Our Country Friends

by Gary Shteyngart

Contemporary

Literary Fiction

Satire

368 Pages

"I picked up Our Country Friends expecting a pandemic novel and got something much richer — a book about longing and belonging that made me laugh on one page and tear up on the next. Shteyngart at his very best."

Synopsis

It is March 2020, and a group of friends and friends-of-friends has retreated to a country house in upstate New York to wait out a calamity unfolding beyond their windows. Over the next six months, the enforced proximity of isolation will do what enforced proximity always does — surface old betrayals, ignite new romances, and force each person to reckon with whom they love and what they are actually living for.

The cast is deliberately unlikely: a Russian-born novelist and his psychiatrist wife; their K-pop-obsessed child; a struggling Indian American writer; a wildly successful Korean American app developer; a cosmopolitan dandy with three passports; a young essayist from the Carolinas with a talent for provocation; and, arriving to upend the equilibrium of this chosen family, a movie star known only as The Actor. Eight people, one house, six months, and more than enough history and desire to go around.

Both elegiac and very funny, Our Country Friends is Gary Shteyngart's most emotionally expansive novel — a Chekhovian chamber piece about love, friendship, and the particular texture of a moment in history that changed everything, written by someone who lived through it with his eyes wide open.

Our Take

The pandemic novel was always going to be a difficult form to get right — too soon risks shallowness, too distant risks irrelevance — but Shteyngart threads it with remarkable assurance. Our Country Friends is neither a document nor a satire but something more generous: a novel that uses the specific conditions of 2020 to ask perennial questions about how we choose our people, what we owe them, and what happens when proximity strips away the comfortable fictions that hold relationships together.

The Chekhov comparison invited by the novel itself is earned rather than presumptuous. Shteyngart has always been a writer of comic gifts, but here the comedy is in service of something warmer and more vulnerable than his earlier work. The ensemble is beautifully managed — each character distinct, each given their moment of grace and failure — and the arrival of The Actor in the novel's second half genuinely destabilizes things in ways that feel true rather than contrived.

Readers who loved Hanya Yanagihara's A Little Life for its unflinching portrait of a chosen family under pressure, or Amor Towles's A Gentleman in Moscow for its warmth and wit in confined quarters, will find Our Country Friends a deeply satisfying companion. The best novel yet from one of American fiction's most distinctive voices.