As the title suggests, Super Sad is a love story. Lenny is head over heels for Eunice Park, a beautiful 24-year-old Korean American. She moves in with him – she needs a place to stay – but the chasm caused by their 15-year age difference is enormous, evidence of the blinding speed with which technology is changing the world. He reads books; she is constantly on her äppärät, Teening her friend Jenny (online name: Grillbitch) or shopping.
Shteyngart, who teaches creative writing at Columbia University, found help capturing the youthful, dumbed-down voices of Eunice and Jenny just steps from his classroom. “You just have to walk out on the quad and listen,” he says. “Oh my God, it’s fun to hear English sliced and diced like that.”
When he embarked on this project, technology was fairly alien to him – he brought in an intern to tutor him in the ways of social networking and the like. Now, he is an iPhone addict who has panic attacks when he has gone too long without a signal.
He started the novel in 2006, planning to portray a global economic collapse, complete with credit meltdown, corporate mergers and government bailouts for banks and the auto industry. But in 2008, when it became clear that his imagined plot too closely resembled real-life events, he was forced to make his fictional economic failure even more severe.
And since the book was published this past summer, Shteyngart has seen more evidence of his imagined world materializing: on the money markets, a tanking American dollar; on the runways in Paris, transparent clothing. And all that bipartisan talk after the U.S. elections.
Shteyngart, who took a what-does-it-take-to-immigrate-to-Canada test along with many other left-of-centre Americans in 2004 after George W. Bush won a second term as president, makes Canada a stable haven in Super Sad.
The author says the kinds of nice things about Canada that might make some Canadians cringe (“one of the things I love about Canada is it’s very self-effacing”), but he is effusive when he talks about one Canadian: Mordecai Richler. He teaches Richler, who he says is woefully underappreciated in the U.S., in his Historical Male course at Columbia.
Shteyngart is also a fan of Margaret Atwood. “She seems to really know something about science,” he says. “I went to a math and science high school, but I really don’t know anything about it.” (He went to Stuyvesant High School, the same place Pulitzer Prize-winning memoirist Frank McCourt taught English, but their dates there didn’t coincide.)
And who knows? Shteyngart may wind up in Canada yet. “We’ll see what happens in 2012,” he says. “Let’s just say two words: President Palin. [If that happens], I am so looking to buy an apartment in Gastown. Or maybe Yaletown.”
Gary Shteyngart will be reading in his potential future home of Vancouver Nov. 21, as part of the Jewish Book Festival, co-presented with the Vancouver International Writers Festival (jewishbookfestival.ca).
