Summer satires: Four novels help us laugh to keep from crying

By The Week Staff

last updated 8 January 2015

Super Sad True Love Story

by Gary Shteyngart

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Gary Shteyngart’s new novel “ratifies his emergence as one of his generation’s most original and exhilarating writers,” said Michiko Kakutani in The New York Times. The author of Absurdistan and The Russian Debutante’s Handbook has dropped an Internet-age Romeo and Juliet into a not-so-distant dystopian future, in which the American economy is sinking, “High Net Worth Individuals” have attained immortality, and everyone’s credit rating, cholesterol level, and “hotness” quotient are constantly being broadcast by their state-of-the-art hand-helds and other snoopy devices. “Sad and hilarious” Lenny Abramov, a 39-year-old life-extension salesman, shares narrating duties with 24-year-old Eunice Park, the crude-talking Korean-American anorexic whom Lenny has fallen for, said Troy Jollimore in the Los Angeles Times. Unfortunately, Eunice’s shallow, Facebook-style posts seem to be “nearly uniformly uninteresting.” That’s only the case until you realize that Eunice and her 20-something friends have adopted a “faux swagger” to mask deep feelings of vulnerability, said Laura Miller in Salon.com. Shteyngart displays more compassion than a typical satirist, and he’s executed his “high-wire act” brilliantly. His hilarious book is also “as super-sad as the title promises.”

The Four Fingers of Death

by Rick Moody

(Little, Brown, $25.99)

Either you like long metafictional narratives or you don’t, said James Gibbons in Bookforum. Personally, I consider Rick Moody’s new, 700-page space opera a “comic tour de force,” since it smuggles a moving meditation on mortality and loss into a book pretending to be an overwrought novelization of a 1963 sci-fi horror film. Some of Moody’s trickery seems unnecessary, said Michael H. Miller in The New York Observer. This book’s fun first half, in which eight NASA astronauts unravel during their 2025 mission to Mars, is simultaneously so dramatic and amusing that it would rank as Moody’s best novel since 1994’s The Ice Storm, had it been allowed to stand alone. But the kitsch becomes too much, said Sam Sacks in The Wall Street Journal. When an astronaut’s severed hand returns to Earth in the second half and begins strangling people, readers are expected to understand that the character ostensibly writing this story is exorcising his sorrow and rage over his ailing wife. You can’t help thinking, though, that the talented Moody is still stinging from once having been labeled “the worst writer of our generation.” He’s shielded himself by handing authorial responsibility to a “bad” writer of his own invention—a “gimmicky excuse” for a sloppy, bloated novel.

The Long Song

by Andrea Levy

(Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $26)

Andrea Levy might be the only novelist working today who could renew our sense of slavery’s horror with “a wickedly funny parody” of life on a 19th-century Jamaican sugar plantation, said Rachel Manley in the Toronto Globe and Mail. On its surface, Levy’s latest appears to be a former house slave’s look back on a torrid romance she carried on with her white master, while she was tending to the daily whims of the household’s oblivious mistress. Yet the narrator’s “Monty Pythonesque” sense of humor never masks the violence and inhumanity of the social system she was forced to navigate, and that chilling backdrop “stealthily and indelibly etches itself onto the reader’s heart and mind.” Sometimes, the narrator’s catty voice simply becomes annoying, and her asides to the reader become distracting, said Rayyan al-Shawaf in The Miami Herald. But getting the story from her mouth makes perfect sense thematically, said Tayari Jones in The Washington Post. With The Long Song, Levy “has returned to the level of storytelling” that earned her Small Island the Orange Prize in 2004. This book, which has just been long-listed for the Man Booker Prize, “reminds us that she is one of the best historical novelists of her generation.”

Star Island

by Carl Hiaasen

(Knopf, $26.95)

Carl Hiaasen’s first novel for adults in five years takes aim at a target that’s perhaps too easy, said Louis Bayard in The Washington Post. Cherry Pye, a talentless former teen-pop princess, is aiming to launch her second comeback at the ripe old age of 22. But Cherry is a pill-gobbling public train wreck. When an ambulance rushes away from her Florida mansion carrying a photogenic blonde on a stretcher, the fear of Cherry’s handlers isn’t that this overdose might be her last. It’s that a stowaway paparazzo will realize that the pretty patient is actually just a young actress who’s been hired as a body double. As complications mount, Hiaasen’s cast proves suitably grotesque: One of Cherry’s bodyguards has a weed-whacker where his hand used to be, and when Cherry’s likable stand-in gets kidnapped, her abductor turns out to be primarily motivated by the thought that Cherry might be the next Marilyn Monroe—and that he’ll make a mint if he can get her to sit for a last photo session before her drug habits kill her. All this is delivered with satisfying “fizziness,” said Janet Maslin in The New York Times, but the whole caper amounts to little more than “standard-issue stuff from a dependably polished and funny writer.” Hiaasen never really tells us anything new about celebrity culture, because the real-world version is already farce.