Gary Shteyngart’s Absurdistan was a tincture of its times, a distillation of a particular culture (recent Russian-American) with a heavy scent of satire. His latest, Super Sad True Love Story travels into the future of, as the jacket states, “say next Tuesday,” to further concentrate its contemporary satire. As with all satire, there’s an implied scolding: See America? This is what you’re headed for if you’re not careful.

Those on the right and the left will feel a certain discomfort (as will the wired, socially connected crowd) as they read through accounts of yuan-pegged dollar, the now truly-national National Guard and mega-merger corporations including (and we do mean including) AlliedWasteCVSCitigroupCredit.

Actually, right and left no longer matter. The Bipartisan Party, led by Defense Secretary Rubenstein — its slogan, “Together We’ll Surprise the World!” is even more cynical than  “We Will Win the Future” — is in control in partnership with the “American Restoration Authority ” (ARA). The  National Guard, fresh back from a disastrous action in Venezuela are reluctantly cooperating. Thanks to budget cuts (the Chinese are threatening to foreclose and the IMF is demanding change), the Guard isn’t getting what they’ve been promised. Sure, you  have your choice between FoxNews-Prime and FoxLiberty-Ultra,  networks that still focuses on gay marriage even as forced relocation turns violent. But the networks don’t seem to care that a lot of Americans have suddenly become disposable. Sound familiar?

It depends on your classification, “High Net Worth Individuals” (HNWI) or “Low NetWorth Individuals” (LNWI), usually corresponding to your category of employment — “credit,” media” or “retail”— or lack of one. Credit ratings reign and people use their apparat to constantly monitor that as well as the “Personality” and “Fuckability” ratings of themselves and those around them.  Mostly, people are judged mostly by the classic:  young and old.

Young is where it’s at. Everyone’s plugged into their own apparati, constantly “teening” and ordering the latest fashions from AssLuxury. Or finding out absolutely everything about everybody, constantly churning data, privacy be damned. Or streaming their own media — anyone can be a star!  –  say from the barroom where they happen to be located. The young are extremely beautiful and intend to stay that ways thanks to new creams and emollients, vitamins and tiny blood-traveling robots (“smart blood”) sent on an oxidant search-and-destroy mission.

Like Huxley’s After Many A Summer Dies the Swan, Sad True frames itself around questions of mortality even as it uses the space inside to address a wider range of cultural and political issues. Shtengart’s framing is precise to the times yet timeless. Everyone knows it’s youth that counts. Bring on the quacks.

Our hero, Lenny Abramov, a 39-year-old slug taking sabbatical in Rome, is too morose to pursue his own youthification even though he works as “Life Lovers Outreach Coordinator of Post-Human Services” for the security-pharmaceutical company Staatling-Wapachung Corporation, a sort of KBR for next Tuesday. An aspiring HNWI and overweight (by next Tuesday’s standards),  Lenny practices a sort of nostalgia that is disgusting to nearly everyone: he reads books.

And then he falls in love. Euncie is beautiful, Korean, incredibly but not illegally young and carries a degree in Image and a minor in Assertiveness. But somehow she’s attracted to Lenny’s sincerity and his books. It gives Lenny a reason to live, to delude himself: “I’m never going to die,” he declares, believing that the technology exists to make good on the promise.

For Lenny, there’s no choice between Eunice, “a nano sized woman who had likely never known the tickle of her own pubic hair…who existed as easily on an apparat screen as on the street before me,” and his Italian fling Fabrizia, “her body counquered by small armies of hair, her curves fixed by carbohydrates, nothing but the Old World and its dying nonelectronic corporeality.”

While Lenny’s larger issues with love, individualism and acceptance of mortality are the book’s central theme, its take on America is what propels it. Shteyngart doesn’t like the direction. Well before the end, before New York is turned into a “Lifestyle Hub,”  we see Sad True’s parable, stated as Lenny witnesses two men being taken away after their apparati and everyone’s is checked  by “angrier and more sunburned than usual” National Guardsmen. The racial and class distinctions at play in the scene, coupled with the brute enforcement of search preludes the book’s biggest scolding: “the looks on the faces of my countrymen—passive heads bent, arms at their trousers, everyone guilty of not being their best, of not earning their daily bread, the kind of docility I had never expected from Americans, ever after so many years of our decline. Here was the tiredness of failure imposed on a country that believed only in its opposite.”

All The Onion-like, satiric cleverness—and we’ve only touched its ironic surface—extends down to each chosen word. Past reviews of made much of Shteyngart’s amazing turn of phrase and they’re still accurate here. The book is presented in Lenny’s diary entries (another of his nostalgic weaknesses, even if electronic) and Eunice’s texting and “teening.” Only Lenny and one of his few friends have much interest in lengthy “verballing,” all but a lost art.

