The dystopian genre of fiction, as I see it, has a few rules
that tend to guide how a writer writes and a reader reads. One of the biggest
is a matter of content and, even though it’s a dirty word, authorial intent.
From the writer’s perspective, dystopian fiction offers social commentary on
the time during which it’s written; the reader draws parallels from
contemporary society (regardless of if the book is brand new or published
decades earlier) and, in judging the writer’s vision, ultimately judges how the
writer’s prophecies stack up – are they possible, are they dangerous, should we
be worried? There are other rules, of course, but I think this author-reader
relationship is central to the genre. Something else that’s central is the matter
of blame.
At the heart of any reading of 1984 or Brave New World
or any bad future scenario is the sinking question, “how did things get this
bad?” In the most celebrated works of dystopian literature (see previous
sentence) the criticisms levied against government or society are so intense
and at their core that they transform fiction into out-and-out polemic. Even if
the divergences that sent humanity into another direction are vague, though,
the feeling that something somehow went wrong lingers. This was a feeling I
experienced as I read Super Sad True Love
Story, but it was one that ultimately may have soured me a little.
The future of SSTLS
has some defining qualities that make it distinct from other bad futures. While
the angles of mass surveillance, government overreach and a little bit of
authoritarian rule are all there, a lot of the stuff we’re supposed to guffaw
at is a lot more social. People spend their entire lives plugged into machines,
and not speaking face to face about how they might really feel. They’re overly
sexualized and downright pornographic. They don’t read, and they certainly don’t
respect or value older generations at all. More abstractly, it seems like
nothing of value is being done by anybody at their jobs, even if you have a
pretty loose definition of “value.” My question now is, who does that sound
like?
SSTLS is the state
of the world if (and when) the millennials take over, or at least, if the stereotypes
do. A generation raised by iPhones and Internet porn who shy away from “real
work” getting into the driver’s seat leads us all to a hideously transformed
society, to an intensely negatively-altered state of being, to the brink of
annihilation at our own hands. But the youth and tech obsession has to go hand
in hand with the political critique for the novel to have any sense of
cohesion, so not only will the revolution be pornographed, but nobody will give
it a damn about it either. The Orwellian state Shteyngart presents is the product
of a vain and social-media-minded generation maturing into power more than
anything else.
I am incredibly skeptical of the arguments against
millennials that are put on the cover of esteemed publications like Time
Magazine with baiting headlines,
and not just because everybody
else is, either. That kind of respect-your-elders grandstanding is just so
old hat that it’s hard to take seriously. Time may want to argue that my
generation is a bunch of rotten assholes, but here’s the thing: so was
everybody else. (Not included there is a hilariously bad story from Time in
the late 1960s on why hippies are dirty and therefore worth your contempt.) It’s
a debate that can attract eye-rolls and an orchestra of “ugh” like no other, but
one people (usually elders -- but plenty of my classmates try pull “when I was
a high school…” at an alarming and surprising rate) can’t seem to stay away
from. Shteyngart is guilty of engaging in it, and I don’t think he comes out
from the battle victorious.
SSTLS is not just
a book of one topic, so to disparage it on the basis of this quality might be a
little much, if it weren’t also the premise of the entire novel. It’s a book
that asks us to look inside ourselves and ask “how did we fuck it up?” and has
a potent and powerful (and predictable, but neither here nor there) message
about mortality, youth and love. But it also has a message about why you
shouldn’t use Facebook too much, and why reading old books is good for you,
dammit, and I cannot quite excuse it for that.
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