When he’s not documenting his irreversible addiction to food porn or commiserating with the literary illuminati, Gary Shteyngart writes books. OK, he writes some of the funniest books I have read, penned by a Soviet or otherwise. His first novel, The Russian Debutante’s Handbook, is funny; his next outing, the absurdist Absurdistan, is even funnier! And now we get the funniest of the bunch, Super Sad True Love Story. What’s that, you say? A love story? From the guy responsible for unleashing a 325-pound lover of hirsute vaginas into the unsuspecting world? Shteyngart has written a love story? I know, I was thrown for a loop too, but don’t worry: the bespectacled spawn of Oblomov and Vonnegut hasn’t gone “rom-com” on us… yet. Through thousands of hours of therapy, yogic realignment, and expensive eyelash therapy (don’t ask), he’s just become way more comfortable letting his romantic side show. Heck, he even ordered rosé when we met at a dim-lit Chinatown bar to shoot the literary shit.
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The Rumpus: One thing that struck me about Super Sad—
Gary Shteyngart: Super Smelly Supersaver!
Rumpus: Yeah, great title. And the cover, it’s like a Twister game mat or something. Was that intentional? If so, what’s that say about your authorial intentions?
Shteyngart: It’s supposed to be a twister. I was signing copies of it at BookExpo America and people were like, “SuperSuper Super Super, Sad Sad Sad Sad?” So it may confuse some people. Which is good. We want them thinking from the start. Puzzling it out.
Rumpus: Speaking of bafflement, Super Sad has a really dark vision of the world, which is actually scarily true. America is bankrupt, the global economy has collapsed and is pegged to the Chinese yuan, everyone knows when they will die and is essentially illiterate, addicted to their äppärät. But you actually had to amp up the apocalyptic dread, right?
Shteyngart: When I started writing SSTLS in 2006, I thought things were going to get bad. This is the premonition I had. I know when things are going in the crapper, growing up in the Soviet Union. I had no idea things were going to get so bad so fast. That really threw me, and I was going back and forth with my brilliant editor, and every draft the real world keeps getting worse and worse. How the hell am I going to keep up with this? At the end I was like, OK, it’s all going to collapse, the Chinese and Norwegian hedge funds are going to end up buying everything. Imagine if McCain had won! Things could have been a lot closer to what’s described in my book. Part of me was thinking, Hmm, if McCain wins I will look like un prophète, but then I was like, Fuck it, the health of the country is more important than my book. Let Obama win.
Rumpus: Black humor and satire used to play a big part in American fiction in the early postmodern years or whatever, but then it seemed to disappear for a few decades, with a few notable exceptions. You’re obviously committed to bringing it back with a vengeance.
Shteyngart: Satire disappeared from American fiction, but American fiction also disappeared from American fiction. I mean, talk about taking a backseat to the dialogue. It’s not even in the dialogue anymore. Who cares anymore, right? The big behemoths that the last roaring lions put out there (Franzen’s The Corrections, Eugenides’s Middlesex) have heart and anger in equal measure, and they’re brilliant books, don’t get me wrong—but what’s a book that can roar now? I’m trying to roar. Who knows if anyone’s tuned in to the lion frequency.
Rumpus: Exactly. It seems like a lot of the fiction being written here—the stuff that’s being published, anyway—even the allegedly “experimental” stuff is really watered down and trite compared to what’s coming out of England and Europe. And who knows what’s out there that’s not even translated yet.
Shteyngart: I worry about that, and I’m part of the military industrial complex, by which I mean the MFA complex. While we’re making very competent writers, but are we placing competency above—I love stories that are messy, that have a shambolic quality, that’s what I love. Are we sanding away some of those edges and creating a very bland and similar generation of writers? That would suck! When I try to “fix” my students’ stories, a part of me is thinking what am I doing? Let some of this gusher run, man.
Rumpus: I’ve always thought that your writing allows for a little messiness, and especially this new book, it’s filled with absurd riffs and craziness.
