Nobody Move, This Is A Review: SUPER SAD TRUE LOVE STORY by Gary Shteyngart

SUPER SAD TRUE LOVE STORY is a dystopian sci-fi novel (is there any other kind?) set in the near future, and as such is a satire on contemporary American obsessions. It opens in Rome in the very near future, where Lenny Abramov, the story’s hero, is attending an orgy. Lenny is in Rome in pursuit of High Net Worth Individuals, hoping to sell them on the idea of Indefinite Life Extension, a service provided by the Post-Human Services division of the Staatling-Wapachung Corporation.
  Lenny meets Eunice Park, an American-Korean student living in Rome, and falls for her immediately. Soon after, Lenny returns to New York, where we discover that the United States is in a state of terminal decline. At war in Venezuela, the US is indebted to China, and is ruled by the quasi-fascist Bipartisan Party led by the hated Rubenstein.
  Lenny’s ambitions are two-fold. He wants to earn enough money to become a High Net Worth Individual, and thus avail of Indefinite Life Extension. He also wants to marry Eunice Park.
  The novel’s opening chapter comes courtesy of Lenny’s diary, in which he records his fears and concerns, his hopes and desires. Lenny’s is not the only story being told, however. The reader is given access to Eunice’s ‘Globalteen’ account, in which we are offered her emails to her sister, Sally, her mother Chung Won, and her best friend, Jenny Kang, aka Grillbitch.
  Thus the story proceeds with Lenny telling us about the declining economic and political situation in New York, and his burgeoning romance with Eunice; we then get Eunice’s take on the same events, which is often radically different to Lenny’s.
  Lenny is an ambitious, shallow, naïve 39-year-old. His infatuation with Eunice, who is roughly half his age, bears all the hallmarks of a mid-life crisis. Obsessed with youth, his credit balance and maintaining the illusion of normality as normal life crumbles around him, Lenny is very much a product of his time, when consumerism and patriotism amount to more or less the same thing.
  Lenny does appear to be slightly more thoughtful than his circle of friends, however. He is genuinely in love with Eunice, and wants nothing more than to be allowed to take care of her. Despite his conflicted relationship with his Russian-Jewish parents, he is constantly seeking their approval. Lenny also has a love of books, or ‘old print media’, which marks him out as something of a subversive in a society that has only contempt for any information that is not streamed on the ‘Globalteen network’ (aka the internet) and condensed into easily digestible data packets.
  Shteyngart makes much of Lenny’s Russian-Jewish background, but also presents Lenny as an Everyman, his naivety manifesting itself as a curiosity that in turn allows the reader to explore the nooks and crannies of his brave new world. He should be a likeable protagonist, but Lenny is too passive a hero to generate much sympathy. It makes sense, according to the book’s logic, that Lenny - and his entire generation - should be passive, conditioned as they are to be constantly receptive to information overload. By the same token, Lenny would have been a much more interesting character had he taken the decision to kick against the pricks much earlier in the story.
  Eunice is roughly half Lenny’s age, a young woman who is entirely immersed in the shallowness of her culture. An obsessive on-line shopper, she is emotionally stunted, dazzled by surface appearance and prospective mates’ credit rating. It’s to her own credit that Eunice gradually comes to appreciate Lenny’s subtle virtues, not least of which is that Lenny loves her for who she is, not what she represents.
  Eunice’s background is every bit as complicated as Lenny’s. One of two daughters in an immigrant Korean family, she has grown up with one foot in the liberal, consumerist society of the United States, and her other foot firmly shackled by her family’s conservative values. Her family life is further complicated by the fact that her father is physically abusive, and her mother is deeply religious. Starved of genuine affection, reluctant to trust men beyond physical engaging with them, she slowly responds to Lenny’s overtures.
  Meanwhile, Joshie Goldmann is Lenny’s boss at the Post-Human Services division of Staatling-Wapachung, a sprawling corporation that also houses a military division. Joshie is the living embodiment of the Indefinite Life Extension programme; although a father figure to Lenny, and a friend of almost 20 years standing, Joshie appears physically to be 20 years younger than Lenny. Joshie rules the Post-Human Services division with a benign dictator’s tender touch, espousing hippy-like mantras in order to motivate his staff.
  The America Lenny lives in is embroiled in a doomed land-war in Venezuela; Shteyngart never explicitly states the war is for oil, but we can take it for granted that that is the motive. Meanwhile, disgruntled veterans of the war, denied their promised bonus when they return to the States, foment dissent against the Bipartisan Party that rules the US. This dissent eventually boils over into outright conflict, when the veterans of New York, many of whom live homeless in Central Park, are attacked by the National Guard, and a state of emergency declared.
  Shteyngart also emphasises the current US obsession with the illusion of eternal youth, exaggerating it into a desire to live forever via the Indefinite Life Extension programme. The obsession with technology is also lampooned, as most people own an ‘apparat’, which appears to be an advance version of today’s hand-held devices (at one point, when Lenny takes out his out-moded apparat, he is sneered at by a younger co-worker, who asks if his apparat is an iPhone). The cult of celebrity and the desire for 15 minutes of fame is also lampooned, as most of Lenny’s ‘Media’ friends appear to stream their own on-line shows. Consumerism has become something of a philosophy in Lenny’s America; strangers can point their apparats at you to discover your credit rating, while credit poles on the street will also flash your credit details as you pass by.
  On a darker note, the two-party democratic system currently operating in America has morphed into a one-party government, which is quasi-fascist in tone, and issues declarations reminiscent of Big Brother in George Orwell’s 1984.
  Shteyngart employs a lively style, a variety of ‘teen-speak’ which is perfectly pitched to reflect the shallowness of the culture. The prose is slightly more formal when Lenny addresses his diary, but Eunice’s accounts are peppered with sexual slang, acronyms and an abrasively crude form of affection.
  He also employs a narrative structure that is initially interesting, in that he presents the reader with Lenny’s diary account of events, and then offers a contrasting take on those events - personal, political - from Eunice’s perspective. Once the pattern is established, however, it very quickly becomes predictable, and even monotonous.   Overall, the novel is an interesting contemporary equivalent to Aldous Huxley’s BRAVE NEW WORLD or George Orwell’s 1984, or Michael Chabon’s THE YIDDISH POLICEMAN’S UNION, as it offers a jaundiced view of a near future where our modern obsessions could well lead us.
  Despite Shteyngart’s use of familiar technology, however, there is little that is fresh or new here - in its appraisal of a conservative and quasi-fascist future, the novel’s liberal angst is predictably conservative.
  Shteyngart’s lively use of language makes the novel an enjoyable read on a page-turning basis, but in terms of the big picture, the novel is more concerned with reacting to current trends rather than devising a future philosophy. There’s a self-limiting aspect to the story that is perfectly in tune with Lenny’s passive personality, and with the internal logic of the world Shteyngart has created, but that self-limiting aspect also means that the novel lacks the grand ambitions of the great sci-fi novels.
  I’d recommend SUPER SAD TRUE LOVE STORY to anyone interested in dabbling in contemporary sci-fi, but connoisseurs of the genre might find it a little disappointing. - Declan Burke

