Our Country Friends Is a Disquieting Vision of the Post-COVID America to Come
As novelists begin to turn their eyes to the pandemic and the destruction it has wrought, Gary Shteyngart’s latest stands out. He depicts a vision of America that is deeply unsettling: a collapse that is merely more of the same.
Gary Shteyngart’s Our Country Friends is one of the first major works of pandemic fiction by an American writer. (Leonardo Cendamo / Getty Images)
“The American writer in the middle of the 20th century,” wrote Philip Roth, “has his hands full in trying to understand, and then describe, and then make credible much of the American reality. It stupefies, it sickens, it infuriates, and finally it is even a kind of embarrassment to one’s own meager imagination. The actuality is continually outdoing our talents, and the culture tosses up figures almost daily that are the envy of any novelist.”
Sixty years later, American writers face a similar problem. Factual descriptions of recent life in the United States sound unbelievable: a reality-show host presides over a pandemic that leads to mass graves in New York and food lines around the country; educated liberals convince themselves that the government is secretly controlled by the Kremlin, while conservative crowds await the resurrection of a former president’s son who is supposed to take down the cabal of satanic pedophiles that run the world; JPEGs of cartoon apes sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars. How does a writer represent a reality that seems so unreal?
In a Plague Year
This is a question that hangs over Gary Shteyngart’s new novel, Our Country Friends, one of the first major works of pandemic fiction by an American writer. Our Country Friends begins in March 2020. Sasha Senderovsky, a Russian American writer of comic novels much like Shteyngart’s own, quarantines at his country house in upstate New York along with his wife and adopted daughter. They are soon joined by guests who Senderovsky has invited to shelter with them on the Hudson: three friends from his youth, a former student who has become a buzzed-about essayist, and a celebrity referred to as the Actor, with whom Senderovksy is trying to write a pilot. Over the next six months, the characters eat, drink, argue, have sex, fall in and out of love, uncover various secrets, and worry about the locals who fly thin blue line flags and resent their new richer, more diverse neighbors.
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