Shteyngart: Especially compared to my last book, Absurdistan, which was a very controlled book. In Absurdistan I was working with some—I hate to use the word “tropes,” but here it comes—tropes which had a more traditional Russian satire quality to them. Dead Souls or something like that. In this book, I just wanted these two characters, Lenny Abramov and Eunice Park, to speak to each other. And when we speak to each other it’s a mess. I wanted to capture that messy quality. What if I let the messiness and sloppiness get out of hand just a little bit? What if I surprised myself emotionally by following where this story goes?
Rumpus: What surprised you about this book?
Shteyngart: That I could allow the love story to take center stage with each subsequent draft. The initial drafts read like a bad version of an Isaac Asimov science-fiction magazine. I mean, that was what I grew up with.
Rumpus: Isaac Asimov?
Shteyngart: Oh, God. [Makes masturbatory motion.] Anyway, but then it became—the more knowledge I dropped on this book’s fat ass, the less it was compelling. The more I pulled back and let this love story go, the more I felt confident of the book’s vitality. All I want from a book is to feel like it’s as alive as I am, but a lot of the fiction I encounter is just dead. It says, “I’m a piece of wood, but a brilliantly designed piece of wood.”
Rumpus: A very pliable piece of wood.
Shteyngart: I’m so pliable! Look at me, I’m the Woodster! Mwah-mwah!
Rumpus: You teach a course on immigrant fiction. More contemporary stuff or like Roth and Bellow?
Shteyngart: Bellow was an immigrant like I’m an octopus. He was from Montreal. But yeah, there’s so many reasons
why immigrant fiction is so popular nowadays. One of the reasons is we don’t translate shit. We’re scared of these freaky foreigners. But an immigrant’s safe, in a way. We’re part American, part something else. We’re not that threatening. We explain the world to America. We’re the bridge. Sure, we come from furry, bizarre cultures, but we canmake you feel like “So this is what Brighton Beach is like!” It’s interesting, because other nations—Germany, France, for example—translate boatloads, but the immigrant fiction scene, at least in Germany, is hardly as strong as ours. There’s not that many immigrant writers in Germany. They go directly to the source. You want to know about Turks? Translate a Turk—and not just Orhan Pamuk. A Turk you’ve never heard of. A young Turk, if you will.
Rumpus: There are a lot of young Turks writing these days, even if fewer of us are being published.
Shteyngart: This is a supply-and-demand problem. There’s a lot of supply, but not much demand. The more fiction gets taken apart at the MFA level, the more it gets worked over, the more we take it apart—nobody’s reading this shit! This is the problem. I mean, what? Who? Are we really just writing for this small priesthood? Are we just writing for this small, select group of people? That, to me, that’s frightening. Not pointless but approaching pointlessness.
Rumpus: And there’s the Twilight books and all that crap.
Shteyngart: Serious literary books used to have a choke-hold on the national penis. It was incredible. Philip Roth sold 400,000 of Portnoy’s Complaint the first year it was out! His plumber said, “Hey, ain’t you the guy that writes them dirty books?” I had a cable repairman come to the house and he took a look around my apartment and said, “Why you got all them books?” What he was thinking was, You have a twenty-five-inch TV and eight million books. What are you, an idiot?
Rumpus: It’s all about how big your äppärät is—is that what you’re saying?
Shteyngart: I wonder. I hope this is cyclical. I hope right now we’re in the butthole of literature, and that at some point people will throw off the chains of their äppäräti, their iPhoney and whatever else they use, and go back to an introspective life. That’s for subsequent generations. This generation is fucked. We can’t keep up with the technology we’ve created, and it’s like we were invaded by a barbarian horde and we don’t know what to do. Sometimes I think that the iPhone and everything else that is now a major part of my life is a punishment that I’ve inflicted on myself for sins that I can’t quantify. This is maybe—I don’t know—going back to Hebrew school, but since the iPhone came out, my life has gotten progressively worse. I land on a plane and I get nervous if my iPhone—my äppärät—can’t connect. It’s like I’m running a Fortune 500 company. I’m supposed to be a fucking writer, working in solitude, right?
