From The Guardian:
Gary Shteyngart's previous novel, the witty Absurdistan, had at its core a romance, and the same is true of Super Sad True Love Story. In pitching parlance, this new work is Nineteen-Eighty-four or Brave New World reworked by a tag team of Tom Wolfe and Philip Roth. Absurdistan was divided into two main sections: a hilarious but not too exaggerated depiction of post-Soviet St Petersburg, and a more Swiftian coda in a fictitious post-Soviet state. The satire is off the leash in the US-set Super Sad True Love Story, which takes place in that very perilous territory for a novelist, the near future (the danger being that in 10 years' time no one will bother to read your novel because events will have rendered it redundant or ridiculous).
Shteyngart's forecast for the United States of America is bleak (another drawback to the dystopian novel is that once you've read one you don't need to read another; ditto the post-apocalyptic novel). In the world of the novel, the gap between rich and poor is even more pronounced and publicised than today (we're only a step away from Soylent Green, a film which Shteyngart cites), and wealth doesn't just afford you luxury and pleasure, it gives you a shot at immortality. Of Soviet Jewish background, Shteyngart emigrated to the US as a child, and perhaps this has given him a greater awareness of how easy it is to slip down the ladder, or at least fail to climb up the rungs.
More here.
