HIP LIT:Reading and writing are dangerous activities in the new novel by Russian-born, US-raised writer Gary Shteyngart. He depicts a world in which the internet is killing the novel as short, online Tweets and status updates become the norm
'LOOK," GASPS GARY Shteyngart. "A guy just walked in with a book!" Shteyngart stares. The book-toter stares back. Around us, everyone else stares into their touchscreens. The thing about Shteyngart's Gramercy hang-out is that everyone is reading but there are only two books in the entire cafe: Shteyngart's new novel, Super Sad True Love Story, on the table in front of us, and the book that the newcomer, the object of Shteyngart's excitement, has under his arm.
“I can’t see,” says Shteyngart, craning his neck. “It might even be a poetry book.” He shakes his head in a wide-eyed imitation of wonder. “This is what it’s going to be like,” he says, a thick-throated accent suddenly infusing his words. “We book readers, we’re going to be refugees!”
But not just yet; certainly not for Shteyngart, whose reign in or near the throne of Hip Lit shows no sign of ending: New York Magazinepublished the guest list to his book launch and New York Timesfashion writers have referenced his latest novel – last week, a commentary on the Paris shows found traces of Shteyngart's futuristic, nothing-left-to-the-imagination styles in Zac Posen's spring collection.
There have also been the more traditional literary tributes – Shteyngart, who is 38, made it on to the New Yorker'sprestigious "20 Under 40" list earlier this year and, since the publication of his first novel, The Russian Debutante's Handbook, in 2002, he has been hailed as one of the most important voices in contemporary fiction and is on the faculty at Columbia University.
His jacket photograph for that first novel may have shown him perched in an urban wasteland, looking just as cowed and bewildered as the bear cub he held on a leash, but it’s clear that Shteyngart couldn’t hide from his own success.
Still, the shtick of the bewildered immigrant – and the comic loping to go with it – has served Shteyngart well over his decade in the limelight. A Leningrad native who aged seven came to the US with his parents, Shteyngart has impressed with fiction that is sardonic, piquant and bizarre, a satire on the hangover of socialism, the hangman that is capitalism, and everything in-between. Absurdistan, in 2006, saw him send another young Russian anti-hero on a post-Soviet jaunt of self-discovery, again with rambunctious results, leading writer Aleksandar Hemon to declare Shteyngart "the great-great-grandson of one Nikolai Gogol and the funniest foreigner alive".
And as the publicity machine cranked up for novel number three, Shteyngart's shtick seemed to have stuck. A YouTube trailer for the book (the new incarnation of the advance proof copy) casts Shteyngart as a giddily illiterate peasant who had accidentally written a book, with baffled testimonies from writers including Jeffrey Eugenides, Mary Gaitskill and Shteyngart's former student James Franco. Eugenides: "You remind me of Chekhov." Shteyngart: "The guy from Star Trekwrites 'stories'?"
Yet the idiot-with-the-accent act can only stretch so far and, at first glance, something seems to have snapped with this new novel and its defiantly sub-literate title. Another blundering Russian? Check. Another unsympathetic universe? Present and correct. But it's different this time, and as Super Sad True Love Storyunfolds, the apparent flipness of the title comes to make sinking, almost sickening sense.
Such nonsense words are what novels would be reduced to in a society as shallow and dispassionate as the one which Shteyngart constructs so convincingly, a society that at several points looks uncomfortably possible, even uncomfortably familiar. Because the world in which Shteyngart’s hero, Lenny Abramov, lives – or tries to live – is one made up of countless nightmare pixels from the world we already know.
Shteyngart doesn’t place his character in an imaginary post-Soviet state this time. The action takes place in a near-future New York which, readers can only hope, is as imaginary as the cityscapes of Shteyngart’s previous novels. This is an America in the grip of a grotesque merger of eugenicist politics and corporate omnipotence, a country not so much pegged to the Chinese yuan as flogged by it. Bad credit may be fatal.
