Chekhov’s stories 'have an atmosphere as distinct as an odor,' as the translator Avrahm Yarmolinsky put it, and the same is true of the work of Gary Shteyngart, a writer comparably superb at demonstrating absurdity and generating pathos. In Shteyngart’s case I would characterize the signature odor as tangy, briny and instantly appetizing. His books should come with a free bag of salt and vinegar potato chips ... Our Country Friends, the author’s fifth novel, is his finest ... brilliant about so much: the humiliations of parenting and of being parented; the sadism of chronic illness; the glory of friendship. It is also the first novel I’ve read that grapples with 'cancel culture' in a way that didn’t make me want to chop my head off, light it on fire and shoot it into space ... Like Chekhov, whose ghost floats pleasantly through these pages, Shteyngart is a master of verbs ... To read this novel is to tally a high school yearbook’s worth of superlatives for Shteyngart: funniest, noisiest, sweetest, most entertaining. To those I will add a few superlatives that were not celebrated at my own high school: most melancholic, most quizzical, most skilled at vibrating the deepest strings of the anthropoid heart ... a perfect novel for these times and all times, the single textual artifact from the pandemic era I would place in a time capsule as a representation of all that is good and true and beautiful about literature. I hope the extraterrestrials who exhume it will agree.
... reflective, earthy, humane ... rife with the problem of privilege, the profoundly leveling experience of the virus, and an ever-present sense of absurdity and humor ... Shteyngart uses a 19th-century-style omniscience, moving from mind to mind within a scene (and, like Tolstoy, even occasionally inhabiting the minds of animals) while drawing back and commenting to the reader from a perspective that none of the characters are privy to. This choice seems suited to the subject: We were all thrust into a vast calamity that we didn’t understand and over which we had no control. The world feels relentlessly godless. Our all-knowing narrator steps in to give us the big picture in inimitable Shteyngartian style ... This narration also allows the novel to adopt a tone of wry self-reflexivity, as in this slap at the very idea of writing a pandemic novel ... There are wonderfully vivid descriptions of food and weather and sex ... In this dense, ambitious novel, some elements fall flat. The speculative tech of the Tröö Emotions app seems to belong in a different book (although those umlauts are funny), and the more the characters tried to explain it, the less sense it made to me. And I didn’t need Sasha’s ongoing betrayal of one of his closest friends. I appreciate that Shteyngart wants to be unflinching about Sasha’s failings, but it struck me as too cruel for his character ... The novel’s strengths abound. It upends clichés, pieties and commonplaces while also noticing salient details of the lockdown ... It works because the author is aware of his characters’ hypocrisies and vanities. Shteyngart doesn’t let them off the hook, but he does allow them (and us) some respite.
Gary Shteyngart’s fifth novel is so steeped in the present moment that we’re unlikely to be reading it in ten years’ time, let alone 100. Which is all the more reason to read it now. It’s not the first pandemic novel, but I will eat my facemask if anyone comes up with something quite as fun as this. So take a seat and prepare to be entertained ... ull-blown omniscience is rare in contemporary fiction. So it’s a true pleasure to sink into Shteyngart’s expansive, benevolent storytelling — hopping between his characters, dashing back and forwards in time, commenting on the world at large, revelling in the mechanics of his craft ... At 317 pages the scale is not Tolstoyan, and Shteyngart does struggle to fit so much story into his medium-sized novel. The deliciously convoluted plot proceeds in fits and starts. At times we’re shunted from twist to turn a little too abruptly; significant action happens off stage, and we learn about it in hasty recap. Some sentences, too, are overstuffed ... Yet what a lot he does fit in ... captures a time not so very long ago that already feels far away — a time before vaccines or variants, a time when we doubted the efficacy of masks and frantically wiped down surfaces and supermarket vegetables. And he has captured it beautifully: that sun-soaked nervous energy, the intense, almost maniacal aliveness of the early days of the pandemic. A fever dream that’s already fading. But then that’s exactly the point this flamboyant, theatrical, tragicomic book is making. Everything passes. We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep.
Gary Shteyngart never strays far from the absurd ... In his latest novel, Our Country Friends, Shteyngart convincingly demonstrates that large doses of caustic irony mixed with poignancy and melancholy may be the most effective tonic for coping with the lunatic mood swings so many of us have experienced since the virus first appeared ... Shteyngart wields his satiric bite to good effect ... Shteyngart deftly pivots from this hilarious, tragicomic parody to a mood closer to the wistful, elegiac tones of his beloved Russian master, Chekhov. Astute readers will also realize that in keeping with Chekhov’s principle that a gun placed on the stage must go off before the curtain falls, the coronavirus, too, will inevitably find a target ... By novel’s end, Shteyngart’s flawed characters have absorbed lessons in humility, compassion and grief. And even though Shteyngart leaves too many loose ends curiously unexplained, his darkly brilliant comedy of love and folly gives us the absurd leavening we need to keep on laughing, and living, in covid’s all too tragic wake.
