ANATHEM,
by Neal Stephenson
$9.99, Harper Collins, $9.99
ISBN: 0061982482

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THE ROAD,
by Cormac McCarthy
Knopf, $7.99
ISBN: 0307267458

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THE LOST SYMBOL
by Dan Brown,
Doubleday, $9.99
ISBN: 0385533136

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SUPER SAD TRUE LOVE STORY,
by Gary Shtenygart
Random House, $9.99
ISBN: 067960359X

By the time J. Edgar Hoover reached mandatory Federal retirement age, it was well-known that the long-time FBI Director had become an ominous nutcase with the dirty goods on many people, including the political high and mighty. Lyndon Johnson was president, and it was assumed that he, like many of the denizens of Washington, would heave a sigh of relief as he handed Hoover the gold watch on his way out the door.
Instead, LBJ made a special exception and kept Hoover on as head of the Bureau. When asked why he had done such a thing, Johnson replied: “Better inside the tent pissing out than outside the tent pissing in.”
In the second decade of the twenty-first century, publishing, literature, and “SF” find themselves in revolutionary times, in part thrust there by technological developments—and how perfectly science fictional that would sound leading off a story in John W. Campbell’s Astounding.
But this really is the second decade of the twenty-first century, and the times they really are a-changing. Publishing is being changed by ebooks and ebook readers like Kindle, Nook, and the iPad, the literary content of the product can hardly be immune from bottom-line changes, and science fiction, by its very nature, cannot escape being up there on the line of scrimmage, for better or for worse, whether it likes it or not.
The four novels under consideration here are The Road by Cormac McCarthy, The Lost Symbol by Dan Brown, Anathem by Neal Stephenson, and Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart, and that it itself tells a multiplex revolutionary tale. I read them all on my Nook.
I received none of them as review copies. I bought them all as ebooks with my own money.
For those of you for whose beer money we critics compete and who must be constrained to shell it out for your literary entertainment, will it really come as a shock when I say that we reviewers expect freebies to review from publishers competing for our attention?
I have upon rare occasion bought books because their publishers did not grace me with copies or galleys, but I wanted to review them anyway. But I had never ever written one of these columns entirely about books I had to pay for. Which, of course, I hope will never happen again. Which, of course, I know damn well will.
And until now, I’ve never before reviewed a novel I read as an ebook, and in this essay I’m doing nothing but. And this is something I think I’m going to be doing a lot of in the future, and I won’t be complaining about that at all.
As a reader of literature outside the commercial SF genre, I do have to pay my own way, and have always been parsimonious about buying hardcover copies of what I wanted to read for my own personal enjoyment and/or edification for twenty-five dollars and up. This Scroogy attitude is probably exacerbated by all the free copies I’m inundated with of stuff that goes for the same prices, but which just isn’t the sort of stuff I want to read.
But epublishing and retailing, by fits and starts, here doing it right, there being exploitatively and foolishly greedy against enlightened self-interest, are changing my attitude, and I believe are in the process of changing the attitude of readers in general with finite budgets who have to balance wanting to read what they want to read right now with how many right-now editions they can afford to buy.
All of that is gone into at far greater length than I can burden you with here in The Publishing Death Spiral and The Future of eBooks Is Now on my blogsite Norman Spinrad At Large (http://normanspinradatlarge.blogspot.com/). For present purposes, the point is that all  the novels under consideration here were launched as hardcovers for twenty-five dollars or more, yet all of the ebook editions sell for the same price as the trade paperback reprints and sometimes a lot less, and are out there just as fast. Meaning at any time in the publication cycle readers of ebook editions are going to get more titles to read for the same money.
Three electronic cheers for that!
It means that even a critic who in fact not only gets freebies inside the genre tent but gets paid for reading them will look around more freely at what may be relevant to larger literary matters outside the genre tent, the boundaries of which are swiftly eroding.
None of the four novels under consideration are what we think of as genre “science fiction,” which is why they never came in over my transom as review copies. But all of them are not only literarily speculative fiction, not only even arguably science fiction, but perhaps, taken together, a clade of speciating literary vectors that arguably may replace “science fiction” entirely.
