Looking for a Great Read...or Two?

This year,  two novels I poured through were each so clever, so extraordinarily allegorical yet reality-driven, so funny and yet so enlightening that each one gave rise to simultaneous jealousy and joy to this reader. Jealousy because I don't believe I am capable of the kind of prose exhibited in each, although I will die trying. Absolute joy in reading because each transformed the present condition into a series of farcical, satirical circumstances that ultimately seemed plausible.

These books are Freddy and Fredericka by Mark Helprin (Penguin Press 2006) and  Super Sad Love Story by Gary Shteyngart (2010).  Each novel exhibits a wholly nomadic spirit of travel and discovery. Misunderstandings become the underpinnings of world conflict and on occasion, haphazardly create harmony and symbiosis. Helprin and Shteyngart are satirists of the best kind, with deep insights into the human condition and abilities to create distopian worlds with utopian moments. The main characters are outsiders, yet ultimately leaders who get it "right."

In Freddy and Fredericka, a peculiar English royal family in the not-so-distant future is at a crossroads. They are not sure whether Freddy, the crowned Prince, is mad or sane and are convinced that the heir to the thrown must succeed in a quest and prove himself before being able to be elevated in succession. His mission is simple: be propelled like a missile into the United States in order to single-handedly conquer the lost colonies and bring them back into the fray under British rule. Naked, without funds, he and his fashionista wife parachute into the States, landing in what they think is a "heath" that turns out to be the swampland of New Jersey.

Lenny, the protagonist of Shteyngart's Super Sad Love Story (a title which I can never keep straight) is a forty- something year old "hack" who returns from his nice ex-pat job in Italy to New York, which is now a perpetually hip, distopian society obsessed with youth, immortality and technology. The Chinese have taken over. The dollar is worth nothing. Books have mostly been destroyed. English is reduced to acronyms, slang-slinging and text messaging short-hand. Everyone has his "apparatus" on at all times which displays the wearer's emotions. (Talk about wearing your heart on your sleeve!)

Kudos to both authors. Reality crosses paths with blind determination in each book. Original, brilliant concepts, executed well plus a love story. Really, what more could any reader want??