Super Sad True Love Story

“In certain wealthy precincts of trans-Atlantic society, the differences between young and old were steadily eroding, and in other precincts the young were mostly going naked, but what was Eunice Park’s story? Was she trying to be older or richer or whiter? Why do attractive people have to be anything but themselves?”

Eunice’s comparatively conservative dressing style is part of her mystery. The culture of openness, facilitated by technology, makes her modesty surprising: what would she have to hide? Clothing is a technology, like an äppärät, that comes to represent Eunice’s desire to keep her background and struggles private and personal. 

“And so, as my hand began the long journey from my lap into the fear-saturated cabin air, I wanted my parents near me. I wanted my mother’s hand on the back of my neck, the cool touch that always calmed me down as a child. I wanted to hear my parents’ Russian spoken aloud, because I always thought of it as the language of cunning acquiescence.”

In a moment of worry, Lenny reaches for his parents’ language. From the beginning of the text, his regressive lean for an unfashionable language, and for his parents’ resourceful-if-humble background, is an instinct to help him pull through existential worry.

“Sup, slut? I really wish you were here right now. I need someone to verbal with and Teens just ain’t cutting it.”

Eunice and Grillbitch’s interactions are full of colloquialisms, sexuality, and authenticity. This interaction demonstrates the casual, sexually-charged language they use with one another. It also reveals the longing for authenticity that they both frequently experience.

“I feel like I don’t know what I’m doing half the time anyways, but I’m so glad that we can confide in each other, because the world sometimes feels so, like, I can’t even describe it. It’s like I’m floating around and the moment anyone gets near me or I get near anyone there’s just this STATIC. Sometimes people verbal me and I just look at their mouth and it’s like WHAT? What are you saying to me? How am I supposed to even verbal back and does it even matter what comes out?”

Grillbitch’s description of her desire to connect is compelling in a digital age. Like the information and biographies attached to each person, the person herself begins to feel a sense of “floating” and detachment from others. Ironically, she will never see Eunice again, although they have the most authentic connection that either knows.

“I guess that’s what I wanted right now, with Nettie Fine “INACTIVE,” with Eunice six time zones away, with the Credit Poles reducing everyone to a simple three-digit numeral, with an innocent fat man dragged off a plane, with Joshie telling me ‘future salary & employment = let’s discuss’: a little love and mothering.”

Lenny seeks out those who can comfort him. While he is not necessarily close with his parents, he recognizes that “mothering” is important for him. It is one of the most important kinds of love, in the end, that Eunice provides him: she helps him to pull his appearance together, to take care of himself, and to stand up for himself, just as a mother would.

“If you ask me, there’s a little something sad about the employees of Post-Human Services, and to me brash, highly functional Howard Shu is the personification of that sadness. The truth is, we may think of ourselves as the future, but we are not. We are servants and apprentices, not immortal clients. We hoard our yuan, we take our nutritionals, we prick ourselves and bleed and measure that dark-purple liquid a thousand different ways, we do everything but pray, but in the end we are still marked for death.”

The “sadness” that Lenny sees in his coworkers is part of his own recognition that the work he does is largely artificial. Although he is sucked into its efficacy when Joshie pulls him back into the company, Lenny is, from the beginning, skeptical about the mission as he realizes that long life is only available for the few, not for him.

“I’m learning to worship my new äppärät’s screen, the colorful pulsating mosaic of it, the fact that it knows every last stinking detail about the world, whereas my books only know the minds of their authors.”

When Lenny returns to work, he must get himself used to an äppärät that is more knowledgeable than he has known before. Technology has accelerated more quickly than he can track, and he is already behind and outmoded. Still, he describes it with somewhat admiring language, and while possibly skeptical, he is also intrigued by it.

“I keep thinking about that night we spent in Rome, about every minute of it, and I guess it’s become like this foundation myth for me.”

As a reader, Lenny sees his own story as a story like a book (which is, possibly, why he writes it down). To identify Eunice as a “foundation myth” is to recognize a thread in his life around which he reorients everything else, for better or worse.