It’s A Fair Cop’s Union, Guv

Adrian McKinty (right) has his own interweb doohicky, and yet for some reason he insists on sending me top quality material for use on Crime Always Pays. To wit:

Alaska Schmalaska

In Michael Chabon’s universe, a self-described redneck like Sarah Palin could never have become governor of Alaska. Why? Because in his world Alaska isn’t a frontier bastion for moose-killing survivalists but rather is the transplanted home for two million cosmopolitan Jewish refugees crammed into the sprawling city of Sitka just south of Juneau in the Alaskan panhandle. This is the central conceit of Chabon’s THE YIDDISH POLICEMAN’S UNION, a murder mystery and alternative history noir, that follows Detective Mayer Landsman’s quest to find the person or persons who killed the quiet chess master who lived in his overcrowded flop house.
  In what used to be called ‘the Jonbar Hinge’ among us sci-fi buffs, the moment Chabon’s Earth diverged from ours was sometime in the late 1930s, when the US government allowed unlimited Jewish migration from a Hitler dominated Europe to refugee camps in Alaska.
  The book is a kind of a ghost story, imaging the unlived lives of hundreds of thousands of people who, in the real world, were murdered by the Nazis. Chabon’s fantasy is that instead of this vibrant, rich, literary Yiddish culture becoming extinct in 1945, it crossed the Atlantic and survived in America.
  So that’s the premise but what of the book? In many ways it’s a standard police procedural of the Ed McBain / Mickey Spillane school that Chabon has composed in an affectionate pulp 1940’s style. He writes in the urgent present tense with a great deal of panache and economy. Chabon’s metaphors aren’t quite as rich as Raymond Chandler’s (whose are?) and his steeliness isn’t up there with Hammett, but his jokes are as good and sometimes better. His humour is Yiddish humour. Dry, slightly surreal, dark. There’s a gag or Chandlerism every few pages: ‘She took a compliment the way some people take a can of soda that they suspect you’ve shaken first.’
  The plot takes a while to get going but that’s ok, as you want to get to grips with Chabon’s Alaska, the alternate time-line and the offbeat characters. When the murder mystery does start to unfold, Chabon spins the yarn with intelligence, style and tight plotting.
  Alternative History novels are en vogue and a different outcome for World War II is by far the most popular scenario. Philip Roth’s THE PLOT AGAINST AMERICA covered similar terrain only three years ago and we’ve also had FATHERLAND, SS GB among many recent others. Chabon himself is a fan of Philip K Dick’s AH novel THE MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE, which towers above all contenders in the ‘Nazis win the war’ field.
  Although Chabon isn’t quite off in terra nova, what really stuck with me was the idea that every single person in Sitka – the former capital of Russian America (now there’s an idea for an AH novel) – was speaking Yiddish. There’s Yiddish TV, newspapers, radio, songs. Even the Irish newspaper hack talks a kind of low German. I liked this notion because although now virtually extinct as a literary tongue, Yiddish produced an extraordinary corpus of poems, plays and novels in its brief flowering, and today its influence can be felt in everything from Woody Allen films to Mel Brooks and Curb Your Enthusiasm. Irony is the default stance of Yiddish prose. Irony, embedded with black witticisms and a kind of grim fatalism. I have read a critique that Chabon’s style is ‘not Yiddish enough’ and certainly compared with Nobel Prize winner’s IB Singer’s it seems mannered and even a little forced. But actually Chabon does have a precursor in the lesser known Yiddish master Lamed Shapiro, whose American stories were influenced by the US hard-boiled school and seem strikingly similar to Chabon’s mix of paranoia, violence and defiant logic-inverting humour.
