super sad true love story.

supersadtruelovestory

Slate’s review of the latest Shteyngart book. Looks fascinating.

Gary Shteyngart might be too funny for his own good. His new novel, Super Sad True Love Story, is a spectacularly clever near-future dystopian satire, but it may actually disappoint admirers of his first two, more consistently hilarious, novels, The Russian Debutante’s Handbook and Absurdistan. At first, the book seems like Shteyngart business-as-usual as we delve into the diary of one Lenny Abramov, a pure exemplar of this writer’s favorite species of comic protagonist: a self-deprecating Russian-American Jewish male, self-conscious about his appearance, uselessly well-educated, wry, passionate, neither old nor young, and helplessly prone to error.

Read the rest here.