Unlikely but Super Sad True Love Story

Some books are such unlikely candidates for me that tracking their path to my bookshelf is like a walk with a drunken sailor. The improbable player here is Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story. First, it’s one of those books that translate so well to marketing copy that I feel like I’ve already read it. I was browsing through publishers’ forthcoming titles a couple of months ago and alighted upon this description:

In the very near future … a functionally illiterate America is about to collapse. But don’t tell that to poor Lenny Abramov, proud author of what may well be the world’s last diary. Lenny … loves Eunice—a cute but impossibly cruel 24-year-old Korean-American woman.

There’s nothing wrong with this copy, right? But there’s a little familiar tinge of ‘Oh god – Woody Allen’s secret memoir’, dystopian America, lone future bibliophile … yadda yadda … got it.

I guess it goes without saying that my reader’s hubris has lately reached kind of toxic levels. Luckily, Shteyngart’s writing appeared in The New Yorker‘s fiction issue. In the 14 & 21 June issue, the editors published the now infamous ’20 under 40′ list, comprising 20 writers under the age of 40 for whom we should have our watchlights lit.

Whatever you think of such lists and their ‘arbitrary or absurd’ cultural foistings (litblog The Millions’ ’20 more under 40′ list, is just one of the reactions around), when you’re The New Yorker, you do sometimes get the cream of the cream, as they say in France. And lo and behold, nestled in the pages is an excerpt from Super Sad True Love Story, titled ‘Lenny Hearts Eunice’.

There’s something of Humbert Humbert’s pathetic effulgence to Shteyngart’s Lenny Abramov in Super Sad, and an extra touch of naive joy. Blithe despite having ‘a so-so body in a world where only an incredible one will do’ and having suffered a demotion – he’s only sourced one potential client in a year for his life-extension company – Lenny recounts his meeting with Eunice in his diary with the fervour of a fifteen year old: ‘I told her she should move to New York with me. She told me she was probably a lesbian.’ Eunice is your typical thoughtless but bright mid-twenties gal: ‘He took me to look at some Caravaggios and then he kind of like touched my butt.’

Shteyngart writes like a kindergartener who’s discovered a pile of crayons made of chocolate: ‘Lenny Hearts Eunice’ is joyful, fresh and rollicking. What really drove it home for me, though, was the book trailer. That’s right, book trailer. I have never watched a book trailer in my life, and I really hadn’t planned to start. But who needs plans when you’re following author and bookseller Christopher Currie on Twitter?

“Shteyngart + Eugenides + McInerney + Gaitskill +Franco = the best book trailer of the year. Enjoy. http://bit.ly/cT5GqC”

Normally, the idea of book trailers fills me with dread. But that’s Jeffrey Eugenides, Jay McInerney, Mary Gaitskill and James Franco, and it’s funny as all get out. Watch out for Shteyngart’s ‘How to act at a Paris Review party’ class. Do yourself a favour and click on that link.

I suppose there’s really no way of not reading Super Sad True Love Story now. Ah, the accidental seductions are always the best.