Super Sad True Love Story

Super Sad True Love Story (2010) by Gary Shteyngart. In the near future, a time in which youth is everything, a 39-year-old Jewish man named Lenny falls in love with a 24-year-old Korean woman named Eunice. Aside from youth, a good credit rating is paramount, and devices called apparati, worn by virtually everybody, broadcast one's credit rating to the "poles," roadside devices which display the credit rating of passing pedestrians. Lenny has good credit, but he lacks the funds for youth-restoring nanobots which are being used by the very upper classes. The book cleverly alternates chapters devoted to Lenny's diaries with chapters devoted to Eunice's "Globalteens" messages to her friends and family. Thus the reader knows things that Lenny believes but which Eunice contradicts, and one can see that their affair is doomed. It's an artfully told tale which makes satiric commentary on the current state of society, and what it threatens to become. Grade: B+