The action of the book revolves around what happens when the book-reading, slobbery Abramov cohabitates with the postliterate Park. With García Márquez, you think, "Oh, the guy sprouted wings? It happens." With Shteyngart, it is, "Everyone communicates through 3D holographic devices that broadcast your fuckability rating? Well, you know how it is. Shteyngart writes about technology with such ho-hum aplomb that I think he does for technology what magical realists did for the supernatural. Park is practically perfect Abramov a flawed human. 4chan coarseness having permeated society, that rating is reduced to a single score: Fuckability, rated on an 800 point scale like a section of the SAT. This is all the more shocking because in Shteyngart's near future, your romantic desirability is calculated and broadcast in real-time through an application for your äppärät, a communication device that projects shimmering, manipulable holograms above its surface. Chubby, ugly, and balding, Abramov has "a gray, sunken battleship of a face, curious wet eyes, a giant gleaming forehead on which a dozen cavemen could have painted something nice." He falls for a damaged young Korean woman, Eunice Park, who "could not have weighed more than eighty pounds." More improbably, she falls for, or least into, him. All of these things are correlated, but causality is fickle and flickering. Gary Shteyngart's new book, Super Sad True Love Story, is a story about the reversal of the immigrant dream, the demotion of language in human communication, and the rise of algorithmic perversity, wherein what we desire becomes what we are statistically likely to desire. It is hard to tell what the relationship between the iPhone and the collapse of America might be, but I'm sure glad that someone is trying to figure it out.
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