A Wry Dystopian Seer

By MATTHEW KAMINSKI, Wall Street Journal (July 22)

In the American future of "Super Sad True Love Story"—Gary Shteyngart's third novel, to be released Tuesday—the satire comes without veils. Books, a.k.a. "printed, bound Media artifacts," smell bad. The new generation can't read texts but "scans info" and sends "Teens," a sort of tweet, on the latest model of "äppärät," the iPhone a dozen generations hence. Nearly everyone under 30 is "completely ahistorical"; over 30, obsolete. "We're in a post-literate age," says one young thing. "You know, a visual age." And "America is history."

Mr. Shteyngart says he knows a bit about the passing of the literate age. "I'm writing novels!" he says. "I'm one of those last Japanese soldiers on one of those islands, hiding in a cave and shooting, because nobody told him that Hirohito has surrendered. Banzai!"

At 38, the writer is hardly obsolete. His name appears on glam lit lists like Granta's "Best of Young American Novelists" and the New Yorker's "20 Under 40." Our obsession with rankings is actually a running gag in "Super Sad True Love Story," and as in 2006's "Absurdistan," or his first book, "The Russian Debutante's Handbook," Mr. Shteyngart can barely write (or utter) an unfunny sentence. He says he worries the comedy may blunt some of the serious intent. "But can you imagine a dystopic novel about our stupid media culture that has no humor? It'd be a disaster."

Sitting earlier this week at Brown Café, his midday haunt on Manhattan's Lower East Side, Mr. Shteyngart wears a checkered blue shirt and thick glasses. He is shortish and balding, a Soviet-born Jew who emigrated from Leningrad in 1978. An awning on a shop across the street reads "Information Overload." "How appropriate," he says, laughing. "I don't know what they sell, but I don't want it."

In the imaginary future, technology makes us dumber. "I'm feeling pretty dumb these days," says Mr. Shteyngart, an iPhone nestled in his khaki shorts. "I'm so glad that one of the first teenage slang was TMI"—too much information.

While conceding "change is inevitable," he notes that "things happen way too fast. I always bring up the example of Tolstoy writing about the War of 1812 in the 1860s. The horse was a horse and a carriage was a carriage. Tolstoy didn't have to worry about the next killer app. The novel is a disaster at this point. It's not a disaster that there are no good novels being written. There are wonderful novels written. It's that our brains are being disassembled right now and being put back together in a whole different shape, and that is not going to be conducive to reading a 300-page thing that doesn't have any links."

Mr. Shteyngart made an amusing Internet trailer for the book starring writers Edmund White and Jay McInerney and the actor James Franco, a former student in his writing class at Columbia. "You have to use extraordinary ways to attract an audience," he says. The danger is that serious fiction will "become poetry, which now exists almost entirely inside the walls of academia."

In "Super Sad True Love Story," the death of letters helps bring about America's collapse. At the start, we see a country sapped by a military misadventure in Venezuela and deeply indebted to the People's Bank of China-Worldwide. The Chinese People's Capitalist Party is the new global hegemon.

Behind the scenes, a U.S. secretary of defense whose name evokes Rumsfeld rules a one-party (the Bipartisans) paramilitary state. Hot fashions for women are "TotalSurrender" skirts with a slit down the crotch or see-through "Onionskin" jeans. Consumption of pornography starts around age 6. News comes courtesy of FoxLiberty-Prime or FoxLiberty- Ultra, or any member of the Media, always capitalized, who streams whatever first comes to mind with his äppärät. And things get worse. A clue toward the end of the story that won't give away the ending: A sign outside a local watering hole reads, "WE ACCEPT ONLY YUAN SORRY BUT WE ALSO HALF TO EAT."

Mr. Shteyngart waves away easy political labels. "Everyone gets a drubbing," he says. "Some conservatives can say it's about illiteracy, about certain cultural values no longer being transmitted." He sings a popular tune of American decline: "Every power that moves that quickly will have a precipitous fall. There's little you can do about it. One can hope for a soft landing—the Netherlands, not Argentina."

But enough of the Orwellian prophesy. As Mr. Shteyngart says, "I wrote a love story. It's in the title." Lenny Abramov, a shortish and balding 39-year-old Russian Jew, falls for a young Korean-American, 15 years and several technological eras younger.

Lenny's fictional 740-square-foot apartment in a 1950s tower on Grand Street was Mr. Shteyngart's real home until two weeks ago, when he moved up to fashionable Gramercy Park. We sneak into his old building. Mr. Shteyngart finds another occasion for his dyspepsia, a death notice posted next to the elevator: "Every other day someone is dying, old Jewish guys and girls who didn't move out to the suburbs. It's so disconcerting." In the novel, Lenny is obsessed with mortality and aging, and works for a "life-extension" company called Post-Human Services.

When I say I miss the pre- äppärät days—say, 1995—and even felt better informed then, my fellow Gen-Xer completes the thought. "Much better informed—and happier," he says.

"The younger generation that I know—and I do know a lot of them—they're not happy," he says. "All of us are overwhelmed with information. All of us are struggling to survive in ways we never had to before. Things were much better when this country actually produced things like drivable cars and people like us wrote about it. It was simple, and good. Good cars, good journalism, good haircuts. . . . 'Mad Men' is nostalgia for all of us—well, not the racism, the sexism and the anti-Semitism."

One of Mr. Shteyngart's literary heroes is Philip Roth. After several beers at Cafe Katja in Lenny's hood, we agree that Mr. Roth's books, whatever the period, are a distinctive pleasure to read. "This is all I wish for my career," Mr. Shteyngart says. "Some will be better than others. I don't care. I want people to have fun. Why is that so wrong?"

Mr. Kaminski is a member of the Journal's editorial board.

Write to Matthew Kaminski at matthew.kaminski@wsj.com