Down and Out In Gotham

By ALEXANDER THEROUX

The love story here may be super sad, but it is a joyride next to the chaos, violence and dysfunction that Gary Shteyngart's third novel attempts to depict—an apocalyptic, dying-empire America.

For its backdrop, "Super Sad True Love Story" offers the "Rupture," a futuroidal world in which the U.S. has all but collapsed, a war with Venezuela rages, the yuan backs America's cratered currency, military helicopters hover overhead with rotor blades whack-whacking, and armies of the poor and disenfranchised ("Low Net Worth Individuals") live in a tattered tent city in New York's Central Park. First Avenue is a "barbed-wire-strewn checkpoint." Tanks roll menacingly through the five boroughs.

If all that weren't bad enough, something called the New York Lifestyle Times has replaced the New York Times. Companies have merged into mega-entities and now have names like LandO'LakesGMFord. China, an economic supremo, threatens to foreclose on the U.S. Fear reigns. On billboards and signs, Big Brother Speak is everywhere. It is a nightmare.

Or is it? The foreground of "Super Sad True Love Story," as the title suggests, is a romantic narrative that, with a few tweaks of detail, could exist in the present moment. The romance is poignant, strange and improbable. It is also badly joined to the almost farcical dystopia that surrounds it, as if Mr. Shteyngart had two ideas and cobbled them into a mega-entity of his own.

A homely, balding, 39-year-old Jewish man from Flushing, N.Y., named Lenny Abramov, a NYU graduate and a self-conscious, almost comic momma's boy—an unlikely Romeo—feels "true love" for 24-year-old Eunice Park, a Korean-American from Fort Lee, N.J. He first meets her in Italy, where she is on an extended holiday, and then slavishly pursues her when she returns stateside, eventually talking her into living with him. It is the intensity of his ardor, his desperate need, that seems to win her over. That aspect of the love story is affecting, but it loses its charm after a while and in any case keeps getting intruded upon by Mr. Shteyngart's futuristic scenario.

Lenny, for instance, lives in a Lower East Side co-op, "a kind of instant Florida for those too frail or poor to relocate to Boca in time for their deaths." He is surrounded by "withered NORCers in motorized wheelchairs and their Jamaican caregivers." The co-op, it turns out, is part of a NORC, or "Naturally Occurring Retirement Community." Meanwhile, technology invades everyday life. People GlobalTrace each other with robotic regularity. We hear repeatedly about the efficient, omnifunctioning "äppärät," a gadget that monitors people's biochemistry and rates their sex appeal. Reading books in this new age is rare. Books, in fact, are called "printed, bound media artifacts" and are considered "smelly and annoying." Lenny tries keeping his volumes fresh with sprays of Pine-Sol.

Obviously George Orwell's fingerprints are all over Mr. Shteyngart's novel. It is, in its way, a black-comedy version of "1984" but without a philosophical core or a steady worldview to guide its attempts at dark satire. Is Mr. Shteyngart pushing current trends to their extremes to mock current extremists (look out for China!) or to warn us of America's fate in the not-so-distant future (a militarized society)? Maybe his goal is simply comic fantasy, but the result is more silly than amusing and uneven in its effects, veering between menace and goofiness.

Equally uneven is the tale of Lenny's obsequious, obsessive feelings for pretty, powerful Eunice, told in the first person alongside Lenny's intermittent (and much too similar-sounding) diary entries. The love story, however touching at first, begins to seem wayward and confused. The lovers are a "mismatched pair." "Honestly," writes Eunice to a Korean girlfriend, "I'm afraid to see our reflection when we pass by a mirror." Eunice clearly rules the roost. Her young beauty gives her a leg up and before long will prove her lover's undoing.

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It is often hard to see why Eunice is part of the romance at all. A Woody Allen-type nebbish, Lenny is a kvetcher ("My mind was full of sickening Jewish worry, the pogrom within and the pogrom without"); he frets about his age, his baldness and, in a major way, his parents. He is devoted to them, immigrants from Ukraine, to whom he is still little "Lyonitchka." "I became twelve years old as soon as I passed the mezuzah at the front door," he confesses. "I lack the genetic instinct to deal with unbridled authority. Before a greater force, I crumble."

At certain points, Lenny is a realistically portrayed lover with a markedly sweet, almost cloyingly sentimental but genuine sensibility. At other times he is nothing but a diffident, hand-wringing nitwit right out of a Jules Feiffer comic strip—someone we are meant to laugh at more than feel sympathy for. Mr. Shteyngart, whose gift for the acutely satirical was much in evidence in "Absurdistan" (2006), can't seem to decide what he is about here. The novel is tonally all over the place.

Mr. Shteyngart gives a good deal of attention to the anomalies and similarities of Jewish and Korean families. Although he has done commendable homework (Korean words like yamjanae, meeguk salam, ajumma and dolsot bap stick in the narrative like currants in a bun), the members of the Park family—the angry father, the hand-wringing mom, the chubby sister, their dreams and aspirations—feel as clichéd as the Irish and Jewish families in the old Broadway hit "Abie's Irish Rose." Eunice's mother writes emails to her daughter: "Dating nice boy extra. But all the time you must to be careful with him because you are woman. Do not give away mystery. Are they any korea boy in rome?" This kind of thing is doubtless meant in good fun, but it feels lame, as do the ethnic-joke riffs that dot the narrative.

In the end, it may not matter. Not only does the romance fizzle but the beleaguered country itself, as portrayed here, seems to be too artificial to warrant our pity as it races toward its inevitable doom.

Mr. Theroux's latest novel is "Laura Warholic: Or, The Sexual Intellectual" (Fantagraphics).