Gary Shteyngart

Vladimir, who works for near-minimum wage at the Emma Lazarus Immigration Absorption Society, is the throwback in the Girshkin family, and the cause of endless lamentation for his parents. He still broods over the trauma of being called a “Stinky Russian Bear” at his American kindergarten and pines for the Motherland, or at least his childish recollection of it. His best friend tells him “you have the bearing of an emancipated serf.” His mother, a successful CEO, is worried that the only thing her son’s education at a “progressive Midwestern university” has suited him for is advising her on the most “sensitive” (i.e., non-actionable) way to sack her black marketing director. And as for Vladimir’s physician father, among the first things we hear him say is “Medicare fraud is not really a crime.”

Despite Vladimir’s meek and melancholic propensities, the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. In a naive attempt to collect a little extra cash with which to impress his American girlfriend, he manages to offend a Catalan drug dealer and is forced to flee to Prava (Shteyngart’s inexplicably coy pseudonym for Prague). There, he goes to work for a Russian gangster nicknamed the Groundhog, who sees great financial promise in Vladimir’s ethnicity (“All you need is three Yids to rule the world”).

Galvanized in some mysterious way by finding himself amid the ruins of his Soviet Eden, Vladimir launches a successful plan to bilk gullible Americans in a pyramid investment scheme comprising a chimerical “brand-new high-technology industrial park and convention centre,” “modernized” Uzbek film studios and “a vocational school for the Yupik Eskimo in Siberia.” There’s also an actual nightspot dubbed the Metamorphosis Lounge, where intimate services and ample quantities of horse tranquilizer can purchased. Oh, and a literary magazine, too.

The literary magazine makes Vladimir a big shot in the cooler reaches of the American expat scene, and Shteyngart finds plenty of opportunity for satire in “white Middle Americans with a fashionable grudge.” But it’s the Russians, and the Stolovans (Czechs), who get the largest portion of his strangely loving yet merciless attention. In his eyes, they’re incorrigible hustlers and cheats, operating on the principle that “The world owes us for the last 70 years.” The Groundhog is both casually brutal and plaintive: “Why don’t you ever spend time with your Russian brothers?” he asks Vladimir before authorizing the American to lead a Savonarolan purge of the operation’s kitschiest trappings. Into a bonfire of the vanities go “the nylon tracksuits, the Rod Stewart compilations, the worn Romanian sneakers, everything that had qualified the Groundhog’s vast crew as Easterners, Soviets, Cold War-losers.”

At one point, Vladimir gets a call from a friend, a former Soviet apparatchik, looking to unload 300 ill-gotten Perry Ellis windbreakers. Vladimir in turn asks the older man, named Frantisek, for advice on how to handle the more troublesome elements in the Groundhog’s ranks. Their conversation is worth quoting at length, since it captures the irresistible blend of the grandiose and the crass in Shteyngart’s post-Soviet characters:

“‘The Russians of this calibre [said the apparatchik], they only understand one thing: cruelty. Kindness is seen as a weakness; kindness is to be punished. Do you understand? You’re not dealing with Petersburg academicians here or enlightened members of the fourth estate. These are the people that brought half this continent to her knees at one point. These are murderers and thieves. Now, tell me, how cruel can you be?’

‘I have a lot of anger in store,’ Valdimir confessed, ‘but I’m not very good at expressing it. Today, however, I lashed out at the Groundhog, my boss –’

‘Good, that’s a good start,’ Frantisek said. ‘Ah, Vladimir, we are not so different, you and I. We are both men of taste in a tasteless world. Do you know how many compromises I have made in my life? Do you know the things I have done … ‘

‘Yes, I know,’ Vladimir told the apparatchik. ‘I do not judge you.’

‘Likewise,’ Frantisek said. ‘Now remember: cruelty, anger, vindictiveness, humiliation. These are the four cornerstones of Soviet society. Master them and you will do well. Tell these people how much you despise them and they will build you statues and mausoleums.’

‘Thank you,’ Vladimir said. ‘Thank you for the instruction. I will lash out at the Russians with my last strength, Frantisek.’

‘My pleasure. Now, Vladimir … Please tell me … What the hell am I supposed to do with these goddamn windbreakers?’”

Will Vladimir’s innate wimpiness or his newfound braggadocio win out? Will he choose the staid, clean, straight-arrow American side of himself, or succumb to his wild and wooly inner bear? Unlike the immigrants in more genteel literary fiction, he won’t find this to be a subdued and poignant struggle. Before this dilemma is resolved, there will be tragic moments, yes, and violence, and, heaven knows, lots of exclamation points. These are Russians, after all.

