It's the future and millions of Americans are lined up to emigrate to Canada. Financed by China (which is about to call in its loan) and using a yuan-pegged dollar, the United States is ruled by the Bipartisan Party and is at war with Venezuela. In the collapsed economy, businesses have merged to create colossal conglomerations such as LandO'LakesGMFordCredit. Media organizations have ceased to exist.
This is the apocalyptic world imagined by New York-based author Gary Shteyngart in his novel Super Sad True Love Story - a society ruled by technology to the point of collapse.
Everyone is outfitted with an äppärät, a sort of iPhone on speed. Used for shopping and communicating via the social-networking behemoth GlobalTeens, the äppärät is also constantly updating its user's ratings: credit, "hotness," potential as a lover - information all others are privy to as well. It is the end of privacy - and modesty, as women walk around in nothing-left-to-the-imagination Onionskin jeans. People rarely verbal (talk to) each other any more. And books are more than passé; they are shunned. This is a society in a rush - of digitally scanning (rather than reading) text; of heavy acronym use, such as TIMATOV (Think I'm About To Openly Vomit).
One company, operating out of an abandoned Manhattan synagogue, is working on the formula that will allow people to live forever, an option available only to HNWIs (High Net Worth Individuals). Meanwhile, LNWIs (Low Net Worth Individuals) are camping out in Central Park.
How far in the future Shteyngart's cautionary tale is set is a little vague, but one thing is clear: It's soon.
"When I do readings, I jokingly say, 'Oh, it's set next Tuesday,' " he said in a recent interview. "I really don't know [when it's set] I never thought of it as being too far in the future. Sometimes people say it's 20 years in the future or 30 years in the future, but I think at that point it'll be much worse. This is just a little preview.
"When you write speculative fiction, you're really not writing about the future; you're writing about today."
Shteyngart, who grew up a "science-fiction geek" reading Isaac Asimov and George Orwell, in many ways resembles the novel's protagonist, Lenny Abramov. Like Lenny, he is in his late 30s, the child of Russian Jews (he immigrated with his parents to the U.S. from Russia when he was 7) and a lover of books.
But unlike Lenny, a failing salesman hocking immortality to HNWIs, Shteyngart has achieved the American Dream: success. His first novel, The Russian Debutante's Handbook, won the Stephen Crane Award for First Fiction and the National Jewish Book Award for Fiction. His second novel, Absurdistan, was named one of the 10 Best Books of 2006 by both The New York Times and Time magazine. And the critics are all atwitter with superlatives for Super Sad. "His most powerful and heartfelt novel yet," the Times raved.
It's Shteyngart's first novel not set in his Russian homeland. "I've been so obsessed with Russia collapsing and reporting from the collapse of the Soviet Union," he says. "Now, America's in deep trouble and I feel lucky that I can write about it. It's so nice not to have to leave your immediate neighbourhood to have to write dystopian satire."
Shteyngart is speaking from Boston, where he is spending time while he has some work done on his place in Manhattan's Gramercy neighbourhood. He's funny (as evidenced by his gone-viral book trailer on YouTube), to the point where it's unclear when he should be taken seriously. Asked how his success has altered his life, the only thing he offers is: "more therapy sessions."
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).
Marsha Lederman