Super Sad True Love Story v. Model Home
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OPENING ROUND
Super Sad True Love Story
v. Model Home
Judged by Matthew Baldwin
Matthew Baldwin is a programmer from Seattle who lives with the Best Wife Ever and a handful of good-for-nothing cats. He runs the website defective yeti, loves to play board games, and once convinced 30 sober adults to run the 100-meter dash with their pants around their ankles. Known connections to this year’s contenders: “None.”
I got exactly as far as “UnitedContinentalDelamerican” before giving up on Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story, which is to say about halfway through page one. If my 40 years on this big blue marble have taught me one thing, it’s that hyperbolic corporate portmanteaus are the hallmark of wacky five-minutes-in-the-future dystopias. And that, unfortunately, is a class of literature of which I have had my fill.
This is new. I used to be a huge fan of the genre, eagerly devouring everything from Max Headroom to CivilWarLand in Bad Decline. But in 2009 I waded through Infinite Jest, thus quenching that particular thirst. As The Lord of the Rings is to fantasy, IJ serves as the encyclopedic last word in darkly comic futurism (well, the last 479,198 words); and just as I found “Xanth” novels wanting after The Scouring of the Shire, I now tend to dismiss anything that can be said to “extrapolate every toxic development already at large in America to farcical extreme” (as the New York Times described Super Sad).
Does this make me a snob? Good gravy, I hope so—I generally don’t experience Great Literature until they make a video game out of it, so my pretension credentials (hereafter: “pretentials”) are in dire need of burnishing. (Aside: If anyone knows how to get past the end boss in Wii Olive Kitteridge, let me know.)
So I reshelved Super Sad and tucked into Model Home.
Set in 1985, Eric Puchner’s debut novel documents a nuclear family on the cusp of detonation. Safely ensconced in their exclusive California community, minutes from the beach, the Zillers have achieved a distinctively ’80s variant of the American Dream. They have grown so comfortable with their wealth that they no longer think of money… except for the head of the household, Warren, who thinks of little else, as he alone knows that they no longer own any. He has sunk everything—savings, retirement—into a housing development in the desert, a wasteland so barren it is only suitable for a toxic waste site. And that is exactly what the municipality begins constructing within earshot of Warren’s investment, dooming the Zillers to financial ruin.
Warren tries to hide the situation from his family, and does so with implausible success: When the car is repossessed, he claims it was stolen; when the furniture is taken, he says it’s only to make way for the new, better ensemble that will be arriving any day. His wife and children accept these explanations partially because they are caught up in their own misadventures, but mostly because the tone of the novel allows for absurdities. Indeed, the humor in the novel is so broad at times that it veers into sitcom territory. Warren’s wife Camille, for instance, is working on a sex-ed film (Earth to My Body: What’s Happening?) as hilarious as it is farfetched.
All of this is fun, and makes for an enjoyable read. But it is in jarring contrast to the tragedy that strikes at the end of Part I, one clearly intended to affect the reader deeply. And yet my reaction was less “Oh, my God!” and more “Wait a minute, I thought this was a comedy. Was I actually supposed to care about these people?”
Part II opens with the Zillers living in their own abandoned housing complex, putting the novel a chicken dance away from becoming Arrested Development. But from this point forward Puchner reins in the zany. Largely free from the slapstick, I found the second half of the book to be considerably more engrossing.
The inconsistency of tone vexed me, because Pucher is adept at crafting entirely believable scenes:
[Lyle] got up without saying good-bye and went back inside the party, wading through a crowd of people dancing to “Takin’ Care of Business” by Bachman-Turner Overdrive. The puritanical work ethic espoused by the lyrics seemed deeply at odds with the dancers themselves, one of whom was wearing a box on his head that said NATURAL LIGHT. The words on the box struck Lyle as forlornly beautiful. When the singer of the song got to the part about “working overtime,” the crowd erupted into cheers.
With such skill at mining the humor from the world as it is, it is unclear to me why Pucher often felt the need to “punch up” reality. But by the novel’s conclusion, he found a workable, if not entirely satisfactory, balance between realism and unbelievable-ism.
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And so, back to Super Sad.
I had a tough time getting into Super Sad True Love Story, and not only because of my aforementioned prejudices. Were it not for a three-hour train ride, and the fact that I had agreed to review it, I doubt I would have made it past page 100.
The novel is neither “super sad” nor “true,” but “love story” I’ll allow. The exact date is unstated, but the setting is one in which all that is currently perilous with the U.S. has reached its logical conclusion: the war on terror has turned us into a police state, our national debt has turned us into a wholly owned subsidiary of China, and our fixation with stats has turned us into a nation obsessed with credit scores and “fuckability” ratings.
