She Treads Softly: Our Country Friends

Tuesday, October 26, 2021

Our Country Friends

Our Country Friends by Gary Shteyngart
11/2/21; 336 pages
Random House

Our Country Friends by Gary Shteyngart is a recommended novel following a group of friends plus one movie star set during the pandemic lockdown.

It’s March 2020 and the lockdown is approaching. Sasha Senderovsky, a Russian-born novelist, Masha, his psychiatrist wife, and Nat, his adopted daughter who is obsessed with K-pop, are at their New York estate where Sasha has built a colony of bungalows. He has invited a group of friends to stay at his colony for the lockdown. Arriving are long time friends Ed Kim, a wealthy citizen of the world, Karen Cho, a successful Korean American app developer, and Vinood Mehta, a struggling Indian American writer. Joining the group is a former writing student of Sasha's, Dee Cameron, and The Actor. Once they all arrive they have no idea how long they will be staying in this bitter sweet comedy of manners.

There are certain parts of Our Country Friends where the descriptions are beautifully rendered and stunning in this novel set during a notable period in history. In a modified locked room scenario morphed with a surreal comedy of manners, these characters are all stuck together much longer than they originally anticipated and were not prepared emotionally for the experience. (The plumbing was also not prepared for the group.) I liked parts of this novel and didn't care for other parts. This uncertainty in my reaction is perhaps reflected in the novel itself.

Part of my hesitation in rating it is I didn't like any of the characters (except, perhaps, Nat and her obsession with K-pop) and couldn't relate to their experiences at all. All the awkward love stories between these people were simply uncomfortable. They are not truly fully realized characters but more a representation of different types of people. I would be enjoying certain parts of the novel and then something would happen or be said that sent it plummeting. Additionally, having never actually experienced the lock down, a time of even more work, it is unrelatable. I'll look forward to Shteyngart's next novel.

Disclosure: My review copy was courtesy of Random House.

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John Updike's six rules for reviewing:

1. Try to understand what the author wished to do, and do not blame him for not achieving what he did not attempt.

2. Give him enough direct quotation--at least one extended passage--of the book's prose so the review's reader can form his own impression, can get his own taste.

3. Confirm your description of the book with quotation from the book, if only phrase-long, rather than proceeding by fuzzy precis.

4. Go easy on plot summary, and do not give away the ending.

5. If the book is judged deficient, cite a successful example along the same lines, from the author's oeuvre or elsewhere. Try to understand the failure. Sure it's his and not yours?

To these concrete five might be added a vaguer sixth, having to do with maintaining a chemical purity in the reaction between product and appraiser.....Review the book, not the reputation.... Better to praise and share than blame and ban. The communion between reviewer and his public is based upon the presumption of certain possible joys in reading, and all our discriminations should curve toward that end.