While at its base Sad True is two-thirds of the traditional love story–boy-meets-girl, boy-get-girl, boy-lose-girl to HNWI-boss– it’s propelled by its larger social, political and sexual themes. It’s a fictional characterization of the Shock Doctrine, as applied to contemporary America. Elderly LNWIs are evicted and camps of unemployed squatters are liquidated in flames, all set to the oblivious rhythms of the uber-connected masses. The rise of financial institutions, the divide between rich and poor, the loss of attention as technology consumes it and  our country’s indebtedness, especially to China, are all taken to not-so distant extremes. That’s why the book makes us feel a bit uncomfortable. It’s also why we couldn’t put it down.–Cabbage Rabbit

This Rabbit has never quite gotten Bret Easton Ellis’ Less Than Zero to equate. We read the book when it came out in 1985. We liked it for its take on the disillusioned youth of wealthy Los Angeles. We’d been around enough to know that rich kids always have the best drugs. While these spoiled brats weren’t part of any scene we knew, we knew they existed. And we couldn’t help identify with all the name dropping of locations and situations. After all, we lived in L.A., too.

Most of our confusion came a couple years later when the movie was released. We couldn’t keep the two straight. In the movie, drugs were a plague, in the book a symptom. Julian, an unlikable character in the book, gains a bit of sympathy as played by Robert Downey Jr. in the movie  (“a talented, sad-faced clown” according to Imperial Bedrooms). In the movie he dies. In the book, he only wishes he would.

So 25 years later, with the sequel Imperial Bedrooms, our confusion is complete. It’s 20 some years past and Clay, the narrator of Less Than Zero, tells us they had made a movie about the book about his life. “In the book, everything about me had happened. The book was something I couldn’t disavow. The book was blunt and had an honesty about it, whereas the movie was just a beautiful lie.”

Clay, the narrator of Less Than Zero, but not the blond screenwriter who went on to marry Blair, the girl in the book that Clay did and didn’t love, returns from New York in the sequel and is immediately plunged into a middle-aged version of his disaffected youth. Some of the old friends are there — Blair, Julian, Rip Millar, the once and future drug dealer, Trent, who has married Blair but who is still probably getting some on the side (both sides, like Blair’s father–remember? — who has since died of AIDS) — and much of the old evil. It was hard to like any of the characters in the original book, what with the snuff films and gang rape of 12-year-olds.  In the movie, Clay is a crusader of sorts and shows a bit of moral compass. In the book, he’s cold and distant. In the sequel, he is as self-serving, evil and corrupt as anyone else.

Ellis takes his two-sided characters and plunges them into intrigue, paranoia and an overall promise of no-good. Though it’s not about struggling lower class types who’ll do anything to get ahead (excluding, of course, the aspiring actresses), the book still carries the scent of noir. It’s a mystery with lots of paranoia, much easy sex and a sense of impending doom. Existential questions come in the form of , “Why am I being followed?”  or “Am I losing my mind?” or “Has someone been in my refrigerator?” In this way, Imperial Bedrooms is a much more entertaining book than its predecessor. There’s a murky plot to try and second-guess, there are femme fatales and some not so fatale as well as the feeling that no one can be trusted.  And yes, there’s plenty of drugs and alcohol and late night rendezvous. Murder raises its head right from the beginning.

Imperial Bedrooms does have something in common with the original and that’s its take on women. Women weren’t just desirable  second-class citizens in the first book. They were meat. The same is true here but with one hitch. Why does Clay lust after the mysterious Rain, what makes her become an object of hope and desire? There’s no explanation. Even her uncommonly good looks aren’t so uncommon among the uncommonly good looking. What Clay sees in her is something of a last chance even though he’s a guy who likes to take chances. Despite his attachment, she’s still an object. He never leads her to the bedroom. He “pushes” her there.