Also, it’s a love story, and as super-sad as the title promises. Sometime in the next decade or so, Lenny Abramov, an indifferently effective sales representative for an outfit called Post-Human Services, meets Eunice Park, a Korean-American recently graduated from Elderbird College (the equivalent, I’m guessing, of Andover) with a double major in Images and Assertiveness. He’s 39 and preoccupied with the bodily decay he hopes to correct if he can ever afford his own company’s services: They sell “life extension” and “dechronification,” but only to HNWIs (High Net-Worth Individuals — this is an acronym-crazed world we’re talking about). Lenny is instantly smitten, bewitched by Eunice’s blend of youthful beauty and surly attentiveness. She calls him “nerd face” and “old,” but kindly adjusts his shirt cuffs and shows him how to properly brush his teeth.

Lenny and Eunice’s rickety affair unfolds in a New York City smartening itself up for a visit from China’s central banker, “unofficially the world’s most powerful man.” In this economy, the most desirable commodities have prices pegged to the yuan. Something called the Bipartisan Party has taken over the government, and the hardline policies of Secretary of Defense Rubenstein are applauded by Lenny’s parents — Soviet émigrés from way back who watch nothing but FoxLiberty-Prime and FoxLibertyUltra in the sanctity of the Long Island enclave Lenny describes as their “vibrant right-wing habitat.”

The most slicing satire in this novel, however, is reserved for the technologized culture of everyday urban life; Shteyngart is the Joseph Heller of the information age. His characters carry networked devices called äppäräti wherever they go, emitting (willingly or not) such data as their cholesterol and stress levels, credit rankings, self-esteem and relationship history, as well as their off-the-cuff evaluations of friends and strangers. “Learn to rate everyone around you,” a co-worker admonishes Lenny: The instantaneously broadcasted metrics include such categories as Personality, Sustainability and Fuckability. When a friend suggests that they “FAC” while hanging out in a bar, clueless Lenny has to be told that this acronym means “‘Form A Community’ … It’s, like, a way to judge people. And let them judge you.” (Lenny, by the way, comes in last place among 40 in the category of “Male Hotness.”)

Shteyngart’s future America is a land of run-on corporate monikers (“LandOLakesGMFordCredit”) and capitalized yet disturbingly vague careers: middle-class people work in either Retail, Credit or Media. Journalism as we know it has been replaced by “streaming” narcissists, whose “shows” consist of a mishmash of political commentary, health tips, celebrity gossip, nostalgia, porn and discussions of such Seinfeldian trivia as “the ‘wah-wuh’ sound of the doors closing on the 6 train versus the resigned ‘sheesh’ sound on the L.” One of Lenny’s best friends dates a woman “who spends about seven hours a day streaming about her weight” (her show’s signature line is “Hey, girlfriend, gots muffintop?”) Another friend streams critiques of U.S. foreign policy “intermixed with his own hardcore gay sex.”

The peril in writing about satire this accurate is that it’s tempting to list every clever little dart that lands right in the bull’s-eye. I could go on about how perfectly Shteyngart captures the poignant, adolescent crudity adopted by Eunice and her girlfriends; their pet names for each other include “ass hoo-kah,” “slut” and, of course, “betch.” (They also shop for sportswear in the JuicyPussy line on a website called AssLuxury.) Since the narrative is divided between Lenny’s old-fashioned diary entries and Eunice’s e-mails and IMs, we know that behind all that pornographic faux swagger these girls are perilously vulnerable.

That’s the difference between Shteyngart and the average literary satirist (or even an above-average one, like Martin Amis): his warmth. I almost attached the “mercilessly” to the word “accurate” in the first sentence of the paragraph above, but had to stop myself, because “Super Sad True Love Story” is in fact overflowing with mercy. In Eunice, Lenny sees two elements: the tough, family-first immigrant fiber inherited from her parents, which is what the two of them have in common, and a history-free American optimism manifested as commodity worship. He loves both. Watching her shop for clothes, he marvels at, and pities, her “attempt to extract meaning from an artifact that contained mostly thread. If only beauty could explain the world away. If only a nippleless bra could make it all work.”

It’s a high-wire act, pulling off a novel that’s simultaneously so biting and so compassionate, and in his earlier books Shteyngart, while unfailingly shrewd and funny, wasn’t always this tender. “Super Sad True Love Story” is indeed a sadder, and also a better, book. Perhaps it’s the setting that brings it out in him: an America he could only truly love now that he thinks it’s melting away. (He can make you feel the loss of Lenny’s co-op apartment as a muted Chekovian tragedy, the passing of an era in 750 square feet.) That’s what slips through Lenny’s fingers in the personified form of Eunice Park, the fleeting, hopeless dream of escaping the universal fate of humankind. “Forget it, Lenny,” you want to whisper in his ear. “It’s Absurdistan.”

