This is speculative fiction that is completely on target when it comes to current feelings about the Internet, economics, politics AND youth culture. It’s like Shteyngart took Jaron Lanier’s “You Are Not a Gadget,” all your worst nightmares about the Tea Party, your yuppie friends who keep their faces buried in their iPhones at the bar, your recent revelation that Facebooking is the loneliest part of your day, and your strict immigrant parents, and wrote a love story.

The part that tickles me the most, and where I think Shteyngart cuts to the bone of cultural hubris, is that this is another nail in the coffin for the cyberpunk dream of the Internet as a tool of connection, creation, and subversion. It's a satirical (and yet it's satire in the way that 1984 was satire - in that you kind of suspect it could actually happen) vision of how "connectivity" tends toward surveillance and as such actually leads to rigidity and conformism, to increased government and corporate exploitation, and to profound isolation.

Add on top of all that (the cultural commentary, the laughs, the love) Shteyngart's literary feat of writing from the perspective and in the language of two different protagonists with two very different styles!

Can you tell I'm impressed?