Gary Shteyngart

> Privatization, nationalization, savings incentives, spending stimulus, regulation, deregulation, fixed exchange rates, floating exchange rates, exchange controls, free currency exchange, more tariffs, fewer tariffs. And the net result: bankruptcy . We find ourselves in an imaginary America, governed by an authoritarian, police-state "bipartisan" regime in the throes of full economic and political decline: > zero for our economy, zero for military power, zero for everything that made us proud of ourselves . In a technological world where books are no longer read, but where one endlessly consults one's tablet (with the result that > you know every filthy detail of the world, while my books know only the minds of their authors ), Lenny Abramov is a forty-year-old Russian-Jewish man who works for a genetics firm specializing in extending the lives of its wealthy clientele. The novel opens during the protagonist's final days in Rome, where he has lived for a year drinking, having sex, and indulging in the Italian *dolce vita*, blithely squandering company money with meager commercial results. Just the day before his departure, he meets an American woman of Korean descent, Eunice, and falls madly in love with her. "How can I bring her to reconcile her youth with my decrepitude?" Lenny wonders: > we are such an improbable couple, so implausible because she is gorgeous and I am the ugliest forty-year-old in this place... I know we are living in Rubenstein’s America (the President of the United States)... but doesn’t that make us even more responsible for each other’s destiny? And it is precisely this attentive care and affectionate protection that allow Lenny to win over, step by step, Eunice’s otherwise eccentric and capricious heart. A love story unfolds against the backdrop of a devastated and decadent New York. For Lenny, loving Eunice is also loving his city—a desperate longing to lead a normal life amid the rubble of an empire. > Is it still my city? (Lenny asks himself) I have a ready answer, cloaked in obstinate despair: it is. And if it weren’t, I will love it even more. I will love it to the point that it will become mine again . Yet collapse inexorably arrives. Protest demonstrations are violently quelled by a police force privatized by major corporations. Chinese, Venezuelans, and Norwegians conquer America and divide its spoils, condemning New York to become an enclave for the wealthy and forcibly expelling residents from their homes. Amid this catastrophe, the love story also comes to an end, and with it Lenny’s entire frame of reference, leaving behind nothing but "the complete, black silence." It is a sophisticated novel, built upon a dual narrative structure. On one side lies Lenny’s diary—lexically refined, erudite, and ironic, replete with evident references to contemporary America; on the other are Eunice’s messages, composed in a youth-speak jargon. What emerges is a narrative and stylistic counterpoint that effectively conveys their divergent understanding of affection and events. For Lenny, it is a matter of escaping the fear of death and finding meaning in life before the collapse of his world. For Eunice, the romance is merely a parenthesis, to be navigated opportunistically while prioritizing her family of origin and personal ambitions. A distinctive feature of the novel is its use of words: recherché, caressed, alluring, endowed with unusual meanings. On a windy day, Lenny encounters a weary, elderly woman who > looked up at the looming wind and said one word: Gale. Just one word, a word that meant nothing more than a period of weather marked by strong winds, but it took me by surprise, it reminded me of how language was once used, its precision and simplicity, its power to summon memories.... and a hundred other days of gales appeared before me.... we were communicating with words . Yet it is precisely this preciousness of language that weighs the reading down, hindered by a narrative that is slow, repetitive (due in part to the dual structure), and often long-winded. A certain New York intellectualism prevails, to the detriment of narrative freshness. Why read it? It is a sad love story, a last stand against the collapse of the Western world.