Super True Interview

Gary Shteyngart attends preproduction session with Otherground crew.

By Laura Raskin

In March, the M.A. Arts & Culture Seminar from Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism invited author Gary Shteyngart, a creative writing professor at the School of the Arts, to be the subject of our first Blog Talk Radio interview. We wanted to talk to the satirist about his third and newest novel, “Super Sad True Love Story,” debuting this summer. We were also curious about the focus of Shteyngart’s fiction seminar “Strangers in a Strange Land,” which looks at the state of immigrant literature and translation in the U.S. today.

Shteyngart emigrated from Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) to Queens, N.Y. in 1979 at the age of seven. Up until then, he told us, he had worshipped at Lenin’s feet, but now in the U.S., his parents expected him to leave all that behind. His new heroes should be President Reagan, Yaweh (God in the Hebrew Bible), and “J.R.,” a greedy oil baron from the hit soap opera “Dallas.” Those first years in America were a confusing and often angst-filled time that left Shteyngart yearning “to belong somewhere.” He told OthergroundNY, “When I was very young I went to Hebrew school, which I really despised and … [the Torah] was drilled into our heads day in and day out by these rabbis, so I wrote my own version called the Ganorah. And so ‘Exodus’ became ‘Sexodus’ and I wrote this very raunchy version of the Old Testament. And that was the first time that any Americans actually talked to me and wanted to be my friends. So for me there was a kind of Pavlovian response to writing satire and trying to figure out my place in this strange civilization.”

His first two novels – “The Russian Debutante’s Handbook” (2003) and “Absurdistan” (2006) – satirize and distill what it means to be Russian, and what it means to be a Russian Jew in New York. “There were no Russian writers of my generation writing about this,” he said. And he was scared to be in the vanguard – it took him years and multiple visits with an analyst to work up the nerve to submit his manuscript for “Handbook.” But once the fear subsided, he realized that a strain of similarities exists in all immigrant experiences. “There’s a very strong literature out there [written by immigrants] that in many ways rivals what native-born writers have produced,” he said.

Nothing and no one is left un-skewered by Shteyngart’s grotesque descriptions and storytelling, and, surprisingly, the effect is mostly tender. (“In my books I’ve offended almost every ethnic group imaginable, including Canadians,” said Shteyngart.) His novels are love letters to the familiar, even if the familiar is hateful. “The Russian Debutante’s Handbook” received the Stephen Crane Award for First Fiction and the National Jewish Book Award. “Absurdistan” was named one of the ten best books of the year by The New York Times Book Review and Time magazine. Shteyngart is one of Granta’s Best Young American novelists, and his fiction and essays on travel and other topics have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Granta, Esquire, and the New Yorker.

“Super Sad True Love Story” – the new novel – takes place in a not-too-distant future dystopia. The U.S. is on the verge of financial collapse and is about to be bought out by a Norwegian hedge fund. In this society, everything is transparent, and a person’s net worth as well as their ability in the bedroom are readable as soon as they enter a room. Looks count, books don’t. It’s also an against-all-odds love story between a somewhat clueless dork, Lenny Abramov, 40, and a twenty-something Korean-American, Eunice Park, who uses acronyms more than words. Shteyngart was inspired to write the story after a visit from a cable television repairman. He saw the walls of books in Shteyngart’s apartment and commented on their number with a kind of horror and disgust. “We’re moving slowly toward a post-literate culture, which I think often happens with gigantic empires,” said Shteyngart, adding that our empathy for each other is fading, too. “We’re heading toward a very image-oriented culture. Everything now requires a visualization.”

His seminar at Columbia explores the role of the novelist in this world, and what it means to never be at home – except maybe in New York City.

For our complete interview with Shteyngart, click the link on the right side of this page.

Music by Raphael Fusco