quiet and ubiquitous poverty, has been taken over by a combination of Chinese and Norwegian business interests. The novel slows a little during what feel like rather dutiful ethnic encounters - Lenny takes Eunice to see his parents on Long Island, he meets her parents and sister at a "worship service" in Madison Square Garden - and for a while it seems as if a pre-post-human realist novel is trying to sneak into the satirical pages. But the writing is never less than stylish and witty, and the sense of disaster, here as in Shteyngart's other novels, is unfailingly lyrical, performed for full, funny rhetorical orchestra. When Lenny's world ends, when Eunice leaves him, when America's war on Venezuela comes home to Manhattan, when New York City is about to be turned into a spa for the very rich ("the idea is to rebuild New York as a kind of 'Lifestyle Hub'"), we are not exactly laughing, nor are we crying. It's true that Lenny, now Larry Abraham and a Canadian citizen, is still grieving for lost time and lost love, but Lenny likes to grieve, and besides, he's fictional. The sheer exhilaration of the writing in this book - Lenny's confessional tones, Eunice's teenage slang - is itself a sort of answer to the flattened-out horrors of the world it depicts. It's not that writing of any kind will save us from our follies or our rulers; but words are a form of life, and we can't say we haven't been warned. We're at war with Venezuela, and there's an Orwellian iPhone-like device in everyone's pocket. Michael Wood's book "Yeats and Violence" will be published later this month.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [August 15, 2010]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Credit Poles display your financial worth as you hurry by, clutching your äppärät, a diabolical gadget that monitors your biochemistry while streaming torrents of acronym-infested babble and rating the sex appeal of everyone in sight. New Yorker Lenny Abramov, the stubbornly romantic son of flinty Russian Jewish immigrants, works for Post-Human Services, a life-extension venture. He is madly in love with young, hip, and unhappy Eunice Park, who is far more concerned about online shopping and her dysfunctional Korean immigrant family. As Lenny records his feelings in an actual diary, and Eunice confides in her best friend via e-mails, their personal worries are amplified by aggressively raunchy, reductive, and judgmental social media and dwarfed by the Rupture, America's collapse into ineptness, chaos, and tyranny as China backs American currency, the war with Venezuela escalates, and poor people live in Central Park. All Lenny wants is to make Eunice happy, but everything undermines him, from his age--at 39 he's considered decrepit to his taboo passion for books. Full-tilt and fulminating satirist Shteyngart (Absurdistan, 2006) is mordant, gleeful, and embracive as he funnels today's follies and atrocities into a devilishly hilarious, soul-shriveling, and all-too plausible vision of a ruthless and crass digital dystopia in which techno-addled humans are still humbled by love and death.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
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. (Aug.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
This cyber-apocalyptic vision of an American future seems eerily like the present, in a bleak comedy that is even more frightening than funny.Though Shteyngart received rave reviews for his first two novels (The Russian Debutante's Daughter, 2001; Absurdistan, 2006), those appear in retrospect to be trial runs for his third and darkest to date. Russian immigrant Lenny Abramov returns home to Manhattan of the indeterminate future, following a year in Italy, only to find his career as "Life Lovers Outreach Coordinator (Grade G) of the Post-Human Services division" in jeopardy. Just shy of 40, he is already coming to terms with his mortality amid the scorn of much younger, hipper careerists, as he markets eternal life to those with the wherewithal to afford it. The narrative alternates between the diary entries of Lenny and the computer log of Eunice Park, his much younger and reluctant Korean girlfriend whom he'd met in Italy and eventually persuaded to join him in the States. Lenny's diary is itself an anachronism, since this "post-literate age" lacks the patience to scan text for anything longer than political bromides or marketing pitches. The society at large finds books "smelly," though Lenny still collects and even reads them. "Media" has become an adjective (positive, all-purpose) as well as a noun, and some familiar institutions have morphed into Fox-Ultra and The New York Lifestyle Times. Both Lenny and Eunice are fully fleshedout characters rather than satiric caricatures, but their matter-of-fact acceptance of Bi-Partisanship masking a police state, and of the illiterate, ebullient and Orwellian American Restoration Authority as a bulwark against the country's collapse (the waiting list to move to Canada exceeds 23 million), makes this cautionary tale all the more chilling. The narrative proceeds in a surprising yet inevitable manner to the outcome the title promises. When Lenny realizes "I can't connect in any meaningful way to anyone," he's writing about not merely a technological breakdown but the human condition, where the line distinguishing comedy from tragedy dissolves. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