  THE YIDDISH POLICEMAN’S UNION is a thoughtful, introspective novel which did well on release and it’s probably going to do even better when the Coen Brothers make the movie version in 2010. My only criticism is that I don’t think the AH scenario really adds that much to the narrative and I wonder if the novel might not have worked just as well in our universe. Chabon said that the AH was necessary because ‘the Yiddish world is dead’, and while it is true that the Nazis destroyed Yiddish Europe (and the survivors mostly migrated to Israel where they had to speak Hebrew), Yiddish did not die out completely. My own wedding ceremony was in Yiddish at a Yiddish-Bundist commune in Putnam Valley, New York, and anyone who’s been to Kiryas Joel, NY, will find an entire town of 20,000 Haredi Jews with Yiddish newspapers, Yiddish street signs, Yiddish coffee shops, Yiddish schools, self published Yiddish spy novels. And yes, Kiryas Joel even has Yiddish speaking policemen. – Adrian McKinty

Adrian McKinty’s FIFTY GRAND will be published by Holt in 2009

Mi Casa, Su Casa – Bernd Kochanowski

The continuing stooooooory of how the Grand Vizier puts his feet up and lets other people talk some sense for a change. This week: Bernd Kochanowski (right) makes his Edgar predictions.

“On May 1st, the mystery writers of America (MWA) will announce this year’s winners of the Edgar Awards. Compared to other crime fiction awards it seems especially difficult to predict winners for the Edgar Award; not only might one’s own preferences send one awry, but the expectations of the juries change from year to year more than that of other.”

BEST PAPERBACK ORIGINAL
“Last year in this category, highly unusual (but fine) crime fiction novels were nominated. That might have been the reason that a rather bland book won. This year’s books are modern, sometimes bold but still more to the liking of the conventional crime fiction reader. In ROBBIE’S WIFE, Russel Hill tells the story of an older American writer who comes to England to find his peace and rebuild his shattered career. There he meets a young attractive woman who revives and stimulates him and leads him back to writing, a woman worth fighting for. It is a fine, but rather a conventional book and not on a par with earlier Edgar Award winners in this category.
  “WHO IS CONRAD HIRST?, written by Kevin Wignall, is an altogether different matter. It is a thriller that plays with the expectations of the reader and tells the story of a man who lost himself, became a killer and wants to find himself again. It is not so much a suspenseful and gripping book as well constructed and told. I missed a bit the great emotion and would assume that this slightly cool book has only a small chance.
  ”Two of the books are written by female authors, not only with heroines but with a female twist of the genre, with women who life lives and behave in a way not typically attributed to them. Megan Abbott’s QUEENPIN is a female variation of the ’50s pulp fiction. In a fine language it tells the story of a young woman who learns the ways of the criminal world and who makes her first own steps. It is a hardboiled story with a hint of noir but not enough speed to sustain this notion. The heroine is not really engaging and the plot itself has certain flaws. Obviously this should be no realistic candidate but the book has been much praised in the English-speaking world. In direct comparison, CRUEL POETRY by Vicki Hendricks is as noir, female, exciting and self-contained as only the best books. Renata provides sex for joy and money until a client wants more than he gets. With its explicit sex scenes and as a noir, it is not necessarily palatable to the majority of readers, but it would be a worthy winner.
  “In this panel, BLOOD OF PARADISE by David Corbett is the classical thriller. It is a book with a political proposition which is stated in a dossier that is found at the end of the book. Some of its quality lies in the fact that this proposition is not obvious for a reader who does not read the dossier. BLOOD OF PARADISE is a story of an US bodyguard who works in El Salvador and is confronted with his own past and is getting between the lines. This story describes a reality of which the USA and its security services are partly responsible. It is a story full of esprit and a has fair chance to win.
  “Therefore: CRUEL POETRY almost head to head with BLOOD PARADISE and clearly ahead of WHO IS CONRAD HIRST?. QUEENPIN would be a mistake and ROBBIE’S WIFE not understandable.