“What if the violence was actually channeling our collective fear into a kind of momentary clarity, the clarity of being alive during conclusive times, the joy of being historically important by association?”

When the Rupture begins, everyone at Grace and Vishnu’s party panics. They already have “collective fear,” but the idea that that fear is validated or reasonable only emerges in a moment of violence. The fear of never being important, of dying without impacting the earth, suddenly becomes null in the “joy” of being part of something. Of course, this euphoria fades, but it shows how powerfully the same kind of fear motivates everyone in Lenny’s life.

“You know what’s the worst is when you’re happy and sad at the same time and you can’t figure out which is which.”

Eunice’s oddly provocative statement, shared with Grillbitch, embodies most of her life: when Eunice feels loving toward Lenny, she also grows sick of him; while she wants to help others, she is also often selfish; where she has a chance for comfort, she leans into unhappiness. Eunice is rarely happy and often sad, but she seems most unsettled before she is engaged in emotions or actions.

“I think that’s where we went wrong as a country. We were afraid to really fight each other, and so we devolved into this Bipartisan thing and this ARA thing. When we lost touch with how much we really hate each other, we also lost the responsibility for our common future.”

David Lorring’s astute observation about the United States is a clear vision of how political unraveling happens in Shteyngart’s fiction and could happen in reality. Losing touch and losing responsibility are two major products of the data-driven, technology-sharing culture within the novel.

“That’s the thing with Lenny, if you spend time with him you realize he’s just very yamjanae. I think that’s a very Korean thing, to be able to sense someone so sweet and gentle and appreciate him for who he is.”

Eunice explains to Grillbitch that, although Lenny seems odd, he is also oddly valuable to her. She finds, through her Korean heritage, a way of viewing his positive qualities that feels countercultural in the globalized, standardized world. Loving Lenny becomes part of the experience of identifying as Korean-American for Eunice.

“I think this is the time for us to forget who we are and to be a part of our families and everything else is just that weird noise you hear when people you don’t know are verballing. It’s true, everyone is a ghost around me, except when I’m on the äppärät with you. This country is so stupid. Only spoiled white people could let something so good get so bad.”

Eunice explains to Grillbitch her rising sense of responsibility to her family and to the Korean community. She ultimately does not feel part of the country, which has been ruined by “spoiled white people,” and sees her primary mission to be caring for her own. Reality bends when Eunice feels most real connecting with a friend who is like her from afar, where her “real” interactions feel like ghosts. 

“Click, click, click, each hanger hitting the preceding one, making the sound of an abacus. She spent less than a full second on each dress, but each second seemed more meaningful than the house she spent on AssLuxury viewing the same merchandise; each was an encounter with the real.”

Lenny notices that Eunice shopping in person is noticeably different from Eunice shopping online. Selecting clothing can be empowering or even intoxicating in person, where it is less meaningful experienced through swiping on AssLuxury. 

“OBSERVATION: You bitch and whine a lot, Eunice, that’s your SOP, but you’re still a very strong woman, scary strong sometimes. Use that strength for good. Move on.”

David’s wisdom, directed toward Eunice, helps her to uncover her strength and value. In difficult ways and in comforting ways, David points out her strengths rather than just comforting her in her weaknesses; he thinks critically about her in an effort to help her, not just to observe her. These qualities all make him different from Joshie, who is merely critical, and Lenny, who is merely comforting.

“‘This isn’t some stupid äppärät app. This is eternity. This is the heart of the creative economy.’ ‘Fuck the creative economy,’ I said, without thinking. ‘There’s no food downtown.’”

In the small moment when Lenny realizes Joshie’s extremes, he hinges on Joshie’s catchy language (“creative economy”) and provides a nonliterary, unpretentious response. Eunice’s influence on Lenny becomes clear, and he proves his ability to think lucidly about the world around him. Joshie’s spell overtakes Lenny again soon after, but Lenny’s capacity to allow his feelings toward a person to change begins to grow in this moment of disagreement.

