Fiction; Prediction?

Bonus marchers, 1932

By this time last week, I had given up on trying to function.after a physically and mentally punishing week at the office. So I spent most of the weekend immersed in Gary Steyngart's Super Sad True Love Story.

The story is set in a future time that's vague, yet seems to be just around the corner.

Lenny Abramov is heading back to New York after a year in Italy. When his pre-flight screening goes unexpectedly wrong, it's a hint that some things at home may be awry. Lenny is allowed to fly, but it's unclear whether or not he's been flagged for surveillance by the American Restoration Authority—the shadowy entity administering the country on behalf of the ruling Bipartisan Party.

But the incident seems minor to Lenny, who's just fallen in love with the beautiful Eunice Park. A 39-year old booklover, Lenny records his story in an old-fashioned diary; in a parallel narrative, the viewpoint of the much younger Eunice is told through text pulled from her e-mail account.

Lenny returns to a country where technology and consumerism are at bizarre levels, yet not completely unlike our real environment today.

Everyone—except the ultra-wealthy elite of HNWIs (High Net Worth Individuals)—is required to carry a data device called an äppärät, for instant read-out of the bearer's Credit rating.

The äppärät is used to monitor the everyone, yet everyone adores it, with characters using it to stream their every thought and to rate the hotness of everyone in view.

Steyngart's take on consumerism borrows from current "street" marketing to invent even more absurdly crass products. Male characters wear SUK DIK logo clothing; Eunice, her sister and best friend compulsively surf a site called AssLuxury, in an endless quest for deals on the JuicyPussy fashion line.

The price of everything is noted: consumer goods costs are all-important, and they are expressed in "yuan-pegged dollars."

Lenny works in "the creative economy." Reporting back to his nightmarishly hip workplace, he sees that employee names and ratings are now displayed on an old-fashioned Italian railway board

... the black-and-white flaps were turning madly, the letters and numbers mutating—a droning ticka-ticka-ticka-ticka—to form new words and figures, as one unfortunate Aiden M. was lowered from "overcoming loss of a loved one" to "letting personal life interfere with job" to "doesn't play well with others." Disturbingly enough, several of my former colleagues... were marked by the dreaded legend TRAIN CANCELED.

I found the novel hard to put down: the first half or so is just that funny, although the comic inventions also seem believable enough to have a painful edge.

And the really dark notes are plentiful, early on:

People in the streets are being stopped by the New York National Guard—whose troops have oddly Southern accents. And the security checkpoints are marked by signs denying their existence; persons stopped are instructed that—

BY READING THIS SIGN YOU HAVE DENIED EXISTENCE OF THE OBJECT AND IMPLIED CONSENT.

Credit Poles read the Credit ratings of pedestrians, as the authorities monitor LNWIs (Low Net Worth Individuals). Immigrants are watched, to be deported if they break the rules: Chinese must spend; Latinos, save.

Without good looks or wealth, Lenny still is able to establish a relationship with Eunice. She has to overlook other bad traits: Lenny reads books (the young say they smell bad), and he is too "brain-smart."

Whether the relationship can survive or not, the world around the two becomes darker as the novel progresses.

As the country's economic/political underpinning is threatened with investor "decoupling," New York prepares for the visit of the Chinese central banker, "unofficially the world's most powerful man."

Whole neighborhoods are cleared; the newly homeless camp in Central Park, in an echo of another century's Hoovervilles.

Veterans of the recent war with Venezuela are angry about not receiving their promised bonus. Events parallel the 1932 Bonus Army, as vets and other LNWIs camp in Tompkins Square and refuse to leave.

The National Guard are gradually supplanted by the security arm of Staatling-Wapachung, the sinister corporation that also employs Lenny.

Well before the novel's end, Lenny's Russian Jewish immigrant parents are afraid to go outside because of the Credit Poles; Eunice's Korean immigrant mother wonders if she and Eunice's father did the right thing in leaving a poor, war-torn country that unexpectedly became rich and peaceful while their adopted country declined.

Despite the comic exaggeration, Steyngart's vision of the future is entirely too believable—a very worthwhile novel, if not something that improved my mood at the time of reading.

The week that followed brought daily news stories resonant of the novel's atmosphere of life in a dying empire.

New York Stock Exchange bought by Germans.

Borders' bankruptcy suggests books are not mass market. Some places still support independent stores, but in my little town, Borders has been the last remaining place to peruse new books, even if the stock was increasingly showing the Kmart ownership.

It's certainly no news that there are separate standards for HNWI and LNWI, but as in Steyngart's tale, the gap grows ever more stunning.

Roy Edroso mused yesterday on severity of punishment for the ordinary person caught in the criminal justice system; the absence of consequences (other than greater wealth) for those who have destroyed the economy; the right-wing's ramping up the war on teachers' unions; and more—

One of the saddest things about the decline of this country is that we've relearned a pre-democratic contempt for the suffering of the less fortunate and a solicitous interest in the problems of the very fortunate. Poor saps who never had a chance are presumed to never have deserved one, while the rich are treated with kid gloves lest they take offense and go Galt on us. Once Americans cheered the underdog. Now I see there's a book out called Underdogma: How America's Enemies Use Our Love for the Underdog to Trash American Power which tells that this generosity of spirit is actually a dangerous delusion...

I don't know if Roy was thinking of Steyngart, or simply observing our "culture"—

We hear a lot of talk about "hippie punching" these days, but make no mistake: Under a certain, very high net worth [my emphasis], everybody's getting punched.