Like its predecessor, Imperial Bedrooms is one-sided in its take on class. The Hollywood rich may be evil but they’re visible, unlike everyone else. The few doormen and limousine drivers here have sold their souls to someone who can afford to pay them. The only Mexicans are drug thugs. The broad mass of Los Angeles’ population doesn’t exist.  Any truly great Los Angeles novel will be focused on everyone. The rich will be the ones who move through the city invisibly, even if they are pulling the strings. The shock of Ellis’ first book was just how young these debauched privileged children were — some of middle-school age –  and how little their parents cared. It’s not so surprising that their paid-for self-absorption is still there at 40.  There’s little in the way of moral lesson to be learned in these bedrooms (yes, we’re still quoting Elvis Costello). We already know that they’re all no good. “History repeats the old conceits….”  The song Ellis’ title are pulled from — “Less Than Zero”– was inspired, Costello says, by a British fascist who “was unrepentant about his poisonous actions of the 1930s.” Sounds like Ellis’ characters at any point in either book (but not the movie). At end, we read it for the name-dropping and to see who’s left standing. Oh, and who was in the refrigerator.–Cabbage Rabbit

The Rabbit’s  March Hare personae means he’s still waiting for his copy of Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice (tomorrow! tomorrow!).  In the meantime, we’re reading the reviews. As usual, novelist/reviewer Walter Kirn shines a light. He’s an admirer. Even Salon’s Laura Miller, who so hated Against the Day, finds the latest to her liking. Rereading her review of Against the Day made us recall how (to put it kindly) mixed the reviews were on that lengthy, wacky tome and how, to the Rabbit’s ears, many reviewers missed the point or just couldn’t handle so many unsecured plot lines (see the many letters that follow Miller’s Against the Day screed for perfect examples of die-hard Pynchon fan reaction, reviewer slurs and confused murmurings of the sort that Pynchon always seems to spawn). When the Rabbit was confronted with the assignment, he had–in perdictable March Hare style–the advantage of being late if not last. His sorely-missed editor at the I.E Weekly (we love you Rich!) asked for reaction to the notice. For no good reason, here’s that review. Please write in and tell us what we already know: that there’s little explanation of what goes on in the novel (and so much does!), that we give little space to its central characters (all 87 of them) and that, well, we just didn’t get it. But isn’t that the point with Pynchon novels?

Up To His Old Tricks

Why won’t critics let Pynchon be Pynchon?

Once a novelist is declared one of our best living writers are critics obliged to kill him off? Or does he do himself in? In the strange and stranger case of reclusive Thomas Pynchon both seem true.

Pynchon came screaming across the literary skies during a ten year period beginning in in 1963 with V, The Crying of Lot 49 and Gravity’s Rainbow. Nothing in existence compared to these wild, expansive books and Pynchon’s place as god of his own comic universe seemed secure. He was buried in critical praise and awards. His esteem grew when the Pulitzer committee refused to consider Gravity’s Rainbow because of a few grossly risqué scenes (how well we remember the dominatrix who after consuming a piece of gristly meat squats over Brigader Pudding’s open mouth and delicately drops a turd).

Then, in a trajectory suggested by the German missiles celebrated in Gravity’s Rainbow, Pynchon fell to earth. Over a decade passed before the short-story rehash Slow Learner was issued. Then came Vineland–Pynchon’s most forgettable novel–which revisits the 1960s, an era chronicled in The Crying of Lot 49. Mason & Dixon, published in 1997, marked a return to form but was so large and cumbersome with dialect that it defied casual reading.

Even as Pynchon’s work changed, it stayed the same. An endless cast of cleverly-named characters stumble through scenarios pulled from real and imagined history. Paranoia, singular and collective, is rampant. Destiny overpowers individuals, improbable science mixes with out-and-out fantasy, and drugs, no matter the period, are imbibed. Plots–several per novel–seem more comic book than high literature. And somewhere along the way, someone breaks into song.

Against The Day arrived late last year and marks a return to the Pynchon of old. It begins with the hydrogen skyship Inconvenience climbing aloft in 1893 with boy-book heroes the Chums of Chance bound for the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. It ends some time after the First World War with the skyship now a destination rather than a means to one. In between, there’s more action—and characters– than one can shake a stick of dynamite at, all of it centered on the contract killing of a blast-happy miner who’s accused of being an “anarchist.” Revenge, such as it is, comes slowly, oh so slowly.

Reviews of the thousand-page-plus tome were mixed but stirred with poison. Louis Menard of The New Yorker asks “What was he thinking?” and calls the novel “shapeless, just yards and yards of Pynchonian wallpaper.” In the Los Angeles Times, novelist Christopher Sorrentino also invoked the author’s name to damn it, calling the book “Pynchonesque.” Michiko Kakutani, currently The New York Times foremost critic, said the book read “like the sort of imitation of a Thomas Pynchon novel that a dogged but ungainly fan of this author’s might have written on quaaludes.” It was as if Pynchon had erred by writing as only he can.

In our humble view, Against the Day is a great book worthy of its author’s best. If it were a movie, it would be trumpeted as “colossal,” “epic” and “breath-taking.” That “wallpaper” Menard complains of is actually well-hung art, more foreground than background. And the trance like character of the tale–make that tales– is deeper than any downer might induce. Pynchon’s universe is an entwined, inexplicable place much like real life. Not every story we live has a neat ending. Pynchon’s go on and on.