Or vice versa?
None of these four novels are mimetic contemporary tales; none of them are fantasies, since they do at least attempt to more or less stay within the known laws of mass and energy—or in the case of Anathem, argue its way around them and through them with geeky rubber cosmology. So if one reverses figure and ground to define science fiction by what everything else is not, they have to be SF because there’s nothing else for them to be.
I bought an ebook edition of The Road with no thought of wanting to review it because Cormac McCarthy is an establishment literary lion, the novel is set in a post-apocalypse future, and it received such laudatory attention in what’s left of the establishment literary press as a novelist in my existential position would sell at least a collateralized debt obligation on his soul for. I had previously bought the ebook of Super Sad True Love Story because the coverage in the more or less same PR environment promised a fun read, and because this non-genre SF novel was set in some sort of gonzo near-future.
Only after having read both the Shteyngart and McCarthy did I realize that both of them were science fiction, and not even merely speculative fiction, by any coherent literary definition. And that from a proprietary genre point of view, these guys were standing outside the genre tent.
But were they pissing in or knocking on the door, to flagrantly mix two metaphors in a single sentence? The only thing that seemed clear was that something mutationally general was going on.
Only then was my curiosity drawn to The Lost Symbol, a sort of sequel by the author of the monstrous best-seller The Da Vinci Code, which I had read for lack of anything else in English to be found  in an apartment in Paris where Dona and I were staying. This is what one could only call the kind of contemporary paranoid present tense historical thriller that insists that it’s realistic by shoehorning itself inside the physical laws of mass and energy, however loosely it plays with everything else.
And is this not another functional definition of science fiction if ever there was one? And has not Dan Brown gotten filthy rich writing it? And does it not make sense for those of us writing science fiction without attaining his lofty commercial eminence to try to figure out why? Particularly since The Lost Symbol is, in literary terms, a real stinker, much more so than The Da Vinci Code.
In The Da Vinci Code, it was the Catholic Church getting the expose the machinations of the Illuminati of the Month treatment, via a search to crack the secret encoded in the Mona Lisa that exfoliates into a derring-do thriller via an academic expert forced by fictional necessity to do the derring, à la a reluctant Indiana Jones.
Unless you’ve just returned from the ex-planet Pluto, you don’t need me to tell you that it was an enormous commercial success, but maybe you do need me to confess, if that is the proper word, that I rather enjoyed it. Hey, Leonardo, Opus Dei, a homicidal albino monk, the Holy Grail, the hidden secret life of Jesus and Mary Magdalene, the Roman Catholic Church fighting for its life well outside the rules of the Marquis of Queensberry—pretty hard to not be gripped by such material, and Dan Brown writes proficiently if not with high literary ambition.
But did Brown really believe this stuff ? Could it really be true? Was that why some Church officials expressed their displeasure? Was not putting these thoughts bouncing around the heads of readers and paranoid pop culture part of its appeal?
Whatever, Dan, any agent worth his commission would have told Brown, since The Da Vinci Code earned out so much above the advance we got on it, your publisher is slavering to lay out much more for the advance on a sequel.
Voila, The Lost Symbol! Same lead hero, but this time it’s the Freemasons, particularly the Founding Fathers of the United States of America, the CIA, and Noetics, a science fictional science of consciousness reminiscent of Scientology presented without the sardonic wink of an L. Ron Hubbard.
And the venue in which the action—and there is plenty of that—takes place is not millennial Rome or Paris with the atmospheres that implies, but the mythical cityscape secretly created as Washington, D.C.
Washington’s architecture and decor as the creation of the Freemason Conspiracy of the Founding Fathers? George Washington as Prometheus? Human thought manipulating and creating reality because collectively it has some cockeyed quantum mass?
Come on, Dan!
Do you really believe this stuff ?
But hey, there really is a pyramid with an all-seeing eye atop it on the dollar bill, the Founding Fathers really were mostly Masons, as was George Washington, and some of this stuff seems well-researched and credible. There are probably as many or more people who believe in this incarnation of the Secret Masters of the world’s reality as believe in the Men in Black and the alien corpses in Hangar 51 and Timothy Leary’s Curse of the Oval Office combined.
