Our Country Friends

1

The House on the Hill was in a tizzy.

Workmen s trucks streamed up the long gravel driveway. Two sets of plumbers from both sides of the river had been summoned to dewinterize the five bungalows behind the main house, and they did not care for one another. A broken set of windows in one bungalow had to be replaced posthaste, and a family of field mice had chewed through the electrical cable powering another. The handyman, who did not live on the property, was so overwhelmed by the state of affairs, he retreated to the extensive covered porch to eat a cheese sandwich in long deliberative bites. The mistress of the house, Masha, had lowered the shades in her first-floor office to escape the cacophony of modern tools and loud country cursing. At times, she would peek out to note the surfaces that would have to be wiped down after the workmen left. Natasha (who liked to go by Nat), her eight-year-old daughter, was upstairs, illuminated by a screen in the darkness of her room, in a lonely public world of her own.

The only happy member of the household was Alexander Borisovich Senderovsky, known as Sasha to his friends. Happy, we should say, with an asterisk. He was agitated as well as excited. A windstorm had brought down the heavy branches of two dead trees flanking the driveway, scattering the vast front lawn with their dead white rot. Senderovsky liked to expound at length upon the entropic nature of his estate, the way all manner of growth was allowed to go its own way, sumacs elbowing out more well-heeled plants, ivy poisoning the perimeter, groundhogs bringing destruction upon the gardens. But the scattering of dead tree limbs made the House on the Hill look apocalyptic, the very thing Senderovsky s guests were coming up to escape. The handyman claimed a bad back and was not handy enough to remove all the tree limbs on his own, and the so-called tree guy had gone missing. Senderovsky, in his athletic pants and wildly colored dressing gown, had

Gary Shteyngart was born in Leningrad in 1972 and came to the United States seven years later. His debut novel, The Russian Debutante’s Handbook, won the Stephen Crane Award for First Fiction and the National Jewish Book Award for Fiction. His second novel, Absurdistan, was named one of the 10 Best Books of the Year by The New York Times Book Review. His novel Super Sad True Love Story won the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize and became one of the most iconic novels of the decade. His memoir, Little Failure, was a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist and a New York Times bestseller. His most recent novel is Lake Success. His books regularly appear on best-of lists around the world and have been published in thirty countries.

The novel s strengths abound. It upends clichés, pieties and commonplaces while also noticing salient details of the lockdown. The New York Times Book Review

Our Country Friends has all [Shteyngart s] usual humor and absurdity, but it s deepened by a new empathy. Los Angeles Times

Shteyngart knows how to make you belly laugh, and he s in his element here, poking fun at the claustrophobia of privilege. He perfectly captures the nature of adult friendships and the petty jealousies, disappointments, and dependencies that can define them. Vulture

In the backdrop of the pandemic, Gary Shteyngart gathers his memorable characters in a shelter, where they cook, seduce, and reconsider life s meaning. . . . Like The Decameron, Shteyngart s Our Country Friends reminds us that even in darkness, light promises to return if we reach for love and art. Min Jin Lee, author of Pachinko, finalist for the National Book Award 

Gary Shteyngart is a national treasure. He has always written with great humor and heart, but never more so than here. Be careful reading this book in public; it is as likely to make you laugh out loud as cry. Jonathan Safran Foer, author of Here I Am

I cannot say enough how much I loved Our Country Friends. It s a tragicomic tour de force about so many things sex, infatuation, the pandemic, kimchi, racism, immigration, adoption, stalking, Russian writers, K-pop, Japanese reality TV, writing but most of all, it s about how we create, sever, and mend lifelong bonds of friendship, how we wound and heal those we love most. It s the rare book that, when you turn to the last page, leaves you grateful to the author for creating this world and allowing you in for a time, but also a little sad, filled with regret at having to leave it. Angie Kim, author of Miracle Creek

Shteyngart s most moving novel, Chekhov and Boccaccio reimagined in America in the year of the pandemic, is a