Our Country Friends

Our Country Friends is Gary Shteyngart's 2021 sixth novel, the structural pandemic-era literary commercial work that documented the broader American 2020 pandemic experience from inside the New York intellectual class that the broader Shteyngart catalog has been working with since The Russian Debutante's Handbook (2002). The structural premise is the eight friends who quarantine together at the Hudson Valley country estate of Sasha Senderovsky (a Russian-American novelist whose biographical arc parallels Shteyngart's own) across the first approximately six months of the COVID-19 pandemic. The ensemble includes Sasha's psychiatrist wife Masha, their preteen daughter Nat, the broader friend group (the publishing editor Karen Cho, the screenwriter Vinod Mehta, the Korean-American playwright Ed Kim, the Argentine-Greek essayist Dee Cameron, and the visiting actor whom Sasha calls only 'the Actor' across the entire arc of the novel), and the operational pandemic isolation that the broader Hudson Valley setting provides.

Shteyngart's structural method is the patient ensemble construction across the eight protagonists and the approximately six-month timeline, with the Senderovsky-family chapters carrying the structural emotional weight and the broader friend-group ensemble chapters providing the structural comic-and-literary counterpoint. The novel reads in the patient Shteyngart comic-literary register that distinguishes the work from the broader contemporary American pandemic-era literary fiction tradition (Tom Lake, The Anomaly, Sea of Tranquility). The Sasha-and-the-Actor subplot across the entire novel carries the structural literary-celebrity-and-collapse arc that the broader pandemic-era Hudson Valley setting requires. The Anton Chekhov Uncle Vanya structural-allusion that runs across the entire novel (the cast of eight Chekhovian-archetypal characters, the country-estate setting, the late-summer-into-fall arc, the broader literary-historical allusion structure) gives the novel its structural literary-historical scaffolding.

Recommended for literary commercial readers, as the right Shteyngart entry point for readers coming to his catalog through the pandemic-era work, and for fans of Tom Lake, the Sebastian Junger-or-Chad-Harbach contemporary American literary commercial tradition, and the broader pandemic-era literary fiction. Compare to Lake Success (Shteyngart, 2018), Anxious People (Fredrik Backman), and contemporary American literary commercial fiction. The Arthur Morey audiobook is the definitive audio production. Four solid stars.