The genius here lies in the parallels Pynchon draws with contemporary times. The promise of new technologies (in this case, electricity) become meaningless in the face of class struggle and war. Politicians are clueless and corrupt. Big business threatens individuality and hope springs from the promise of the impossible. Immigrants are the object of complaint and security is a booming business. Something frightening is gathering in the distance. The book’s title leaves no doubt how Pynchon feels about the 21^st century. It’s the same ol’, same ol’ all over again.

As always, Pynchon delivers this serious message with comedy, irony or both. The book bounces from Chicago, where the soon-to-be assassinated Austrian Archduke wants to take some sport in shooting Hungarians working the Windy City’s stock yards, to Colorado, Belgium, Mexico, Venice and Hollywood as well as the very center of the earth. A strange vessel cruises beneath the Middle Eastern sands looking for lost cities. There’s a race to build a time machine–the presence of stranded visitors from the future prove it’s possible–and a convention celebrating mayonnaise. Just when things threaten to turn dull, we meet a talking parrot named Joaquin who, since a run-in with a Corpus Christi housecat, expresses a preference for gringo pussy. How can you not love it?  –Cabbage Rabbit

The problem with fiction set in the future is that the present is always catches up. Take for example A Scanner Darkly, the best known of the five novels in the Library of America’s latest collection from science fiction writer Philip K. Dick. Written in the early 1970s and set in 1994, it now, almost 15 years later, seems dated (Dick died in 1982). Drug dealers still use pay phones, cars still have carburetors and people still listen to cassette tapes. On the other hand, police use holograms for spying on suspected dealers and undercover cops wear something called a “scramble suit” that makes them not quite visible. How come the forces of oppression always get the cool technology?

In many ways, Dick’s bypassed future looks like the present. A Scanner Darkly, like the 2006 digitally-colored movie staring Keanu Reeves, Robert Downey Jr. and Winona Ryder it inspired, is famously set in an Orange County we recognize. Commercial strips are populated with MacDonald’s and Pizza Huts, houses are made of plastic and there must have been a mortgage crisis because whole tract of them have been abandoned. The world of 1994 is a place in which the ‘70s really never went away. People “flash” on thoughts, quality drugs are “primo” and those who like to get “loaded” are “heads.” Stoners still go to the drive-in to see Planet of the Apes and all ten (ten?) sequels.

A burn-out tragedy focused on the paranoia of surveillance society, A Scanner Darkly speaks to the present. It’s a strange read, stranger than the strangely animated movie it inspires. That’s the thing about Dick’s writing. In plot, pace and ideas, it twists your thinking. It carries timeless messages. Dick’s great themes of high anxiety, insidious technology and mental exploitation take over your head like his imaginary drugs. You don’t know what to believe even after you’ve put the book down. In a sense, reading Dick is the ultimate natural high.

Five Novels of the 1960s &; 70s follows the structure of the Library’s first volume, Four Novels of the 1960s. There’s a story made famous by Hollywood (in the first volume it was Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep which became the movie Blade Runner). There’s a stunning work of contemporarily relevance and surreal dread like the psychedelic marketing nightmare Ubik from the previous volume. This time it’s Now Wait for Last Year, which focuses on a three-way interplanetary war and a drug that facilitates time travel. To further screw your neurons, there’s a psychotically personal tale, in this case Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said. Dick infrequently wrote stories that create realities we’ve were lucky to avoid. Here, it’s Dr. Bloodmoney or How We Got Along after the Bomb, an account of life after a nuclear test disaster and the resulting exchange of bombs. The world somehow survives—this is actually a story about devotion–but don’t leave your horse unattended or somebody’s liable to eat it.

Dick’s fixation with interplanetary colonization is represented by Martian Time Slip. Life on Mars is dismal and aimless. Colonists wile away the hours until the ditch rider visits with the monthly supply of water. A traveling salesman swings by to break the monotony (and we do mean swings). Corporations scheme over which will get to exploit Mars’ not-so-abundant minerals and the colonists bide their time with the latest mind-relaxing drugs. The strangest touch: autistic children are exploited by business because they can see into the future and predict how well a product will sell.

Paranoia was the great theme of the last collection and it’s certainly present here, especially in A Scanner Darkly. But other psychological states figure in, notably schizophrenia. Dick was a heavy abuser of amphetamines and as he progressed into the ‘70s, questions of sanity dominated his work. The drug known as “Death” or simply “D” in A Scanner Darkly puts the brain at war with itself, dividing right and left spheres in a competition that results in dual realities.

