Review of Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart

Shteyngart knows how to bring the beef.

Politically incorrect ranting, raving, and livestreaming.
Much chuckle-worthy correspondence featuring an upper middle-class Jewish American, a Korean American and her family, and an upper-upper-upper-upper class American CEO-type with sub-human morals. Highly polished, irreverent bashing of this, that, and the other. Prescient, but really just an extrapolation of what you will see and hear walking down the street in New York, probably, five days from now.
Our hapless middle-aged protagonist, Lenny, hilariously laments into his diary – artificially injecting his super sad, balding existence with pathos. He just spent a year in Italy trying to get laid on business. and he gets reamed by the post-apocalyptic American re-entry procedure. Now he’s on one of those watch lists and his social “hotness” score plummets like his dwindling bank account.
Faulty AI-customer service bots redirect peoples’ life trajectory based on mis-clicks and questionable pronunciation. His job at Post-Human services teeters over an abyss due to his incompetence as a salesman, which stems from social anxiety of a sort, a sorrow which permeates his being, radiating a pathetic red flag toward any prospective clients and romantic partners.
When he meets Eunice, he goes all in in a heart-straining effort to prove his personal crusade to live forever and to live well in a world as unstable as the setting of Mad Max. Living forever is a current fad, but is it only a naive dream bred by pharmaceutical companies cashing in on wealthy folks’ impending mortality?
Lenny is angry, most often at himself, for saying the wrong thing at the wrong time. He is furious at his boss for giving him less money, even though his performance is not detectable, even with a geiger counter. He is outraged by moneyed people doing moneyed things with their moneyed asses. Here, books are quaint bric-à-brac, and he amasses thousands of them hoping his acquaintances will be impressed. They are not.
Unlike other literary novels where the whole point is trying to justify showing a middle-aged man sleeping with a barely legal beauty through intense MFA-curated prose interiority, the author casts all of his characters in a lurid, revealing light, thankfully providing a key perspective of Eunice, who is a girl trying to survive in her own shameless way, another manipulator in a world ruled by influencers, catering to Narcissists, adored by opiated masses.
Laughs to spare. And though it is ugly and uncouth, purposely offensive, it digs at an apparent truth of the Consumerist Mecca—that we are no closer to finding happiness (as a collective) than our simple-lived ancestors.
If this book scares you, then what are you going to do twenty or ten years from now when its absurd predictions manifest in one form or another?