Could it really be true?
Well, there’s the nature of Dan Brown’s secret formula, and an utterly science fictional technique it is, as I should know quite well, having myself applied it to both the historical past and, like Brown, what might be called the speculative present. What you do is use the gaps, contradict nothing that is verifiably true, which lets you play freely with everything else.
It’s a most useful literary technique. You can’t write immediate-future speculative fiction (“anticipation” as the French call it to distinguish it from “science fiction” because the speculative element need not involve science or technology at all) or historical fiction or hard science fiction without employing it. Dan Brown has it down cold in the speculative present, and in The Da Vinci Code it worked well for him.
He uses it to good effect again in The Lost Symbol, but there he also employs a coldly cynical story-telling technique to keep the reader turning the pages without finding a good stopping point to place a bookmark and reading at warp speed to create the illusion of a breathlessly thrilling lead.
He does this with short chapters, most ending just after the viewpoint character learns something important but withholds what it is from the reader by cutting away to another viewpoint character and doing the same thing again.
And again, and again, and again, throughout most of the novel.
Well, you pays your money, and you takes your choice. I say this is a manipulative cheat, and an obnoxious one. Once you perceive it, the thrill is gone away into the clunky clockwork machinery. On the other hand, maybe readers who don’t perceive the carney move will enjoy the roller coaster ride.
Or not. The Lost Symbol got unenthusiastic reviews, made the top of the bestseller lists, but didn’t sell anything like The Da Vinci Code. Given the expectations, it could be considered a flop, at least by the publisher that shelled out a huge advance based on past Bookscan numbers for another cash cow and got one whose inky milk bled red.
What Dan Brown demonstrates with The Da Vinci Code and The Lost Symbol is that you can enthrall a general mass readership that turns its nose up at “sci-fi” with fiction set in a speculative present, where everything that can be verified is set in the reality that those readers know and the speculative elements are presented as hiding within that matrix. Especially if that chosen matrix seems to have plenty of hidey-holes for Secret Masters and theological and/or political secrets whose existence cannot be logically or emotionally disproved.
This fiction of the speculative present is certainly speculative fiction, but is it science fiction? Contend that it is not, and you will have to concoct a literary definition that excludes it. What does it lack, when done right? What does it do that it shouldn’t?
This is of more than mere academic hair-splitting interest because the speculative present is likely to supersede or at least dominate the speculative futures of “science fiction,” and for a general readership has just about done it already.
The operative question is really can “science fiction” welcome it into the fold, can writers whose work has evolved within the genre parameters of “science fiction” adapt to this mode and use what they have learned in the process—which is plenty—or will it be left to the Dan Browns to reinvent the speculative wheel?
I mean, pondering my own vector, I see that my novels were moving in this direction long before I even understood that it was a direction, starting with Bug Jack Barron, proceeding through Passing Through the Flame, The Mind Game, Pictures at 11, He Walked Among Us, and maybe arguably more.
This I was doing while certain other writers were arguing about whether they should “leave science fiction” as rats escape from a sinking boat. Did I “leave science fiction”? Certainly I was never enthusiastic about this stream of my work being published in genre SF lines, where it didn’t really belong in terms of marketing demographics.
But while I was writing this sort of stuff, I was also writing things like Songs From the Stars, Riding the Torch, Child of Fortune, and The Void Captain’s Tale, which I knew damned well could only and should only be published as science fiction. Because only people on familiar terms with that literature could have the intellectual tools to understand, let alone enjoy, fiction set in the far future, and dealing with such material as mutated consciousness and human destiny in a galactic context.
Was I missing something here? Pondering that question and deciding thereby to write this column, I decided that I had to first read Anathem.
Why?
Because Neal Stephenson had begun well inside the tent of science fiction both commercially and literarily with novels like Snow Crash and The Diamond Age, but successfully snake-danced out of the tent and into the speculative past circa World War II with Cryptonomicon. He solidified his escape from singular genre restraints with a kind of historical fantasy trilogy called The Baroque Cycle.