Here, we have Shteyngart at his finest, managing to master, with astute intelligence, the delicate task of depicting American multiculturalism...literary allusion...as well as recreating the irritations, absurdities and apocalyptic horror of the early days of the virus, combined with the violence and terror of American politics. All this while keeping it laugh-out-loud funny ... Shteyngart’s ability is mesmerising, almost to the point of distraction. (Is it too well written? Too perfectly crafted?) Yet, luckily, the humour saves it from ever becoming tiresomely pristine ... Ultimately, in Our Country Friends Shteyngart brings vividly to life a group of characters who go through real, significant change, and who experience Tröö Emotions (read the book to get that allusion). In fact, just read the book.
... the pandemic is a plot device skillfully employed—a way to bring characters into a compound upstate, and keep them there along with the anxieties and social mishaps that have become central to our newly distanced lives. It's a funny novel.
... rollicking if occasionally strained ... Shteyngart skewers the petty narcissisms of cultural elites with trademark hilarity. His descriptions are precise and elegant ... As the quarantine drags on, Our Country Friend lapses into contrived situations and scripted banter; Shteyngart holds the satire a beat too long, bordering on the precious. The politics are messy, faithfully reflecting these Disunited States, but he can't quite quell his impulse to editorialize. While his choice of an omniscient narrator allows him room to maneuver, drama leaks from the narrative ... And yet his delight in his own sentences is contagious; his gimlet-eyed optimism lifts us up. Our Country Friends is ultimately a generous book.
Shteyngart has, from the outset of his career, been an hilariously astute and often prescient observer and satirist of his adopted country; this enjoyable novel is no exception. In Our Country Friends, however, there is a more measured quality to Shteyngart’s writing: he has left behind the sometimes madcap forms of earlier novels including Absurdistan (2006) and Super Sad True Love Story (2010) for an omniscient narrative style that suits the eerie, quiescent nature of his tale ... What Shteyngart has made is a comedy of manners that is always a pleasure to read even if it feels, at times, a little strained. But of course it’s strained, one might argue, we’re all strained, everything is strained ... There are some flaws here: the reader never really gets a handle on how Tröö Emotions works or what it really does; I was not quite convinced by the emotional dynamic (no spoilers here) behind the story of Vinod’s rediscovered, unpublished book. But this is a warm, empathetic novel, written with a tenderness and close observation of this enclosed society that pulls the reader into the novel’s present and allows her to forget for a little while — as Shteyngart’s cast is attempting to do — the catastrophe unfolding in the world beyond.
Gary Shteyngart’s contribution to the burgeoning genre of the lockdown novel is very, very Russian—in the best possible way ... Here’s something of a departure—or at least a mellowing—for Shteyngart; the antic international satire of Absurdistan or the science-fictional Super Sad True Love Story is muted, while on his stylistic mixing board the slider marked melancholy has been notched up to 11 ... (The main fault of the book is Vinod’s overlong and slightly repetitious dream/hallucination scenes.) ... The real Chekhovianism is the way that Shteyngart’s comic style—the book crackles with good one-liners—is so consistently and to such effect shot through with plangency ... These characters, with their variously thwarted ambitions for love and fame, are wrangling with the realisation that they are ordinary, mortal, vulnerable, just like everyone else.
Mr. Shteyngart’s exploration into the pleasures and pitfalls of the American Dream is infused with the sort of liberal guilt that requires that all portrayals of luxury be accompanied by performances of abasement ... Mr. Shteyngart is a comic writer, yet he embodies this attitude far more than he satirizes it. 'Most of literature is about privileged people being unhappy,' the Southern writer argues, and you often wish the book weren’t so tortured about the claim ... there are amusing nods here in the direction of Anna Karenina and Uncle Vanya. But the book’s silly plot twists—love triangles, betrayals, public scandals, the appearance of a menacing stranger and of course a collision with mortality—have much more in common with the kind of prestige cable melodrama that Sasha is trying to get off the ground. A pandemic novel that counts as a work of escapism is something of a feat, though the author himself doesn’t seem quite convinced.