“I’ve been trying to get him to think about health choices, but he’s just really focused on his parents and worried about THEIR death, without really understanding what it means to want to live life to the fullest, to the freshest, to the youngest. In some ways, you and I are really from the same generation of people and Lenny is from a different world, a previous world that was obsessed with death and not life, and was consumed with fear and not positivism.”

Joshie cannot understand Lenny’s attention to his family. He points out Lenny’s concerns with history as the major barrier to his immortality, perhaps before Lenny himself realizes this inconsistency. Although he aims to convince Eunice using this evidence, much of what he says about Lenny’s relationship to his family applies to Eunice, too.

“I tried, unsuccessfully, to see the country around me not just through my father’s eyes but through his history. I wanted to be part of a meaningful cycle with him, a cycle other than birth and death.”

Lenny begins to recognize patterns in life that are more important than his own personal mortality. The idea that countries, and people, do not just live and die but also are part of a longer story of living and dying, is revolutionary in his previously mortality-fixated frame of mind. Although Lenny struggles to think like his father, that he recognizes and admires this frame of mind is critical to his ultimate understanding and embrace of the idea of dying.

“Though I may not act it sometimes, let’s not forget that I’m seventy. And one thing I can tell you from my experience, Eunice, is that you’ll only get one youth. And you better spend it with someone who can maximize it for you, who can make you feel good and cared for and loved and, in the long run, someone who won’t die a long time before you, like Lenny will.”

Joshie’s efforts to persuade Eunice to leave Lenny center on his comparative youthfulness. When he recognizes that he is 70 and tries to use this experience to persuade her, he undermines himself. Joshie’s language betrays his constant obsession with age, and he uses both age and youth to his advantage whenever he can in order to manipulate Eunice into the decision he seeks.

“Nothing of my personality will remain. The light switch will be turned off. My life, my entirety, will be lost forever. I will be nullified. And what will be left? Floating through the ether, tickling the empty bell of space, alighting over farms outside Cape Town, and crashing into an aurora above Hammerfest, Norway, the northernmost city of this shattered planet—my date, the soupy base of my existence uptexted to a GlobalTeens account. Words, words, words.”

Lenny’s ultimate realization that he will die leads to a recognition of the power of words. Although he speaks of his GlobalTeens account, Lenny also implicitly refers to his diary, and his writing, as an enduring thing that might last longer than him. This, in the end, is the role of literature and stories: beyond a list of “words, words, words” in a GlobalTeens account, literature can leave a record of past lives that is a history to connect to.

“She was in her sweatpants and Elderbird T-shirt, heat rising from her body. The floor was covered with cardboard boxes she had assembled, some of them half-filled with books.”

Eunice’s ultimate desperate effort to save Lenny’s book is her greatest act of love for him. Whether or not she recognizes what books can do in a person’s life, she does recognize that they are the means by which Lenny lives. Without knowing his vow to protect them, she understands his sentimentality and acts to protect that emotional experience. This marks Eunice’s emotional development and her respect for her own, and others’, irrational sentimentalities.

“Dead is dead, we know where to file another person’s extinction, but the artist purposely zoomed in on the living, or, to be more accurate, the forced-to-be living and the soon-to-be dead.”

As Lenny examines the art at the company art opening, he is touched by an experience of death that reaches beyond the fact of dying. Where before he recognized that everyone is always slowly dying, when he sees these images, he must confront those who are on the cusp of death. He finds himself disturbed but also drawn to the images: they are beautiful, and they cause him to think differently about his world. This is the purpose of art, in his mind.

“I would add that, whatever one may say about my former love, and whatever terrible things she has written about me, unlike her friends, unlike Joshie, unlike myself, unlike so many Americans at the time of our country’s collapse, Eunice Park did not possess the false idea that she was special.”

Lenny’s loving vision of Eunice centers on this reading of her lack of self-regard. This vision aligns with David Lorring’s vision of her strength, but it also explains why being with Eunice helped Lenny embrace death. Recognizing that one is not “special” allows one to see death as not the worst thing, or most important, thing that could happen.