Summary: A dark tale of America's dysfunctional coming years, and of the timeless and tender feelings that just might bring us back from the brink.
Booklist Reviews
*Starred Review* Credit Poles display your financial worth as you hurry by, clutching your äppärät, a diabolical gadget that monitors your biochemistry while streaming torrents of acronym-infested babble and rating the sex appeal of everyone in sight. New Yorker Lenny Abramov, the stubbornly romantic son of flinty Russian Jewish immigrants, works for Post-Human Services, a life-extension venture. He is madly in love with young, hip, and unhappy Eunice Park, who is far more concerned about online shopping and her dysfunctional Korean immigrant family. As Lenny records his feelings in an actual diary, and Eunice confides in her best friend via e-mails, their personal worries are amplified by aggressively raunchy, reductive, and judgmental social media and dwarfed by the Rupture, America's collapse into ineptness, chaos, and tyranny as China backs American currency, the war with Venezuela escalates, and poor people live in Central Park. All Lenny wants is to make Eunice happy, but everything undermines him, from his age––at 39 he's considered decrepit—to his taboo passion for books. Full-tilt and fulminating satirist Shteyngart (Absurdistan, 2006) is mordant, gleeful, and embracive as he funnels today's follies and atrocities into a devilishly hilarious, soul-shriveling, and all-too plausible vision of a ruthless and crass digital dystopia in which techno-addled humans are still humbled by love and death. Copyright 2010 Booklist Reviews.
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