Super Sad True Love Stories, what part of that title is accurate?

This book threw a lot at you at once. There’s a frightenning similarity between the government of the book’s near future and the direction our government is going, the failure of books and reading, the mysogyny, lack of interpersonal connection, self-esteem and the focus on youth. Whew! That is a lot to pack into one novel. Some twitter conversation brought up the question: “Who are we supposed to root for?” I still am not sure who I should look to for redeeming qualities. Early on, I was creeped out by Lenny and his juvenile mindset when he is around the age of forty. The creep-meter rose to a boiling point with his obsessive teening (is that the right term?) of Eunice Park and his stalker-like scanning of her personal information. He unnerved me and made me quite uncomfortable. Then we came to Eunice Park’s messages and i wondered who to feel sorry for. During their first date in Italy, Eunice had been sweet and nice, giving no signs (that I could discern from Lenny’s discription which is, granted, biased) that she wanted to be elsewhere. When we read her message to Precious Pony, we find out that she was utterly repulsed by Lenny and only had sexual interactions with him because it was the lesser of two evils. She used sex to get out of an even mre uncomfortable situation. I felt that this put us in her mindset, and I didn’t really like being there. Everytime I began to feel bad for her because of her abuse or her misdirection, she said somethng very cruel about Lenny or did something so completely shallow that i didn’t want to feel for her. Everytime  wanted to feel bad for Lenny, he did something super creepy or said something so juvenile and rediculous that i couldn’t. i spent most of the book teetering between the two, hoping to find some growth to show me how it all comes together. Thn Eunice leaves Lenny basically for money, then leaves Joshie for youth. For me, that showed a growth FAIL. She was still using the same tactics she always had to get what she wanted. Lenny ended up traveling and pretending he is not the man fiction had been talking about in order to avoid judgement. Again, reverting back to the tactics of old, just trying not to be ranked or judged.

I began taking supporting characters and giving them my emotional reactions. The elderly women at the co op, Grace who has to bring a child into this damaged world, Lenny’s parents who worked so hard just to see America’s own version of Soviet Russia and it’s collapse. These characters began to receive my sympathy because I didn’t know any of their flaws, so hadn’t been disgusted by them.

The imagery of aging was really shocking for me too. I could talk all day about the ugly representation of a sexualized and fetishized youth, but what made me cringe more was the terrible desceiptions of people deemed “old.” In the society we live in, Lenny is not on the percipice of death or anything. She the constant discussion of his hair loss and graying, his flabbly skin and his wrinkles was a little strange to me. His friends, like Noah, had been pushing so hard to become youthful again the became charicatures, where Lenny didn’t know how to fight it, but in the end seemed to be the only one to get out.