Gary Shteyngart on the Fall of America

In an America in the not-too-distant future, the country is under a de facto dictatorship, is coasting into civil war and may be bought by the Chinese and Norwegians. While cities burn, elderly men are obsessed with eternal youth and everyone’s health and credit scores can be accessed at all times. Welcome to the brilliantly comic dystopian nightmare of Gary Shteyngart’s new novel “Super Sad True Love Story”(Random House, $26), where the youth of America shop as the tanks roll down their streets.

The protagonist of the novel is Lenny Abramov, a neurotic man on the cusp of 40, obsessed with the gorgeous and depressed Eunice, a young Korean-American woman. Lenny works for a life-extending company that targets High Net Worth Individuals. Full of ominous corporations tied to armies-for-hire and an incompetent Joe Lieberman-esque defense secretary prosecuting a ruinous war in Venezuela, Shteyngart’s novel is a satirical masterpiece which makes the reader shudder, how close are we really to the edge of the abyss?

Shteyngart, 38, is the author of the bestsellers “The Russian Debutante’s Handbook” and Absurdistan,” and met with freelance writer Dylan Foley at a cafe in Manhattan.

Q. What are your dystopian influences on the new book?

A. I think of it more like Orwell’s “1984” than Huxley’s “A Brave New World.” The reason people are taking this book to heart is that it is set here, not in some country I made up. The Walmarts are burning. I already felt like I was living in a dystopian world. When you are an immigrant like I am, you are already living in a cute little dystopian world of your own making.

Q. The whole world is obsessed with their apparats, a handheld device that offers Facebook-like information taken to an extreme, disseminating people’s health data, credit ratings and sexually transmitted diseases. What interested you in this rankings obsession?

A. Now it’s numbers, numbers all the time. We live at the razor’s edge with credit. You read stuff about my looks online and people parse my problems, or publish how much my old apartment sold for. Everything is ranked. Are we so far from the idea that you walk into a bar and are immediately ranked the 23rd ugliest man in the bar? If your girlfriend is the third-hottest in the bar, that will raise your rankings.

Q. How did Lenny evolve for you?

A. I decided to take away a lot of the bells and whistles of my earlier characters. I wanted to make him recognizable to people and a lot of that involved stripping away his ethnicity. Being Russian is just one of his burdens. Lenny’s problems are much deeper. He’s 39 and he’s coming to terms with mortality, as well as the fact that he’s unattractive and that his life won’t be getting much better than it is now.

Q. Why are you and Lenny obsessed with Korean women, like his girlfriend Eunice?

A. One reason I am so interested in Koreans as characters is that it is a small, concentrated country. It is not 300 million Russians. Like the espresso I am drinking now, which is strong and pure, the tragedy of the Koreans is strong and pure. Eunice has been living under the weight of everything that happened to her parents. Eunice also grew up in Southern California, so she’s tragic and spoiled at the same time. Her shopping leavens the tragedy, especially the fact that her father is abusive to her.

Q. In your novel, America is under a dictatorship. Why?

A. The point I was trying to make is that society has been corroded. There is information overload, but a dearth of real information. Everything is just a tweet: “They are killing people in Central Park! Oh, I need to buy new clothes.” (Dictatorship) is the next step--we’ve already surrendered our privacy online and elsewhere.

Q&A with Ed Park on his debut novel "Personal Days"

(Originally published in the Newark Star-Ledger on June 22, 2008)

“The Ninth Circle of Cubicle Hell”

In Ed Park’s hilarious debut novel “Personal Days”(Random House, $13), a crew of office drones wait at a unnamed New York City corporate hell for the downsizing ax to fall. In a witty satire of office culture, Park harnesses the Orwellian doublespeak of corporate bloodletting, where workers are stripped of tasks and fired by speakerphone, while the survivors wait for the ominous “Californians” to fly in and brutally fire the rest. An eerie calm settles in as the workers realize that someone is out to destroy the company.

“Personal Days” was inspired in part by the corporate gutting of the once-venerable Village Voice, where Park was fired as an editor in 2006. In his dead-on character studies, Park introduces the reader to Pru, the ex-graduate-student-turned-cubicle inmate, and Jack II, who gives unwanted “jackrubs.” There is Sprout, the Canadian boss who may be evil, and the bizarre Grime, a British worker who has a murky past and an impenetrable accent. There is the highly neurotic Lars, and Jill, who compiles the “Jilliad,” a collection of ludicrous business writings that becomes an almost holy text for the remaining workers. The literary coup at the end of the novel is a 52-page sentence, written by a worker trapped in an elevator with a dying laptop, answering all mysteries and making a strangled plea for love.

Park, 37, was raised in Buffalo and educated at Yale and Columbia universities. He was the editor of the Village Voice Literary Supplement and is a founding editor of “The Believer.” Park spoke with freelance writer Dylan Foley at a cafe not far from his Manhattan apartment.

Q. You started writing fragments of “Personal Days” during the mass firings and layoffs at the Village Voice. What was the process?

A. At some point in 2005, I started writing and didn’t really know what I was working on. “Personal Days” is definitely not a roman a clef about the Voice, but as things at the Voice started going downhill more and more, there was more material. I had never written about the office before and all of a sudden, I was sitting on this great material--all these interesting hierarchies, the interactions between people in the office and the language they use. As the downsizing accelerated, this chaos and confusion magnified everything. The stories were screaming to be used.

For most people at work, there is the mystery, who rules over me? During the Voice downsizing, you had executives flying in from out of town. They have this embarrassingly dumb swagger and they pretend they know everything, which they clearly don’t. I was treated shabbily, but there were people treated worse. I eventually was fired over speakerphone.

Q. The novel is written in three distinct sections--a breezy, first-person narrative, an ominous report written in outline form and a 52-page single sentence. Why?

A. If you are going to write a novel about restructuring a company, you should have a structure that is changing, that is being restructured. That’s why there are three distinct narratives in the novel. The first section is “bad things are happening,” but it is entertaining and written in bite-sized sections. The second section is more anonymous. You have this report but who wrote it? The third section needed to be radically different. It is a love letter and a solution to various mysteries.

Q. The boss Sprout seems to be evil, but with a human face. How did he evolve in the novel?

A. I thought it was funny to have a character like Sprout who was described as “a proud native of Canada.” I started trying to make Sprout be seen as a bad guy through the eyes of his employees. By the end, I wanted him to be a more sympathetic character. You have to figure out the position that he was put in with the firings and who put him there.

Q. In one hysterical section, a fired worker named Jill leaves behind a notebook called “The Jilliad,” a compilation of absurd business sayings. How did you write this?

A. The Jilliad is the one part I didn’t write on my laptop. I wrote it using an old-fashioned typewriter. The typewriter gave the section a neat tone. Jill is this milquetoast character who won’t go into therapy because she is too shy. On the other hand, she is this incredible project going on, that speaks to incredible depths of character. I made all the business homilies up. It was me doing a workout on the typewriter.