L ifestyle /C ulture
Books: Palatable Pandemic, Familiar Face Returns
“Our Country Friends”
Makes Pandemic
Palatable SASHA ROGELBERG | JE STAFF
“Our Country Friends”
Gary Shteyngart
Penguin Random House
FOR GARY SHTEYNGART,
who wrote about the painful
adult consequences of his
botched circumcision in the
Oct. 4 issue of The New Yorker,
no issue seems to be off-the-
table when it comes to writing
topics. Shteyngart’s new novel “Our
Country Friends,” published on
Nov. 2, is no exception, taking
the hairy milieu of 2020 — the
pandemic, the June Black Lives
Matter protests and cancel
culture, whose proximity
to current times may make
readers squirm — and turning
it into a refreshing, hopeful, yet
crushing, narrative.

Sasha Senderovsky, an aloof
and past-prime professor and
writer, is the landowner of a
“bungalow colony,” in upstate
New York, his dilapidated
18 NOVEMBER 11, 2021
property dotted with felled
branches after early-spring
storms. At the onset of the
pandemic, he’s joined by a
flock of hand-picked guests,
many of whom Senderovsky
has known since high school:
the CEO of a popular dating
app site; an adjunct professor-
turned-short-order cook with
a chunk of lung missing thanks
to a run-in with lung cancer; a
former student who catches the
eye of many of the “colonists”;
a friendly rival whose world-
liness and culinary aptitude
are both charming and
overrated; the unnamed Actor
who is haughty and laughably
self-serious. While Senderovsky tries
to escape with his guests, his
anxiety continues to bubble
as he manages financial woes,
a house in disrepair and a
growing paranoia of white
supremacists learning of his
Soviet Jewish identity, as well
as the Korean, Gujarati and
Turkish identities of his guests.

By the wayside falls his wife
Masha, a psychiatrist whose
patients include geriatric
COVID-denying, Soviet Jewish
conspiracists and, not formally,
hers and Senderovsky’s 8-year-
old Nat, née Natasha, who is
herself grappling with who she
is during the pandemic, with
only her love of Korean boy
band BTS seeming to remain
static. Sheyngart projects his own
Ashkenazi sensibilities onto
Senderovksy — both Sheyngart
and his protagonist hail from
Leningrad, both born in 1972.

But while Shteyngart has
enough pop culture savviness
to pump the book chock-full
of allusions, Senderovsky fails
to connect with his fellow
bungalow colonists with his
head-scratching references to
JEWISH EXPONENT
Russian literature.

Within the bungalow
colony’s own isolated habitat,
Senderovsky is his own island.

“Our Country Friends” is
a nod to the collective disori-
entation felt by Americans
at the start of that spring.

Masha policed guests about
maintaining distancing,
masking and militantly
wearing blue latex gloves.

Guests sat coldly outside for
dinners, chairs dragged the
appropriate distance from
one another.

Shteyngart likes to whisper
at his readers through cracks
in the fourth wall, drawing our
attention to an em-dash and
why he’s decided to use it. He
knows his writing hits a little
too close to home and uses it as
an excuse to usher in generous
familiarity and intimacy
with us.

And it’s difficult to resist
Shteyngart’s romantic, but
realistic, portrayal of last year,
especially when scenes from
an isolated and bucolic upstate
New York are replicated in
Philadelphia and across the
country. Forests of “Black Lives
Matter” and “Hate Has No
Home Here” signs line up
on one side of the streets in
Senderovsky’s sprawling
neighborhood, with “All Lives
Matter” signs and black-
and-white-and-blue-striped American flags lining the
other. Mysterious black vans
with xenophobic iconog-
raphy disappear and reappear,
their presence threatening
the delicate homeostasis the
colonists have worked hard to
maintain. A trip to the countryside
to escape the virus was still
not immune to its deep social
impacts. Nightly elaborate
Mediterranean feasts and
copious imbibing gave way to a
host of salacious affairs, secrets,
nightmares and sickness.

Nat worries that she is a
member of “Generation L” —
the “L” is for “last” — as the
climate crisis comes to a head,
but the guests seem to sober
as they realize they may all
be of this generation, regard-
less of the 40-plus-year age gap
among them.

Even the cultural elite must
reckon with their decision to
escape up the Hudson River
while those in the city continue
to die. They have guilt for
leaving, guilt for living.

Shteyngart is ambitious in
his novel. He takes such a distal
locale and group of people and
makes them feel so close to the
reader. But even more impres-
sive is Shteyngart’s ability to
tackle a national conversation
that not only began in the
not-so-distant-past, but that is
also ongoing, and to do so with
wit, tenderness and honesty.

After 19 months of shrug-
ging off COVID-related media,
dismissing it as trite, overdone
or just plain painful to see,
readers can now hopefully find
solace in confronting the totally
bizarre, still not-quite-normal,
experience of enduring a global
pandemic, if only in the pages
of “Our Country Friends.”
srogelberg@jewishexponent.com; 215-832-0741
Gabriel Allon Does
Gabriel Allon-like
Things ANDY GOTLIEB | JE MANAGING EDITOR
“The Cellist”
Daniel Silva
HarperCollins Israeli intelligence officer/art
restorer Gabriel Allon is back
—and anyone who’s ever read
one of Daniel Silva’s books
knows what that means.

Bad guys (often Arabs
and, increasingly, Russians).

Duplicity. Action sequences.

See Books, Page 20
JEWISHEXPONENT.COM Courtesy of Penguin Random House
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