This is what sets Dick’s stories apart from most other science fiction. He wasn’t so interested in inventing futuristic technology as he was in how we would keep from loosing our minds in enslavement to it. The setting may be Mars but the existential problems are the same.

The question of whether or not Dick was merely an exceptional pulp writer persists. As in the previous volume, some of these novels are just decent, others works of genius. But the scenarios and mental states he explores, even in the lesser stories, tend to linger long after this hefty volume’s been closed. Both hemispheres of our brain agree: that’s the sign of great literature.–Cabbage Rabbit

We have seen the future, thanks to science fiction author Philip K. Dick, and it looks like the present… even when it’s set in the past. No, we don’t fly around it rocket-powered hovercraft, there are no colonies on the moon let alone Mars and we don’t carry around laser tubes for zapping our enemies like they do in Dick’s novels. But the pervasive and shady marketing, corporate warfare, bum but expensive technology, reality-altering drugs, and the pervading sense that somehow all of this can’t be real, well, seems so contemporary. And there’s something else familiar about Dick’s fiction: persistent paranoia and self-doubt.

Never mind that much of Dick’s future is now 15 years in the past. Most of the action in the recent The Library of America collection Four Novels of the 1960s is set in the 1990s. That much of the technology he imagined didn’t materialize in the roughly 25 years since the original publications doesn’t matter. Dick correctly foresaw much of the questionable materialism, the nonchalant pursuit of pleasure and the corporate dominance we see today as well as our enslavement to the technology. To borrow one of his own terms, Dick was decidedly “precog.”

But precognition wasn’t Dick’s greatest talent. What he grasped was the present. Dick understood the drug taking, the advertising and the pay-to play mind set that evolved in the 1960s–not to mention the feeling that someone was always watching–and extrapolated the future from there. In some of these tales, it costs a nickel just to open a door, even if it’s your own. Who gets the nickel? Does the door report activity to the government, or worse, the corporate oligarchy?

Dick was a much honored writer among sci-fi buffs in 1982, the year of his death. That was also the year Ridley Scott’s movie Blade Runner, loosely based on the novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and it ignited general interest in his work. Forget that Scott’s film took place in a rainy Los Angeles rather than Dick’s dusty San Francisco, that the replicants in the book, unlike the movie, were easily dispatched or that the blade runner himself, bounty hunter Rick Deckard, was married, adding another layer of ethical quandary to his existential problems (Harrison Ford, with a fetish for a certain replicant, played the role single in the movie). Those of us who, once we left our teenage years, gave up on science fiction recognized Dick as a writer who’d made hack a craft (close exceptions in some of his early work from the 1950s). He turned pulp genre into ethically complex, tryingly plotted, multi-layered works of genius. The movie, though brilliant, didn’t come close to the thoughtfulness of Dick’s book.

The four stories here are more William Burroughs than H.G. Wells. They reflect the author’s slow descent into paranoia and hallucinatory mind set that continued until his death. The Man In the High Castle reverses the outcome of World War II with the Germans and Japanese, in an uneasy alliance, splitting the coasts and struggling for control in the center. An illegal work of fiction has captured attention in the former United States. The book is a Dick-like novel that imagines what would have happened if America had won the war.

The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch follows turf battles on the colonized planets between rival corporate drug suppliers. Hallucinations overlap reality and sinister CEO types literally become gods. Life is cheap in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and not easily identifiable. Parallel realities exist in adjacent buildings and a real live animal, like a spider, is worth a fortune. Time reverses in Ubik, threatening the profit of an all-purpose product (and we mean all purposes) even as precogs gather the mental power to save the future.

What’s fantastic here is not the technology, which is developed not to benefit mankind but to fleece it, but the evolution of a world where nothing can be trusted. Inanimate objects control even the smallest acts. If you don’t have a nickel to open that door, the door speaks insults even as you beg it for credit. Science has found a way to contact the dead but it’s going to cost you plenty and, like cell-phone reception among the mountains, the signal isn’t guaranteed. Corporations employ precogs to predict the success of their products and spy on their competitors. You may think you’ve recovered from a drug-induced hallucination but have really only entered another.

The volume is edited by Jonathan Lethem, whose Fortress Of Solitude carries something of Dick’s absurdist sense of fantasy as well as some of his humor. There’s no forward but Lethem’s chronology of Dick’s life will set fans wondering if the author’s later work was even more twisted and paranoid than these four tales. Reality, as Dick knew, isn’t always what it seems.—Cabbage Rabbit

Four Novels of the 1960s by Philip K. Dick; The Library of America, hardback, 830 pages, $35.

A version of this story first appeared in the Inland Empire Weekly