Not many “science fiction writers” have pulled off this Houdini act to reach a wider and more general readership while still more or less faithful to their own literary stars. But from what I had read about Anathem, it seemed like a novel that could only be comprehended by, let alone be of any interest to, the hard-core cognoscenti, set as it is in an alien civilization on a planet far far away in time, space, and the taste of any but a committed science fiction readership.
¿Que pasa?
Stephenson prefaces the novel with this Note to the Reader:
“If you are accustomed to reading works of speculative fiction and enjoy puzzling things out on your own, skip this Note. Otherwise, know that the scene in which this book is set is not Earth, but a planet called Arbe that is similar to Earth in many ways.”
He then proceeds to pages of Arbe pronunciation guides and a Cliff Notes guide to the rises and falls of thousands of years of civilizations on his fictional planet before even beginning the story.
Well, this certainly seems like trying to prepare a naive and wider readership to sail the starry sea of science fiction, a cunning means of persuading it to take a flyer on this novel. But those who do will find themselves light years, multiplex realities, and consciousnesses from Kansas.
The first person narrator and lead character of Anathem is Erasmus, a sort of monk in a sort of monastery, though as the song says, neither of them are quite what they seem. Stephenson leaves you encapsulated “intramuros” with Erasmus in the only context he has known since childhood, and all you know of Arbe, for a long leisurely while in this long leisurely and sometimes a wee overly discursive novel before he and you escape, flee, or are ejected into the wider world outside the walls. And it’s not exactly what you expected it to be, Dorothy.
Inside, the “fraas” do a kind of theoretical science cum existential philosophical calculus in a millennial attempt to understand life, the universe and everything by talking about it, pondering it, engaging in debates and logical jousts, and regarding material phenomenology as mere data, though one may engage aspects of the material world as hobbies.
The feeling is cloistered Middle Ages, and the “dialogs” deliberately Socratic, often overlong even to a reader who does find such stuff fascinating. What someone will make of reading Anathem as their first immersion in this hardest of hard science fiction, I can’t even imagine. But it does make sense if you can fathom it, and it will end up being crucial to the story.
Until Erasmus leaves the intramuros world, you are led by the monastery-like culture, steampunk level technology, and even the literary style to believe that outside the walls is some kind of medieval age, but nothing could be further from the truth.
Extramuros, they do pragmatic science and technology, high, low, civilian, and military, and through millennia of sine wave ups and downs have evolved a high tech civilization rather more advanced than our own, with things like smart phones, an internet, helicopters, satellites, mini-nukes called “Everything Killers,” ballistic missiles, and, as it turns out, very sophisticated low Arbe orbit manned capabilities.
You could take this set-up as a take on the dichotomy between theoretical and experimental physics, science and mathematized cosmological philosophy like string theory, cosmic Cartesian dualism, or all of the above.
And when some sort of alien spaceship is discovered secretly orbiting the planet and Erasmus gets more and more involved in the efforts of The Powers That Be to discover its nature and intentions, the novel itself bifurcates along two different vectors.
Discovering what the alien spaceship is, who the aliens are, where they came from, and what they want, is a fascinating tale and intellectual puzzle, delving deeply into the possible nature of multiplex universes and a definitive theory of universal consciousness. Vaporware, maybe, but way cool and logically vigorous vaporware. About as deep into hard scientific speculation as you can get, and brilliantly pulled off by Neal Stephenson.
Stephenson does stepwise peel the layers of maya off his cosmological onion to reveal his at least literarily satisfying version of ultimate reality, as such mystical hard SF should. But this fades more and more into the background in about the last quarter or so of this long novel, which devolves into seemingly endless space commando high tech derring-do.
What happened here?
Like the novel itself, the readership demographic Stephenson seems to be writing for appears to bifurcate somewhere past the excellent first two-thirds of the novel, written for a scientifically sophisticated audience of veteran science fiction readers, and the final third, which descends from on high into action footage loops and nuts-and-bolts military SF.
Why Stephenson did what he did only he can really know, which doesn’t mean he had to know why to do it. But that Anathem seems to at least have been nicely commercially viable and critically approved would appear to say something, something that on balance is positive.
