“Act Two for America”: Narcissism, Money, and the Death of American Literature in Gary Shteyngart's Super Sad True Love Story

Abstract

Gary Shteyngart's Super Sad True Love Story is set in a dystopian New York City of the not-so-distant, and uncannily familiar, future. Shteyngart's America is hopelessly indebted to China, has ceded government control of the military to private corporations, and is populated by a citizenry narcissistically enthralled with hand-held media devices called “äppäräti.” In this article, I examine how Shteyngart depicts the collapse of the United States as a global power as a corollary to the devaluation of US currency and the end of American literature as a mode of cultural production. Money, literature, and American national identity are all yoked to the concept of narcissism in Shteyngart's novel. American narcissism has often been supported by narratives of US exceptionalism, which represent the United States as the centre of global geopolitics, New York City as the global centre of culture and commerce, the US dollar as the de facto currency of a global economy, and American literature as valuable cultural capital. However, when the US loses its place as a global superpower in Super Sad True Love Story, it is significant that many of the novel's characters—especially Shteyngart's narrator, Lenny Abramov—note this loss primarily in terms of their changed relationships with both money and literature. I read Shteyngart's novel as a (sometimes failed) critique of the role of narcissism in establishing bonds of national, economic, and literary belonging, and of the ways in which globalization and economic crises can destabilize these affective connections.