Making Dee an essayist rather than a novelist is a shrewd choice on Shteyngart’s part. Why bother with the novelist’s old-fashioned preoccupation with art, when straightforward, combative self-assertion is so much more engaging? ... Our Country Friends is, like Chekhov’s plays, very much of its particular moment ... Sasha broods over his withering career and assures himself that 'he would renounce all his privileges. He would not write another novel so that others could be heard.' This is funny, because the reader knows that Sasha’s contrition is feigned ... He doesn’t consider the possibility that he could do something different, about himself but also about others, a novel shaped by a long, compassionate, deep consideration of their lives, their flaws, their loneliness and disappointments and hopes—a novel, for that matter, very much like Our Country Friends. That would, indeed, be unfashionable. But it would be a book very much worth reading.
In one corner we have Shteyngart’s undimmed talent for comedy, which begins with the colourful cast he has assembled ... Their confrontations and canoodlings are set against a backdrop of likeable satire on modern America ... Alongside the wit there’s straight stuff too. Shteyngart makes points about the inequality of Covid outcomes, city versus country, and the inanity of entertainment and social media. And the strangeness of modern America is one of the things Our Country Friends is most interested in. Shteyngart invokes what Philip Roth called the “American berserk”: the idea — ever more plausible these days — that the US is uniquely prone to conspiracy, madness and chaos ... This fits, deliberately or not, with Our Country Friends and its messy nature, which is at times as exhausting as a long lockdown; there’s so much going on that it’s hard to keep track of everyone or see an underlying structure. The feverish energy that animated Shteyngart’s earlier books with madcap vigour is still there, but coming out in a different way ... Shteyngart has made something out of it – something often funny, sometimes moving, occasionally frustrating – but a little more stillness would be welcome.
[The] themes go some way to explaining the novel’s reception in the US, where it has been critically lauded and achieved the status of an 'NY Times bestseller'. If you raise certain flags, a subsection of the country will salute them ... I wonder what it will be like to read this book in a hundred years. The attitude towards his reader is: you’re living it, you know what I’m talking about ... But the lack of context is a problem even in early 2022. It is never quite clear why any of these people – the former student, the movie star, the international jet-setter – has decided to show up at Senderovsky’s dacha ... We learn little about the lives they are escaping, and, apart from a few references to the dangers of the city, not much about the state of the pandemic itself. The result is that the set-up feels more like a novelist’s conceit and less like a genuine occasion. And, once he has got his characters on site, Shteyngart doesn’t really know what to do with them ... For all the drama, the book feels uneventful. There is a comic energy to the prose that doesn’t often break out into humour and instead creates a kind of low-gravity zone for the characters to operate in. None of their actions carries real weight ... You get the sense that Shteyngart keeps having to make up stuff for his characters to talk about because they don’t have enough depth to their lives to keep a conversation going ... Perhaps strangest of all about this novel is the way Shteyngart seems to lose interest in his own alter ego. Senderovsky, who initiates the whole retreat, plays less and less of a role as the plot wears on. All of this is first-draft stuff, signs of the haste in which the book was presumably dashed off and then published. Shteyngart can certainly write, and there are many great lines, sharp insights, both funny and serious, which deserve a better book to live in.
Shteyngart reimagines the uncertainty of those early days, and also adds context and clarity, even as we remain in the midst of pandemic life ... Our Country Friends feels anything but rushed. It has the leisurely quality of a, yes, Russian novel with a wide cast of characters both rich and poor, youthful and desired, aging and desiring. Shteyngart captures the odd way time moved during the early days of the pandemic, how, despite our isolation, we were bound by fear and confusion ... What might have begun as silly and satirical veers toward heartfelt and meaningful as the COVID-19 virus makes its way into their secluded and pampered lives.
Fans of Shteyngart’s fiction will not be disappointed by the way he details his characters’ romantic encounters, expensive meals and professional anxieties during their stay ... There is also evidence that the author is trying to be kinder to his characters. They read and talk about Chekhov throughout the book, and Shteyngart’s style resembles Chekhov’s quiet nuance more than, say, Joseph Heller’s absurd satire, as was the case in his earlier novels ... About halfway through the book, the characters hear the news of George Floyd’s murder ... The author’s solution is to give his characters a happy ending ... This is a disappointing conclusion because it reminds me of how quickly we all move on from tragedies like police or school shootings and maybe even pandemics. But also because Our Country Friends contains building blocks for imagining a different kind of world. It just doesn’t develop them ... It seems, in other words, like an anti-Shteyngart novel. But also like a worthy aspiration for the author’s future work.