BEST FIRST NOVEL BY AN AMERICAN AUTHOR
“There is a very tough competition in this category and each book would (more or less) deserve to win. SNITCH JACKET by Christopher Goffard is the story of a loser who is on remand and explains to his lawyer why it was not so as it seems. It is a fine book in a style reminiscent of Jim Nisbet, but more stringently plotted. It is full of witty remarks, elaborate language and clever observations of the US-American culture. Because of the language, if at all, only with small odds.
  ”Craig MacDonald’s HEAD GAMES is full of homage and historical allusions. The story describes the hunt for the head of a former Mexican general. It is a road movie that hides under the disguise of a typical American crime story an ambitious literary novel. As the quality of this book is more hidden than plainly obvious, it is also only with small odds.
  “Tana French’s book IN THE WOODS reads like a crossbreed of a classical Whodunit and James Ellroy’s BLACK DAHLIA, a bit psycho-thriller, a bit police procedural, told with literary ambition. It describes the investigations of a murder of a young girl but ends with a daring finish where the different strands of the plot are whirled and shuffled and an emotional cauldron is created. At the end not all riddles are solved, which didn’t find the approval of all readers but I think that’s life. IN THE WOODS is multilayered, moves from one subgenre to another, and pleases again and again with opulent and felicitous phrases. It has a fair chance to win, and as much as MISSING WITNESS by Gordon Campbell. A courthouse drama that celebrates the US-American trial as a performance and demonstrates that all the scheming can backfire and that then a lawyer has to face the results of his own doings. Here is an author who tells a tricky story convincingly and can generate a cogent atmosphere.
  “In pole position in this category I would see PYRES by Derek Nikitas, a story about a young girl whose father is shot in front of her and whose mother is trying to kill herself and in time regresses to an infant state. It (like IN THE WOODS) draws from an astonishing range of subgenres, is well plotted, is full of sensitive descriptions of characters and (again like IN THE WOODS) is a formidable literary book. Pyres ends furiously and puts all the different strands convincingly to bed.
  “Therefore PYRES ahead of IN THE WOODS and MISSING WITNESS followed by HEAD GAMES. SNITCH JACKET would be a surprise.

BEST NOVEL
“The five candidates in this category all a penchant for the literary infused style and they are all viewed by the reader of mainstream genre with reservation. Two of the books are written by writers who had already success outside of the crime fiction world. “[...] there are sentences, whole passages, where he give the genre crime fiction coaching lessons,” writes Franz Schuh about Benjamin Black’s   “CHRISTINE FALLS. It is a book that reads as if its author compiled a list of genre specifications that he than worked off. It is stuffed with clichés and because of its opulent descriptions, real suspense is almost absent.
  “By comparison it looks as if Michael Chabon’s THE YIDDISH POLICEMEN’S UNION is authentic: If you read this book you get a real Chabon; Yiddish in Alaska. The book constructs a world of its own and tells about it with a volley of anecdotes; it is entertaining and exploring. That there are authors who write more suspenseful is not the point. The book is a likely candidate.
  “Two of the books are written almost in an classical (crime fiction) mood. DOWN RIVER by John Hart states its literary program in the acknowledgements and fails in this regard completely. It is not an analysis of choices (as stated) but the demonstration of stereotypical reactions. It is a wonderful atmospheric book, though; still, the Edgar would be a big surprise.
  “Reed Farrel Coleman’s SOUL PATCH is a dark book, well written, well structured, with a fine plot; but still, those who read THE JAMES DEANS might be a bit disappointed. As it combines literary style and classical genre themes, there is a small possibility that this book wins.
  “In between falls Ken Bruen’s PRIEST. As usual there are some small cases to solve and as usual the story is a canvass on which Jack Taylor’s life is drawn. He wonders about the influence of America’s language and culture on Ireland’s intellectual life and sees the long life of old crimes’ memory. It is told in Bruen’s poetical voice, emotionally intense and rooted in the modern pop culture. All in all it seems to me that it is so far the best book in the Taylor series and stands a real chance to win the Edgar.
  “Therefore PRIEST with a small head-start, followed by THE YIDDISH POLICEMEN’S UNION and then SOUL PATCH. DOWN RIVER would be a surprise, CHRISTINE FALLS more than that.”