I would surmise that not many readers who were intellectually seduced by the first two-thirds of Anathem felt all that satisfied by the handling of the denouement, and even fewer readers turned on by space war SF action were going to plow through all that geeky stuff to finally get to it. So it would seem that there still remains enough of a dwindling and perhaps aging-out demographic of sufficiently educated sophisticated readers to support the continued existence of hard-core science fiction.
After all, in a country of three hundred million people, a tiny slice of the readership pie is sufficient to make any flavor of fiction commercially viable within certain parameters. And if you’re willing to accept those economic limits, you can gain the creative freedom to write for your chosen ideal readership.
Which by my lights should be yourself. Would it not be self-betrayal as well as of any potential readership, to write something you wouldn’t want to read if someone else had written it?
What its practitioners are pleased to call “Literary Fiction” recognizes that it can’t attract some maximum bottom-fishing bottom-line readership, and must content itself with being an elite niche genre like science fiction. It’s been a long time since literary lions like Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, and Mailer could publish fiction that was “literary” and “popular” at the same time.
The surrender of this synergy of front-line literary intellectual heroism to the creation of a duality between “literary” and “popular” may be not exactly peace with honor, but at least it does allow some niche literature like “serious” science fiction and “serious” literary fiction to survive with more or less creative freedom.
But there is a feeling abroad that the handwriting of future commercial non-viability may be on the electronic wall for both of these genres with serious literary intent. Writers inside the science fiction tent have been attempting to “break out” of the genre and into the “mainstream” for decades now in various ways and with varying success. And, the grass always looking greener from the outside, of late “serious literary writers” are trying their hands at science fiction.
The problem for science fiction writers is that attempting to address a larger audience means attracting a wider audience, and writing for a wider audience tends to dumb down the product.
The problem for literary writers is that while their sort of inward-looking fiction has no trouble being understood by a general readership, it tends to bore it because of its disconnect from cultural and mass cultural relevance.
Or, as I wrote long ago, “Science fiction treats matters of cosmic significance trivially, literary fiction applies its superior literary technique to the contemplation of the lint in its own navel.”
Cormac McCarthy’s The Road is at once a typical and peculiar specimen thereof. McCarthy is one of those currently rare major league novelists with a major league mass readership track record, and The Road won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, among other lesser awards, something I find hard to understand.
Or maybe I understand too well, and am being cowardly reluctant to state what in establishment literary quarters would be regarded as Philistine lèse majesté coming from a mere “sci-fi” guy. Well, frankly, Scarlett, I don’t give a damn. I might as well stand up on my hind legs and say it out loud:
The Road is superlatively written post-apocalyptic science fiction. But it is not a great novel, or indeed really a good one, and those who claim that it is are the ones who are embarrassing themselves in my eyes and in the eyes of anyone who knows what good science fiction is. Or for that matter, good fiction period.
There, I’ve said it.
In the first place, The Road is not really a novel at all, but a novella stretched out to book length. Not by the old trick of wide margins and large type, but by a newer one, a “post-modern” pretension that similarly increases the page count by padding many of the pages with white space, but in a manner counterproductive to the ease of the reading experience.
“What does he mean by that?” you might well ask.
“All I can do is demonstrate,” I’m forced to admit.
“So go ahead and do it,” you say.
In The Road style, the above three lines would be printed as:

What does he mean by that?

All I can do is demonstrate.

So go ahead and do it.
No “saids” or said-bookisms in any of the book’s dialog or any other form of speaker identification, replacing them with double line spaces every time the speaker changes. And not just in short sequences but in whole pages at a time, running up the page count by halving the words per page.
Fortunately, at least there are really only two speaking parts in this book, a father and his boy; if there were more in a scene, this sort of thing would render it just about unreadable.
Neither character is graced with a name, and the author seems to maintain a psychic distance from them, alternating subtle omniscient author narration with a scattering of stream of the father’s consciousness that seems rather coldly generic. He never enters the son’s consciousness at all as they trudge along through Cormac McCarthy’s bleak and pitiless post-apocalyptic landscape, encountering a rogue’s gallery of human monsters straight out of The Worst of Mad Max toward inevitable entropic doom.