... the stage is set for the kind of satire the Russian-born Shteyngart usually excels at ... Except that nothing much happens ... One of the group’s interminable, if amusing, conversations shifts the balance slightly when the Actor tries out Karen’s app, falling hard for Dee ... However, this catalyst, when it comes, feels as artificial as that romance, as if Shteyngart were desperate to break through his own pandemic ennui. It’s not as if Shteyngart hasn’t been having fun with his characters. In fact, much of the timely humor comes in his mixing of their external and internal realities ... But it is flip and wearying ... The book comes most alive when it delves deeper, touching on the fear beneath the laughs ... The paralysis is broken, as are we all, by death. While that makes life more precious in retrospect, it also shows up the hollowness of so much of that earlier humor, as witty as it may have been.
I have met people, mercifully few in number, who just don’t respond to Chekhov ... They’ll ask what all the fuss is about: a whole lot of rich people complaining about nothing and achieving even less? And perhaps now, with Gary Shteyngart’s latest book, I’m beginning to understand their bewilderment. Our Country Friends, a Chekhov-inspired Covid novel, comes lauded with every form of praise from serious Americans...and yet here I am...wondering what I’m missing ... The American praise quoted on the dust jacket promises a 'brilliant' 'laugh out loud' tragicomedy, but I didn’t laugh and I didn’t cry. I wonder if too many of its culture-war references...simply lack the same pungency for a British readership. The friction between self-regarding Manhattan creatives and barely managing upstate farmers should be fertile enough ground for any novelist, but I constantly felt as though I’d forgotten to pack the codebook. Which left me with the mere domestic shenanigans of the characters, namely a whole lot of rich people complaining about nothing and achieving less.
...whether or not you enjoy Our Country Friends depends upon your love of Shteyngart’s always-clever sometimes-exhausting narrative voice. More importantly it depends on whether you’re ready for your first Pandemic Novel ... Shteyngart makes the most of the differences in race, origin, and class among the main characters and the outside world, and this tension provides the dramatic backbone of the story. In the hands of a lesser (and less funny) writer, reliving the uncertainty of the early days of the pandemic could be tedious, if not PTSD-inducing. In general, Shteyngart makes it work by letting his character’s preparations for and reactions to this changed world flirt with going over the top while never quite going there ... Sometimes the comedy is a little too broad so that some characters remain unsympathetic. And the ending isn’t entirely satisfying because, well, the pandemic did not neatly end when the book does ... a very funny, eminently readable book.
... engaging ... sometimes comic, sometimes poignant ... He borrows a bit from Boccaccio, a bundle from Chekhov, but gives the whole thing the same very contemporary satirical stamp he’s brought to books like Super Sad True Love Story and Lake Success. His satire is sharp-eyed, especially on matters of class and race, but tends to be more sympathetic than savage ... Shteyngart has a gift for writing realistically about love and sex in their myriad forms, from the seismic force of new lust to the comfort of a longtime spouse’s touch. In Our Country Friends, though, he focuses his insight on friendships, how they begin, how they endure, how they end
Shteyngart is terrific at building characters who feel fully fleshed out, and it’s a real feat to do so with eight primary players ... While most of the plot takes place at the country home, the narrative’s tentacles reach far back in history and all around the globe. Several characters are first-generation immigrants, and they illustrate the mix of hardiness and anxiety that comes with uncertainty on a societal level. These are the moments when it feels like Shteyngart has something to say about resilience and strength ... Stalwart fans of Shteyngart’s brand of satire won’t find these characters’ narcissism to be too grating, but given the gravity of the past year and a half, not all readers will have the patience for their flimflammery.
... as vividly as this novel recalls a dreamlike near-past, it’s reductive to think of it only as pandemic portraiture. The pandemic is more like set dressing for Shteyngart’s usual humanism; his concerns widen to encompass the menace of technology and the ill feeling so often rooted in enduring relationships, romantic or platonic. COVID-19’s most essential role here is as symbol: of division, of isolation, of fear, of living in modern America, but also of overcoming, persisting, surviving ... Both the definitive COVID-19 novel and not, this work captures an uncertain modernity and speaks to the existential peril of contemporary life.
[A] clever Chekhovian satire ... Shteyngart’s big-hearted drama is timely yet timeless with its penetrating and nuanced social commentary exploring identity, racism, celebrity culture, social media, and humanity. Above all, Shteyngart artfully exemplifies love in its many registers—parental, brotherly, romantic—in what is ultimately a 'super sad true love' story.
Droll and heartfelt ... Shteyngart drops in about as many illuminating details about the Korean diaspora as he does about Russian immigrants and their American children. The author shows great care for his characters, making Sasha’s vulnerability particularly palpable when an uncertain screenwriting project threatens his financial stability. Shteyngart’s taken the formula for a smart, irresistible comedy of manners and expertly brought it up to the moment.
Shteyngart...can describe anything ... The Great American Pandemic Novel only Shteyngart could write, full of hyphenated identities, killer prose, and wild vitality.