11 responses
This guy is so awesome. Very excited for his new book. Great interview!
Are we in the “butthole of literature”? That’s something to think about, and it’d be a great class for Shteyngart–or anyone else, for that matter–to teach in the Ivory Tower!
A Russian that drinks Rose? Hilarious!!!!
“american fiction disappeared from american fiction” – great rhetorical move…your turn, twilight
ernie,
I don’t think that he’s insinuating that works today, other than his own, are, I guess, shitty (?). Not to link away from the Rumpus (Sorry, Rumpus!), but as he says in this very clever and very good interview, (http://tiny.cc/rrtav) there are a lot of great books being written today (he should know, he blurbs almost every book I pick up in Borders), it’s just that writers and books don’t have the same cultural presence that they used to. It’s the “people don’t read so much anymore”-argument. Which I tend to agree with, as a student who is considered odd by his friends for reading un-assigned books. But many others, like the Rumpus’ Rick Moody, (http://tiny.cc/8fj10) feel that this argument is “more a media construction than it exists in reality.”
Shteyngart’s mentioned his dwindling attention span in almost every recent interview I’ve read. And I respect him for that because I tend to believe and agree with him.
I’d love to share a bottle of Vodka with this man.
Brilliant. Butthole of literature. I’d say more like the taint, more ambiguous, i.e., this tepid wave of publishing could lead us to the sphincter, a hemorrhoidal abyss awaits us . . . or it could swallow us whole. (Terrible mixed metaphor, sorry, but it’s scatological nature speaks to the genius mind of Shteyngart.)
If there were literary police, the first thing they’d (hopefully) do — their meager salaries notwithstanding — is toss tear-gas bombs through the windows of the MFA programs and oust all those miserable motherfuckers (professors, “students,” et al) and eradicate their boring prose and burn their laptops and force them to retreat to the hills . . . or the suburbs from whence they eagerly came.
GS is dead-on about American immigrants offering a “safe” account of our country. Writing today that is considered “edgy” or “provocative” comes by way of a memoir whose author [insert some death-defying tale] had gone through something horrific; and we clutch the pages with utter anticipation and awe to find out if he/she managed to allude death . . . even though the dude’s appearing this Wednesday night at the Barnes & Noble in Union Square at 7PM. Follow him on Twitter!
Which is not to say some memoirs aren’t brilliant. Many are. I fucking love memoirs.
I’m speaking about fiction, goddamnit. People don’t talk about fiction anymore.
Think back to your last dinner party experience. What drove the discussion?
Facebook and the reality shows.
For a moment, someone may have mentioned the oil spill, to which everyone nervously checked their iPhones, etc.; until someone else brought up Lindsay Lohan, and a collective sigh of relief massaged the nervous psyches of the attendees.
We are living in the 50’s, people! Life is Facebook. Everyone “likes” everything. People are invited to “events.” Nothing is awry. If an alien came down to earth and logged onto Facebook he’d think the world was at utter peace.
I hope the subsequent generation yeilds some good writers. Given parents today are obsessive and controlling and “green” beyond belief, there’s hope their children will rebel again. Their children will make real music and literature and protest the general fucked-up-edness of war and politics.
Publishers are, obviously, at fault; too busy worrying about the Kindle and ebooks to cull profound material from the piles (or digital piles) of manuscripts.
Editors seem to want fiction whose narrators relate to them in some way, as though the said editor is a desperately lonely soul who got into this business not to create literature but to sip proverbial tea with fictional characters who “speak” to them. Can you imagine “relating” to Joseph K. or Humbert Humbert or Raskolnikov? Even Tony Soprano, TV’s version of literature, whom everyone loves to watch, isn’t exactly the kind of guy you want to actually spend time with….at least not without going into the meeting “heavy.”