Th-th-th-that’s all, folks, that’s the whole sad content, except for a bathetic little bullshit ending that contradicts what theme The Road has had, which more or less amounts to “life’s a bitch and then you die.”
A nameless man and nameless son making their way south through the moribund landscape of a dying Earth; dying trees, dying foliage, ruined cities and towns, birds falling dead from the sky, the biosphere itself seemingly well on the road to extinction without a ray of hope.
McCarthy is very good at physical description, and would seem to have done his homework, because he’s quite meticulous about getting the nuts and bolts of everything not only well-described, sometimes over-described, but correct in the manner of a conscientious hard science fiction writer. Indeed, The Road would be a successful little piece of hard science fiction, at least in technical terms, except for one not at all minor flaw.
Cormac McCarthy never enlightens the reader as to what has happened to create his post-apocalypse Hades. Nuclear war? Global warming? An asteroid strike? Escaped aliens from Hangar 51 taking vengeance on Gaia? Not only does McCarthy never tell you, he probably doesn’t know himself—because the world he has created doesn’t really jibe with being created by any or even all of the above. He probably didn’t care either.
Talented writers who misunderstand science fiction have often fallen into this trap, supposing that writing in the SF mode allows you to invent whatever literary world suits your purpose without regard to suspension of disbelief or scientific knowledge, and sometimes it even works.
But you do have to havea purpose, a theme, a didactic ax to grind, a revelation to convey—something, anything, that pulls together your series of events, uniting character evolution with dramatic structure and with philosophical vector to reach a satisfying conclusion for the reader, an epiphany, if you’re really on your game, even a satori.
There is a technical term for this.
It’s called a story.
Because it doesn’t have that sort of literary or transliterary purpose, The Road doesn’t tell a story. Because it doesn’t have a story to tell. And I suspect that Cormac McCarthy didn’t care to write a novel that told a story, but wrote the novel as a literary exercise.
Stories arise somewhere below the intellectual surface of consciousness—the subconscious, the collective unconscious, the dreamtime, the zeitgeist—and you know when one arises from the vasty deeps because it grabs you with the grappling iron of emotion, and will do the same for the reader if you’re up to the task of conveying it.
Stories call you. There’s no guarantee they’ll come when you call, and when they don’t, the tendency is to try harder and harder against the zen of it, and when that doesn’t work, to intellectualize a literary exercise like The Road.
To a certain extent this is as good a definition of Post Modernism as any, and not just in literature—and it turns off many readers, or, to put it the other way around, really turns on few. Such literary exercises, if well executed, are easy to admire, but not at all easy to love.
That something like The Road won the Pulitzer Prize when there were any number of much better novels published in the same year even from within the tent of science fiction is a sad and frightening commentary on the state of American serious literature—that is, of a literary culture that takes itself so seriously that it can’t bother itself with true story telling, and looks down its patrician nose at writers who do. And therefore at any readership beyond its own circumscribed fan base.
Perhaps, in a way like science fiction writers turning to things like the speculative present to reach beyond their own circumscribed fan base, literary lions like John Updike, Philip Roth, and Cormac McCarthy have dabbled with much the same thing, or so least they imagine, in an effort to restore some culturally relevant grandeur or purpose to their work, to recapture the magic that seems to have gone away with Hemingway, Robert Penn Warren, Mark Twain, Norman Mailer.
Perhaps they have noticed that members of the club who rarely wrote anything like science fiction are best known for the science fiction they did write. Aldous Huxley for Brave New World, George Orwell for 1984, Anthony Burgess for A Clockwork Orange, for the most conspicuous examples.
Why can’t we do likewise? they may tell themselves. Why can’t we apply our more serious and sophisticated literary concerns and powers to this mother lode of thematic riches and colorful backgrounds and rescue it from the sci-fi hacks and ourselves from post-modern creative stagnation?
Well, they generally don’t fare too well because they generally don’t understand that science fiction as literary exercise without a meaningful story to tell is generally as flat as last week’s tortillas.
