Super Sad True Love Story

I began to reread Gary Shteyngart’s superb Super Sad True Love Story this week, due to a mixture of sickness, lack of interest in my current reading selection (Genet’s beautifully written but difficult Our Lady of the Flowers), and the simple fact that Shteygart has written an incredibly moving and humorous story. Super Sad True Love Story takes place in the near future, in an America that is recognizable though very different, right here in New York. America is about to default on its credit (to China), there is a long war between America and Venezuela, and they live in, as Lenny Abramov says, a “post-literate” society. It is an extraordinary work of contemporary fiction.

Most extraordinary is Shteyngart’s beauty of language and his ability to describe New York with an appreciation and melancholy that could break your heart. As the New York Times says, Shteygart’s portrayals of the city “are infused with a deep affection for the city that is partly nostalgia for a vanished metropolis…and partly an immigrant’s awestruck love for a place mythologized by books and songs and movies…” Despite the darkness of the work overall (though the darkness is hidden well under the overall satire of the work), New York itself, the city of Shteygart’s dreams, retains its beauty.

There is one beautiful moment (there are, in fact, multiple beautiful moments of this) when Lenny describes the city on “a day…when the sun hits the broad avenues at such an angle that you experience the sensation of the whole city being flooded by a melancholy twentieth-century light, even the most prosaic and unloved buildings appearing bright and nuclear…and when this happens you want to both cry for something lost and run out there and welcome the decline of the day” (204). New York City is lost for Lenny, who it would seem grew up in a different era, one before the “decline.” His accounts are, more than anything else, nostalgic for that.

Shteyngart is, of course, neither the first to write of the city nor the last. I feel, however, that he joins a very important tradition. I feel, ultimately, that despite the hardships one endures within it, writers will continue to write of it affectionately and movingly. Think of Henry Miller, or William Burroughs, or any of the other downtrodden writers. Despite their struggles (Miller was, after all, destitute essentially, and Burroughs was… beat), their descriptions of the city are so full of love and carefully crafted detail. Shteyngart similarly creates a nation on the edge of despair, but the one thing that remains is the beauty of the city.

Though, of course, I’ve noticed that there is an essential longing that is pervasive within these works (the feeling of it was beautiful once), what remains clearer is the devotion of artists to the city. This, I think, will always remain.