Reading is a suspicious act and writing anything other than an instant message practically invites imprisonment. Lenny lives dangerously by keeping a diary. The narrative of his girlfriend, Eunice Park, is created on a social network called GlobalTeens; the hyper-sexualised, anti-privacy superhighway that is Shteyngart’s vision of where a communications system, comprised largely of Tweets and status updates, may be headed.
It is very funny and very unnerving. As you read the novel, you find yourself trying to work out just how far into the future all this digitalised chaos and cruelty is. Perhaps 2050, you think. Or 2070. Right? “Hmm, yeah,” says Shteyngart, with a shrug. “Basically, it’s set next Tuesday.”
Shteyngart began writing the novel in 2006, imagining an America in which the biggest banks began to collapse. He was on his second or third draft when life became stranger than fiction down Wall Street way. “And I started becoming really upset,” he says, “because I had to keep rewriting everything, because things kept getting worse and worse. Which is the problem for the writer. There’s no present left. It’s all future, which makes the blogger king.”
Still, the writer persists; in Shteyngart’s case, out of a love of the thing that has mattered most to him since childhood. Reading and writing were the only things which helped him to escape the unpleasantness of being a Russian kid in an America riled by Reagan’s “Evil Empire” speech. He was drawn to science-fiction, to books and films presenting dystopian vistas.
"Maybe I was a little turned on by the idea that everything that was keeping me down would be destroyed," he says. "But even in Nineteen Eighty-Four, it was the love story between Winston and Julia that I remembered."
Now he has written a dystopian novel in which the love story is to the fore. Reviewers have described Eunice, the shopping-obsessed 20-something who claws at Lenny’s heart, as ditzy and vacuous, but that’s not the case, says Shteyngart.
“The way I see it, she’s emblematic of the society she lives in. She is one of the smartest people of her generation.” When Lenny calls her his reluctant sentence-monger, that’s a high compliment. “She uses a subject and a predicate at all times! And that is wild, even for today.”
If Eunice is a sentence-monger, Lenny is a book-monger; the well-stocked bookshelves in his apartment will endanger him as decisions begin to be made about who will and will not survive in the new economy. Much of the book’s sadness is a sadness about the possibility that it is the art of storytelling which may not survive.
"You can't love fiction and not notice what's happening to it," says Shteyngart. "After a day of information pings, are people really going to pick up a book? Yes, they want narrative. But they want it from something that's a more passive form of entertainment. They want it from Mad Men."
Can’t we have both? “What I get from novels. I don’t get anywhere else,” says Shteyngart. “It’s shocking what books can do, and you just don’t get that from anything other than the written word. Not from film, any more, not from anywhere. There’s something incredibly interactive about fiction. All the great novels and short stories leave something out and it’s those gaps between paragraphs, between chapters, that really allow the reader’s mind to work. Yet we think that interaction means going online.”
Fiction, he says, has a “subversive element” that he rarely finds on the internet. The same internet that, in the new novel, pulps language into an extreme, puerile obscenity, even for the most casual of exchanges? “But all of this stuff that the internet throws at you, it is, in a weird way, just about conformity,” Shteyngart says. “You want to make friends on Facebook. You want to be loved. Everything on there is homogenised. Even the pornography is kind of boring.”
This third novel represents a departure for Shteyngart, and not just because his central character is not bumbling around in the relative safety of a make-believe Soviet offshoot. The rambunctiousness has matured into something slower, something more real – and, as a result, something riskier.
“When I started to put Lenny through all the crap that I usually put my nebbish guys through, I started to feel very sorry for him. And I started to take a look, from a more personal standpoint, at how they might deal with these things.”
But, for all the vulnerability of its characters, this is still very much a novel with the scorchmarks of satire all across its pages. It had to be fun to write.
“To a point,” Shteyngart says. “But for me it wasn’t nice to just tear America apart the way I did. That began to hurt. Because, you know, it’s a cute country. With many problems.”
Lenny Abramov couldn’t have put it better himself.
Super Sad True Love Story
by Gary Shteyngart is published by Granta, £12.99. To see the bewildering and entertaining trailer for the book on YouTube, key in “super sad true love story” at www.youtube.com