Enter Lenny Abramov, the country mouse in this particular city, with his love of books (actual, paper-bound books) and a Male Hotness quotient in the lower quintile of any given crowd. He woos and inexplicably obtains young Eunice Park, a dozen years his junior and way out of his league. Together they pick their way through the ruins of America as it collapses around them.
As with Model Home, Super Sad is a blend of high-concept silliness and serious reflection. Actually, it’s less a “blend” in Super Sad than an oscillation between the two: the book alternates between Lenny’s journals (which are well-written and introspective) and Eunice’s emails (which often read like 3,000-word YouTube comments). The unevenness I disliked in Model Home is exactly the disconcerting effect Shteyngart is going for, which he achieves by turning the knob on both outrageousness and eloquence to 11. Here’s an example of the latter:
I hate the Fourth of July. The early middle age of summer. Everything is alive and kicking for now, but the eventual decline into fall has already set itself in motion. Some of the lesser shrubs and bushes, seared by heat, are starting to resemble a bad peroxide job. The heat reaches a blazing peak, but summer is lying to itself, burning out like some alcoholic genius.
All in all, the narrative is like flipping back and forth between PBS and the Cartoon Network.
(Aside: I can’t break myself of the habit of using “PBS” as shorthand for intellectualism, even though they now air Antique Roadshow 22 hours a day.)
Shteyngart is a friend to The Rooster—his novel Absurdistan made it to the ToB finals in 2007, and he served as a judge the following year. I also have a sneaking suspicion that Super Sad is the “better” novel of the two, shot through with allusions to Russian literature that I am too obtuse to detect. It wouldn’t surprise me if SSTLS were to lurch from the grave in the Zombie Round.
But the grave is where it will rest. Though the last 100 pages of Super Sad turned my apathy into enjoyment, it was like seeing the best fireworks in that Fourth of July show while walking back to my car. The display put on by Model Home is less dazzling overall, but I never felt the urge to hightail it to the parking lot in the hopes of beating the crowd. For that alone it gets the nod.
Advancing:
Model Home
Match Commentary
with Kevin Guilfoile and John Warner
Kevin: If I can go all Sonny Chiba on Judge Baldwin’s modesty for a minute, he did not just “wade through Infinite Jest” in 2009, but rather created a massive online reading project called Infinite Summer, in which thousands of people from around the world read that David Foster Wallace masterpiece together, sharing their insights and encouraging each other to “keep coming back” until everyone finished. I was honored to be one of the guides for that event (and you, John, chimed in as a guest, as well), and I encourage anyone attempting to tackle that book on their own to go back to the Infinite Summer site and use it as a resource. It has since become the subject of SXSWi panels and chapters in scholarly books and it was one of the most rewarding reading experiences of my life.
Infinite Jest wasn’t the first book to come to mind as I was reading Super Sad True Love Story, however. The dystopia business in IJ all happens in the background. It is somehow both integral to the plot and beside the point. Ninety percent of the scenes take place inside a prep school for tennis phenoms or a halfway house, and the truly insane dystopian stuff happening outside those walls is really of secondary concern to the characters, whose often hilarious (and sometimes not so hilarious) troubles were rooted in real, hardwired, human impulses.
The dystopian future of Super Sad, on the other hand, hangs over every acronym-stuffed sentence of the book. And it’s very funny. Both of these books are funny, actually, but I laughed more at Super Sad True Love Story, and that counts for a lot with me. Perhaps a result of the affected ways their stories are told, however, the characters were never completely real to me. The book was so dominated by its setting that I just had a hard time relating intimately to them. They made me laugh, but I didn’t feel like they were the kind of flesh and blood guides I wanted to lead me through the landscape.
John: To work, I think a satirical novel has to meet the “it’s funny because it’s true,” standard, and for the most part, I think Super Sad really succeeds, and is the best of Shteyngart’s novels. I was more invested in Lenny and Eunice than you, and didn’t have that particular qualm, or maybe we have another example of how important our own particular aesthetic wiring is when it comes to assessing books, particularly when we’re asked to compare two books as the ToB demands. I don’t think I ever worried how “real” they were, and I was willing to accept a certain amount of stretching because of the satire framework. Occasionally, characters might have to act their parts, which may flatten them out. I don’t see that as a weakness, necessarily, but it is a compromise that has to be worked out if you’re going to do what Shteyngart’s up to here.