Bernd Kochanowski blogs at Internationale Krimis

“You Read Me Poetry That’s Irish And So Black.”*

With three Irish writers nominated for Edgar awards, Declan Burke asks why Irish crime fiction - aka dubh noir - is suddenly so popular in the USA.

Have you heard that Shrooms and Once have both been nominated for Best Movie at the Oscars? No, you haven’t – but can you imagine the hoo-hah if they were?
  Three Irish writers have been shortlisted for the prestigious Mystery Writers of America ‘Edgar’ awards. Named after Edgar Allen Poe, the man who single-handedly invented the crime genre, the Edgars are crime fiction’s equivalent of the Oscars.
  In the ‘Best Novel’ category, Ken Bruen (right) was nominated for PRIEST, in which Galway private eye Jack Taylor investigates the decapitation of a priest in a confessional. Benjamin Black, aka John Banville, got the nod for his debut crime novel, CHRISTINE FALLS, in which pathologist Quirke investigates the death of the eponymous character in 1950’s Dublin.
  Tana French, the Vermont-born author who now lives in Ireland, was nominated in the ‘Best First Novel by an American Author’ category. IN THE WOODS follows a male and female detective partnership as they investigate what appears to be the ritualistic murder of a teenage girl in a leafy Dublin suburb.
  Bruen is already a multiple award winner in the US, and has previously been nominated for an Edgar; Tana French made the New York Times best-seller list some months back; and Black / Banville’s upcoming crime story, THE LEMUR, the third in the Quirke series following on from The Silver Swan, is currently being serialised in the New York Times.
  The glaring question, of course, is why aren’t these writers as popular in Ireland as they are in the US?
  “It’s the old chestnut of crime fiction not being considered ‘real’ writing,” says Bruen. “Funny that, with a Booker-winner [Banville] and a Pulitzer-winner [Michael Chabon] on the shortlist.”
  And yet John Connolly’s superbly written novels, for example, have been best-sellers in the US and Ireland for many years. Why has the new wave of Irish crime writers, the dubh noir of Declan Hughes, Brian McGilloway, Ingrid Black, Alan Glynn, Arlene Hunt and Adrian McKinty, suddenly become so popular there now?
  McKinty (left), an Irish writer now living in Colorado, believes that the new wave of Irish crime writing has coincided with the fact that America’s perception of Ireland has ‘changed radically in the last few years’. “Many of the old stereotypes are finally being laid to rest,” he says, “and Americans have discovered that Ireland is no longer the country of sheep, rain, ANGELA’S ASHES and The Quiet Man.
  “Crime writers embrace modernity and contemporary problems,” he says, “and Americans can’t help but notice in their visits to Dublin that Ireland has the youngest population in Europe and Dublin is a multi-cultural, twenty-first century city.”
  Charles Ardai, co-publisher at Hard Case Crime, which publishes the novels BUST and SLIDE, Ken Bruen’s collaborations with American author Jason Starr, suggests that Irish crime writing possesses a ‘wounded romanticism’ for American readers.
  “Irish settings are particularly appealing, not only because they have a touch of the exotic for US readers but because of the lyricism and sadness of the Irish voice – it blends nicely with the wounded romanticism that has been at the heart of crime fiction ever since Raymond Chandler make it his speciality,” he says. “No one can express pain and grief as resoundingly as an Irishman. No hard-drinking private eye can toss back pints with more fury (or more stamina) than an Irish P.I. And the poetry of the language is just delicious: by and large, American voices just can’t compete with Irish ones when it comes to describing a scene in a tasty way.”
  “Before Christmas,” McKinty says, by way of explaining the new-found American appetite for Irish rather than ‘Oirish’ stories, “I went to the movies to see I Am Legend. The preview for PS, I Love You elicited groans from the audience, but the preview for Martin McDonagh’s new crime thriller, In Bruges, brought belly laughs. That surely is a sign of something.” – Declan Burke

This article is reprinted with the kind permission of the Evening Herald

* A free copy of THE BIG O to the first person to identify the song. Ray Banks? You’re barred.