But when this sort of attempt to meld the virtues of “serious literature” with those of science fiction is done right from both ends of the spectrum, the whole can transcend the sum of its parts, and you can get something like Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart.
Shteyngart is the son of a Jewish Russian family who emigrated to the United States in his youth. This background is certainly relevant to not only his ability but perhaps his desire to write something like Super Sad True Love Story, and maybe even to what literary vector his career might take.
He grew up as a boy in the Soviet Union, in Russia, where, rather than twentieth-century science fiction evolving as a species of commercial low-brow schlock—since such a thing was not possible in the Soviet Union where—science fiction was ipso facto published by “official publishing houses” along with everything else (aside from underground samizdat).
But science fiction, being what it inherently was, also had a kind of sub-rosa function as political satire and/or protest screed. Because if you were careful, you could get away with encoding it in tales that after all are not set in the Soviet Union of today, Commissar, but on an alien planet in the future, far, far away.
If you were careful. If Soviet science fiction writers overstepped the bounds, it could become a seriously counterproductive career move, which it sometime did.
So Russian science fiction evolved in a rather surreal political context, and in a different tent a kind of Russian Magic Realism that was playing something of the same game with fantasy was long regarded as a cutting edge of “serious literature.” So when the commissars metamorphosed into acquisition editors, the boundaries between the two were a good deal more porous than in the US, and in the minds of a certain literate readership, too.
On the other side of the literary lineage, in the United States, the novel of urban Jewish sexual angst à la Philip Roth is very much in the mainstream of serious establishment literature, and Shteyngart, born into a family of Russian Jewish immigrants, has naturally embraced and been embraced by that tradition, too.
Lenny Abramov, the primary lead in Super Sad True Love Story, is himself the son of Russian Jewish immigrants in New York, with all that implies as rich material for a family side to the story, which Shteyngart portrays in full detail with characteristic sardonic but empathetic realistic humor.
Lenny’s inamorata, obsession, non-jailbait Lolita, is Eunice Park, a Korean-American post-teen pop tart. Perhaps the most amazing feat in this novel is how deeply and intimately Shteyngart presents both first generation traditionalist Korean-American family culture and the electronically multiplexed super style and consumer-brand obsessed culture of their jacked-in mall rat daughter.
So where’s the science fiction in this tale of two generations of two different and also somewhat amusingly similar immigrant families?
Well, this story—and true story it certainly is—takes place in a New York perhaps not as far in the future as we would like it to be, when the economically and financially collapsed United States, fighting a losing war in Venezuela, is deep into the process of being turned into a Third World banana republic by its Chinese creditors and Venezuelan and Norwegian gunboat diplomacy.
And no, this is not satire, this is all too credible on an extrapolation level, this is serious science fiction, well-thought-out and realistically rendered. Then, too, Lenny’s job is that of a high-end salesman for a company promising eternally renewable life in the near future to the well-enough heeled and its own elite employees who keep enough clients forking over for expensive temporary measures in the indefinite meantime.
Something like Scientology rebooted as the Foundation For Human Immortality out of Bug Jack Barron, peddling not cryogenic freezing to get the wealthy there, but endless and endlessly expensive medical treatments and sophisticated genetically engineered snake-oil nostrums.
Gary Shteyngart not only brings all these threads together in the end, they reinforce each other, as they should, making Super Sad True Love Story a whole that is synergistically greater than the mere sum of its parts.
This is a novel infinitely more worthy of a Pulitzer than something like The Road, and probably more worthy of a Nebula than anything published in the relevant year, too. Written by a writer who seems by the text to see no more contradiction in this than I do.
Is this a one-shot by a writer whose main aspiration lies along a narrower vector toward being accepted as an establishment literary lion, or contrawise a nascent science fiction writer who seeks not to pass this synergetic way again?
One hopes not. One hopes neither. One hopes that such a complete and completely rounded novel is a harbinger of the future of American literature.
The future work of Gary Shteyngart, the direction his career will take, will surely be indicative of what that future will be.

Copyright © 2011 by Norman Spinrad