Ever since 911 we have crawled back into the womb. We have allowed the scumbags behind reality TV and the nerds behind Facebook and Apple to placate us.
There is no longer a smoking section. There are no more hoodlums.
Literature is no longer cool. It’s been replaced by Comic books. Little film companies like Paramount Vantage were sold off in a tag sale. Short story writers are the new poets. Novelists are Twittering instead of writing as a means to draw fans.
It’s no longer cool to look at ourselves.
Then again, what the fuck do I care? I’m George Clooney.
The world is a fantastic place. Please. Let’s not lose hope. Let’s not hide.
Can’t wait to tell my mom that George Clooney commented on the site today.
This is something I’ve been thinking about for a long time. I mean, how to ween oneself out of the butthole of–well, anything, but in my case “career suicide.” In literature’s case–
See what I mean? It’s really difficult to put it into words, and that’s why I’ve always loved books, really smart books like Kierkegaard’s “Being & Nothingness” and even “Where The Red Fern Grows.” Ever read it? It’s a great trip through life and it teaches you–it taught me, anyway–a whole lot of something about something I hope we can all put a lot more thought and consideration into, and that’s forgiveness.
This Gary Shteyngart guy–wow. If I’d read his books sooner, maybe I wouldn’t have done “Knight & Day.” I could have filmed “Absurdistan.” Boy, wouldn’t that be a life-changing experience. I never considered playing a 350-pound Russian fatso before, but why the heck not? When you think about it there’s so gravitas to that character, and I’m not talking about physical bulk. Sure, you got to wear a fat suit all day, or in my case gain a hundred pounds (fat chance), but think about what you’d learn about the human freakin’ spirit.
So Gary, if George hasn’t already beaten me to it, lemme know, man. Tweet me, bro. Or have your people tweet my people. Bring it on. Bring on your badass Soviet gravitas, dude. I’m ready, I’m waiting and to be really honest about it, I don’t like to wait. Hurry up.
Just subscribed to The Rumpus and am rewarded with this interview. Absurdistan is comedy genius and I have recommended it to whoever wants to know for the last couple of years. Cannot wait to read Gary’s latest- different (non-twister like) cover in the UK, but I can put up with that….
Shteyngart’s line that “we [North Americans] translate shit” is fair enough as casual remarks go, but Tim Parks has an interesting essay (“America First?”) in the July 15 issue of the New York Review of Books that makes a few modest points that may or may not put this common complaint in perspective. Here’s Parks, writing in part in response to Edith Grossman’s “Why Translation Matters” and Aleksandar Hemon’s introduction to “Best European Fiction 2010”: “Both Grossman and Hemon applaud countries like Germany, France, and Italy where translations account for perhaps 50 percent of published fiction. What they do not say is that all but a few of these translations are from English and take the form of genre novels, detective stories, thrillers, and so on.”
“All but a few” seems like a stretch (I really don’t know), but it may not be much of a stretch; it’s certainly true that much of the best contemporary American fiction and poetry goes untranslated. Later in his essay, Parks cites a University of Rochester research program that lists 349 works of translated fiction and poetry published in the U.S. in 2009. That’s a relatively piddling and perhaps embarrassing number, but as Parks point out, it’s “more than anyone could read in a single year and not, for the most part, made up of the kind of genre fiction that European countries import so avidly.” Feel free to bristle at the snobbiness re genre fiction, and I don’t how the tallyfolks arrived at 349; I trust they looked only at new translations, but the number must include new translations of works previously translated into English—great but not quite what Shteyngart’s getting at in terms of giving English readers a broader picture of current global lit (and of the globe in general). Still, 349 is, as Parks says, a challenging number for any reader to tackle, and indie and non-profit presses such as Dalkey Archive, Archipelago, New Directions, and others consistently put out high-quality new fiction and poetry from throughout the world. In other words, we do translate some shit, and most of it’s not even shit.
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