Referenced in this article:

Salon’s review of “The Russian Debutante’s Handbook”

Salon’s review of “Absurdistan”

When we meet Misha, however, he’s stuck in St. Petersburg, penning this book, ostensibly his “love letter to the generals in charge of the Immigration and Naturalization Service.” He can’t get back into the States because his father, the 1,238th richest man in Russia, has shot and killed an Oklahoma businessman “over a 10 percent stake in a nutria farm” and unlike the freewheeling Russians, the American authorities don’t take kindly to the sons of murderers. Thanks to Beloved Papa’s wealth — acquired through assorted dubious enterprises, including VainBergAir, “an airline without any airplanes but with plenty of stewardesses” — Misha lives pretty high on the hog. But he longs for New York and Rouenna, especially when he learns that his girlfriend has taken up with the detestable imigri Jerry Shteynfarb, author of a crap novel called “The Russian Arriviste’s Hand Job.”

After Beloved Papa is assassinated by another kingpin, Misha’s quest to get back to New York leads him on a circuitous, Ativan- and whiskey-soaked journey to the obscure nation of Absurdistan, a former Soviet satellite on the Caspian Sea. There he gets caught up in the rising tensions between the Svani and Sevo, two Sneetchlike local groups whose primary difference seems to be which way they think “Christ’s footrest” should tilt on the Orthodox cross. Ensconced in the Hyatt, where prostitutes roam the hallways, shrieking “Golly Burton!” every time they think they’ve spotted an employee of a certain well-connected American service-contracting firm, Misha forlornly e-mails Rouenna. Eventually, after civil war breaks out in Absurdistan, he takes up the Sevo cause, praying that for once he’s on the side of right.

The plot of “Absurdistan,” however, is really just a pretext to bedazzle the reader with a series of rowdy and blisteringly satirical vignettes of life in contemporary Russia, the boondocks of Central Asia and, every so often, the Never-Neverland of America itself. Courtesy of Beloved Papa, Misha obtained a useless degree in multicultural studies at “Accidental College,” a private (very) liberal arts college in the Midwest, from which “a surprising number of graduates went on to raise organic asparagus along the Oregonian coast.” This education leaves our hero utterly unprepared for the new Russia, where he listens to a hired thug (Ruslan the Enforcer) complain that a rival (Ruslan the Punisher) has stolen the url for his nickname “Why can’t my website be called www.ruslan-the-enforcer.com? … I am the Enforcer. I know Ruslan the Punisher. He lives with his mother by the Avtovo metro station. He is a nothing man. Now people will think that I am him. They won’t hire me to do the bloody work. I will be humiliated.” Not that Misha doesn’t have a certain kind of expertise. He arouses an Absurdistani girlfriend, an NYU student on break and equally enamored of the Big Apple, by reciting Zagat Guide entries for Manhattan restaurants. To local leaders hoping that the West will intervene in their conflict, he explains the grim truth: “No one knows where your country is or who you are. You don’t have a familiar ethnic cuisine; your diaspora, from what I understand, is mostly in Southern California, three time zones removed from the national media in New York; and you don’t have a recognizable, long-simmering conflict like the one between the Israelis and the Palestinians, where people in the richer nations can take sides and argue over the dinner table. The best you can do is get the United Nations involved, as in East Timor. Maybe they’ll send troops.”

The Sevo appoint Misha to the post of Minister of Multicultural Affairs (even though they don’t know — or care — what “multicultural” means) and he begins writing grant proposals to set up a Holocaust museum in the capital (a bit of a stretch considering that the Nazis never got as far east as Absurdistan, but the Absurdis think Misha can help them win the favor of Israel and, thereby, the Americans). Somehow, everyone Misha meets seems to know everything about him — that he is a “melancholic and a sophisticate,” and that he slept with his stepmother a few weeks after his father’s funeral — and finally he will learn that everyone in Absurdistan knows something about the civil war that he doesn’t.

In Absurdistan, almost everyone is working some kind of angle or wearing some kind of disguise, mostly intended to manipulate the prejudices and ignorance of romantic, patronizing, uniformed Americans. The hotel manager, an Armenian-American born and raised in Glendale, Calif., sends out notes in semi-literate English to the guests, trying to pass himself off as “a wily local instead of some middle-class brat from the San Fernando Valley.” A Mossad agent posing as a Texan describes the extensive market research his agency has done on “how genocides are perceived by the American electorate … We give these American schmendricks a map of the world and say, ‘Point to the general area where you think Congo is located.’ Nineteen percent point to the continent of Africa. Another 23 percent point to either India, or South America. We count those as correct answers, because Africa, India, and South America all start out wide and then taper off at the bottom. So, for our purposes, 42 percent of respondents sort of know where Congo is.”

Savage, but pretty damn close to the truth. No doubt Shteyngart’s portrait of life in Russia and “the ‘stans” is equally acute, not matter how exaggerated it seems. Like Heller’s “Catch-22,” “Absurdistan” has the feel of a book whose outrageous caricatures will soon become shorthand for real-life situations. We’re all Absurdistanis, or will be soon, and can sympathize with the beleaguered manager of the Park Hyatt Svani City, when he asks, “Why did all this history have to happen to me?”