I have had a complicated reaction to this 2010 novel, the first of Shteyngart’s that I have read. The writing is solid and dependable, but seldom surprising, beautiful, or striking. The comic elements are usually clever, seldom funny, and sometimes merely painful. The social commentary is insightful but simple. Through all of these reactions, I was never sure how much was coming from me and how much was coming from the novel itself. Absurdist fiction can be hit or miss with me, and I haven’t figured out what makes a work fall into either category. Whatever the reason, this book landed on the side of miss, but while it irritated me at times in the reading, I was always interested and hopeful that it might have more flashes of brilliance than potholes that make me grumble about the narrative trip.
The thing that I keep coming back to in analyzing my feelings are the main characters, Lenny and Eunice. Let’s start with Lenny. Shteyngart seems to want Lenny to carry more weight than he can. Or perhaps he wants to have a character we both like and dislike. Or perhaps it’s something else altogether that I can’t sense because our aesthetic tastes are too different. On the one hand, Lenny is eminently human. He’s insecure, scared of dying, scared of growing old, scared of becoming irrelevant, and scared of being alone. He seeks the approval of everyone, whether he respects them or not. But for all that, he’s also pathetic, ludicrous, and kind of gross. He latches on the Eunice for every wrong reason, and it’s never clear what he’s attracted to in her, other than her looks. And of course, Eunice gets the same treatment, the same mix of humanity and absurdism. And similarly, it’s never any clearer what Eunice sees in Lenny. For a love story to work, we have to be invested in the lovers and their love. While I was sometimes fascinated by them, I was never invested in them and never felt like I understood them. They always felt like characters in a play, half real and half fake, held up by strings and wire, going through the motions as the storyteller dictated.
Part of the distance between me, the reader, and the characters might be the form the novel takes. It’s an interesting idea to make an epistolary novel in which the two main characters seldom write to each other. As a diary, Lenny’s chapters are unbelievable, especially in a world that doesn’t value writing. That goes doubly for Eunice’s writings to her friends and families. We are constantly told that Eunice doesn’t value the written word and then we see her embracing it fully as her medium of communication. It seems to undermine the characterization of the world, unless of course the intention is to say that even as people reject the written word and alienate themselves from it they actually love and embrace it, that Eunice and Lenny are not exceptions, but what’s actually going on beneath the surface of America. But that’s hard to believe, and it would take a lot of mental gymnastics to create a reading that would support that idea.
The epilogue is another odd choice. As with the traditional epistolary novel, this book attempts to present the collected writings of our main characters as put together, edited, and presented to the public in the form in which we just read them. But to do so here is to take away any political punch the novel may have had. The wrap up makes everything about Lenny. Part of the charm of the novel in the context of the love story, the dystopic nightmare America that is just around the corner. As I read the novel, I kept thinking that perhaps instead of the politics being a backdrop, the love story is a mere foreground detail to frame the political happenings. But the epilogue mostly kills that idea, and it adds nothing but some semi-clever additional framing and a reason for the title of the book. And if you ever thought that Eunice and Lenny were equal main characters in the narrative, the epilogue will set you straight. This was always Lenny’s story first. I find everything the epilogue brings to the book disappointing.
So Super Sad True Love Story is an awkward mix of a failed love story and a failed political parable. I would say that I feel like it’s trying to do too many things at once, but I can’t even say that, because I believe that Shteyngart wrote exactly the novel he wanted to write. These characters are presented exactly the way he wants to present them, and the political background is exactly as he wants it to be, making the stabs he wants to make and withholding the conclusions he doesn’t want to draw. So I can’t fault the book for being exactly what it is, but I can say that it isn’t exactly for me. I don’t feel the need to explore more of Shteyngart’s writing because I suspect we will continue to miss each other. And that’s fine for both of us.
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