Baldwin labels Super Sad a five-minutes-into-the-future dystopian story, but I take some issue there. His comparison to George Saunders is interesting, and I would agree that Saunders fits the “five minutes” description, but Super Sad seems to me to be more like a 15-year-forward projection and much of it strikes home, both in the world he created and the one we live in today. I think the novel is super successful at what it sets out to do, but Matthew is open and honest enough to admit that he’s done with that, which is the beauty of our tournament.
Kevin: I read both of these novels on my iPhone. And Super Sad True Love Story might be the perfect novel to read on your mobile device. With everyone in the book carrying around an apparat, constantly messaging each other and instantly calculating one another’s credit rating and relative fuckability index, you really can feel like a world in which we are all somehow insulated from other humans and simultaneously stripped of all privacy is really coming the day after tomorrow.
There is also something about staring at your phone and laughing out loud while waiting in line at the butcher that still elicits some of the weirdest looks from strangers. They gave me the kind of appalled and wondrous looks that I give when the guy next to me on the plane reaches into his briefcase and pulls out porn.
John: I can report that I read both of these novels on the Kindle, and in each case, after the fact, I went out and purchased the hardcover versions.
Yes, I am that book-nerdy. It’s a problem for which there is no cure.
I think you also raise another issue when it comes to responding to specific books, which is whatever else is going on while you’re engaged with a book will affect your relationship to that book, kind of like how Matthew’s amazing Infinite Jest group-read makes him feel like he’s put a cap on a certain type of novel, or like how the first book you read after a book you really got into inevitably gets tarred with the “not as good as the last book” label. Someone needs to start a service where they recommend “rebound books”—the book to read after you’d love a book deeply so you can clear out the gray matter and make room for another great experience.
Kevin: It is inherent in the ToB format that sometimes you come off dissing a book without intending to just by comparing it to another. I much enjoyed Super Sad True Love Story, I just never felt especially invested in it. I was actually reading it on my iPhone at the same time I was reading other fully-actualized books, and at one point I opened my Kindle app and remembered I was about halfway through and I was like, “Oh yeah, this book is good!” and started reading it again.
I certainly didn’t have that experience with Model Home. In fact, I think Judge Baldwin’s somewhat ambivalent reaction to the events in the novel reflects the tangible substance of the characters. This is a comic novel, but it’s also incredibly tense. The father is keeping a secret from his family. The daughter is involved in a relationship she knows her parents won’t approve of (and probably because they won’t approve of it). Tragedy happens. And all this small-scale, personal drama had more emotional impact for me than the large-scale political/economic trauma of Super Sad because I just cared a little more. The writing is sharp, as well. At one point Camille describes the Polish filmmaker who is helping her make a sex-ed film as having “the weedy arms and bedtime squint that Camille associated with hitchhikers.” It’s the kind of description that allows you to perfectly imagine him, but also accomplishes what pages of exposition on Camille’s character couldn’t. Model Home is one of the great underhyped gems of 2010, and I doubt I would have discovered it if it hadn’t been selected for the ToB.
John: I like Super Sad True Love Story quite a lot, so much so that I assigned it as part of my contemporary literature course this semester, which means there’s 65 Clemson University undergraduates who have to have completed reading it by tomorrow. (There will be an in-class journal assignment, everyone.)
But if I were judging this round, my pick would be the same as Judge Baldwin’s, and yours. I really loved Model Home. I actually read this around the time of its initial release, and each week the major attention didn’t pour in, I was a little more surprised. While Shteyngart relies on a future setting to show us today’s world, Puchner manages to do it by putting us back into the mid-’80s and showing that the present decade isn’t the bust following a boom in our history. The way the Zillers try to negotiate that world feels completely intertwined with our current one, and the way Puchner works the different tones sang to me in a key that I dig. The close third-person narration is masterfully done, sketching each character in turn, without jarring as the novel is handed off, section to section. Even minor characters, like the security guard who falls for daughter Lyle Ziller gets drawn in full.
Model Home has begun to pick up some year-end accolades, being named a PEN/Faulkner finalist, and nabbing second prize in the Barnes & Noble Discover awards. I hope it’s enough for a publisher to give Eric Puchner a couple more swings at the bat because in me, he has a fan for life, and maybe a Rooster victory from the four seed will do some good.
Just one more to go before round one is in the books (ha ha ha ha ha)! Tomorrow, it’s our reader judge, Catherine George, who gets a tough and intriguing matchup with The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake versus Bloodroot.
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