As its mouthful-of-a-title suggests, Super Sad True Love Story is a super-ambitious book. But super may be the only part of the title that pans out in Gary Shteyngart's novel about a nightmarish near-future America overrun by consumerism and obsessed with youth. In Shteyngart's dystopian satire, America is at war with Venezuela and economically dependent on China—which is threatening to pull away—and the general public is at the mercy of a constantly streaming information and sensory overload that renders both privacy and books virtually obsolete.

At the center of the novel is the tragic figure of 39-year-old Lenny Abramov, the earnest, intelligent, rather awkward and unattractive son of Russian-Jewish immigrants who sells "indefinite life extensions," and who, having fallen in love with a 24-year-old Korean-American beauty named Eunice Park, is determined to live forever. The couple's doomed romance is unconvincing from the start, at least in part because Lenny and Eunice are stock characters. He's the needy, nerdy Jew-boy; she's the beautiful, opportunistic and hypersexual Asian woman. (It is perhaps worth noting—or at any rate, Shteyngart expects us to note—that the author is the son of Russian-Jewish immigrants, and his wife is Korean-American.)

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