Our Country Friends
Author: Gary Shteyngart
Publisher: Random House
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Note: Content and trigger warnings are provided for those who need them at the bottom of this page. If you don’t need them and don’t want to risk spoilers, don’t scroll past the full review.
Cover Description
Eight friends, one country house, four romances, and six months in isolation — a powerful, emotionally rich novel about love, friendship, and betrayal, a book that reads like a great Russian novel, or Chekhov on the Hudson, by a novelist The New York Times calls "one of his generation's most original and exhilarating writers".
It's March 2020 and a calamity is unfolding. A group of friends and friends-of-friends gathers in a country house to wait out the pandemic. Over the next six months new friendships and romances will take hold, while old betrayals will emerge, forcing each character to reevaulate whom they love and what matters most. The unlikely cast of characters include: a Russian-born novelist; his Russian-born psychiatrist wife; their precocious child obsessed with K-pop; a struggling Indian American writer; a wildly successful Korean American app developer; a global dandy with three passports; a young flame-thrower of an essayist, originally from the Carolinas; and a movie star, The Actor, whose arrival upsets the equilibrium of this chosen family.
In a remarkable literary feat, Gary Shteyngart has documented through fiction the emotional toll of our recent times: a story of love and friendship that reads like a great Russian novel set in upstate New York. Both elegiac and very, very funny, Our Country Friends is the most ambitious book yet by the author of the beloved bestseller, Super Sad True Love Story.
TL;DR Review
Our Country Friends is a wild romp of a novel; a cultural-examination-through-dramedy with a ton of voice and character. It was a little too soon for me to relive 2020, but I respect what this book did.
For you if: You like stories with all The Drama™️.
Full Review
Thank you to Random House for providing me with an electronic review copy of this book! It caught my eye because Salman Rushdie had blurbed it. And while it wasn’t fully comfortable, it’s definitely worth reading.
Our Country Friends is a pandemic novel. Not a pandemic — THE pandemic. It starts in March 2020, when a middle-aged Russian immigrant novelist invites a few of his friends, plus the Actor (who is working to adapt one of his novels) to his “estate” in an unnamed town up the Hudson from NYC. It follows this cast over the course of the following year, where they experience the tension of 2020 — fear of the virus, fear of others, fear for our livelihoods, a racial justice reckoning, the presidential election — as much of us did, at a secluded, disconnected remove.
It’s hard to sum this up succinctly. The book is a dramedy of sorts, a wild romp, written almost stagelike with a lot of voice and humor. But it’s not flip; it’s actually quite uncomfortably on the nose. It makes you laugh but also look at these characters and see yourself in them and remember 2020 and the undercurrent of tension, even for those who were very privileged and sheltered. Really, it’s very impressive.
I recommend this one if you like novels that employ pomp and drama for good reason, and if you aren’t afraid to look back at 2020 yet.
Content and Trigger Warnings
A recounting/reliving of 2020 (lockdown, COVID-19 fear, racial justice protests, election season)
Cancer / terminal illness
Light ableism toward a child’s neurodivergence
Marijuana and acohol use