Gary Shteyngart's "Our Country Friends" presents an ambitious narrative set against the backdrop of a pandemic lockdown, promising a blend of love, friendship, and betrayal. However, the execution falls short, leaving readers with a meandering and ultimately unsatisfying story.

The novel follows a group of eight friends who gather at a country estate to wait out the pandemic, exploring their relationships, aspirations, and inner struggles. Yet, despite the promise of Chekhovian undertones, the story fails to engage fully. One of the most glaring issues is the lack of cohesion in the plot. While there are moments of intrigue and introspection, they are often overshadowed by an abundance of digressions and tangents that detract from the overall narrative momentum. The pacing feels sluggish, and the storyline loses focus, leaving you wondering where the plot is headed. Is that the point?

Gary Shteyngart is one of those writers whose every work is hailed as a masterpiece even before it appears, so perhaps there's no developmental editor hired to take him to task, and he, like every writer, needs one.

Thank you to the publishers and NetGalley for the opportunity to review a temporary digital ARC in exchange for an unbiased review.

This was a fun read. I didn’t tackle it until well after the pandemic but I still could appreciate the situations the characters found themselves in. I will look for more from Gary Shteyngart. I thank NetGalley and the publisher for the opportunity to read this ARC.

This was the book I needed to read at the heart of the pandemic, when I couldn't handle reading about anyone going about their pre-pandemic daily lives.

Although I didn't love this book (my first read by Gary Shteyngart), I enjoyed it enough that I am interested in reading more by this author. I think it was 3.5, but I rounded up.

The book uses the structure/approach of a Russian novel and presents a character list to introduce us to the key players. At the beginning of the pandemic, "the Landowner" invites a group of friends, a former student, and "the Actor" to join him and his family at their bungalow cottages. During the course of the book, we learn about the different characters and their relationships form or are changed through their interactions (and drama that arises or is revealed) as they shelter in place. Overall, there were a lot of interesting themes considered (family, class), but somehow it just didn't come together for me. I don't know how to explain it, some parts felt like they dragged on without fully considering the characters and instead using them as a device to push things forward.

Thanks to the author, Random House, and NetGalley for the opportunity to read an advance copy in exchange for an honest review.

I thought I wasn't ready for a pandemic novel, but Shteyngart perfectly captures the unease and desperation of those early days. This is both tender and hilarious. Highly recommend!

Shteyngart does it again. Reading this is not like reliving the pandemic- it's like retreating to an idiosyncratic artists' residents filled with out-of-touch, hilarious intellectuals who will give you a new perspective on elitist culture and the socio-economic disparities of pandemic suffering. These characters are your worst, most flawed, most entertaining friends, and there's no one better to with whom to watch the world fall apart.

I suppose this is my first pandemic themed read and as such it stands out pretty well on its own, there is just the right amount of realism and drama, and the signature quirkiness of the author, it's not a book for everyone but I would wager Shteyngart's true fans won't be disappointed. I enjoyed aspects of the book and certain others like the slightly confusing dreamscapes or random musical/stage pieces less so.

2.5 Stars. When I first started this book, I was thinking this might be like the movie The Big Chill, then even laughed when one character mentioned The Big Chill in the book. 7 friends get together at the start of the pandemic to quarantine and be away from the city. That is where similarities to The Big Chill ends. Lot of meandering where nothing really happens until about 90% through. Lots of cheating, eating, pot and alcohol round out this story. It was just ok.

Gary Shteyngart is a funny guy. In Our Country Friends, he tells a story in which Sasha, a former literary luminary, up to his eyeballs in debt, invites five friends to join him and his little family at their country estate to weather the pandemic. The results are not at all what he anticipated.

My thanks go to Net Galley and Random House for the invitation to read and review. This book is available now.

Shteyngart does us the favor of listing the cast of characters (“Dramatis Personae,”) at the book’s opening, and I relied on it heavily. Because all of the characters are introduced at the outset, I took a ridiculously long time getting them straight, but it was worth it. The group’s dynamic would be fairly stable but for the introduction of “The Actor,” someone he knew back in the day but who is an A-lister now. But frankly, some, if not all, of the other guests would probably not have come but for the mention of The Famous One as a possible addition. When he comes, the women practically swoon in his presence, and then nothing is the same for the rest of the story.

The first third of the book seems relatively formless, but I suspect the author (should I say, “The Author?”) is warming us up, letting us get to know the characters before a lot of other action takes place. The promotional blurb tells us that this story encompasses six months and four romances, and that it’s about love, friendship, and betrayal, and that sums it up.

Generally speaking, I don’t enjoy novels about rich people, but because Shteyngart is setting them up for satirical misery and angst, I dive in, and I emerge shortly afterward, laughing. This sly humor is unmissable.
Because nearly all of the characters are over forty, I highly recommend this story to readers of a literary bent—if you know Chekhov, it’s even funnier—who are forty or over.

Gary Shteyngart’s latest novel, “Our Country Friends,” is perhaps one of the first “pandemic novels” to emerge. It’s greatly preferable to any “pandemic TV” that first assaulted us (except for “Superstore”) and certainly most “pandemic movies.” There’s nothing worse after sitting in Zoom meetings all day than watching people have Zoom meetings on TV at night. Shteyngart reimagines the uncertainty of those early days, and also adds context and clarity, even as we remain in the midst of pandemic life. A Russian novelist by the name of Sasha Senderovsky has invited his friends to join him and his wife and child in the country to wait out the pandemic in relative safety. The grounds hold small bungalows where the friends can work and sleep, and they meet in the evening on the large porch of the main house, separated and sanitized, at least in the beginning. The guests are two of Senderovsky’s friends from high school, Karen Cho, the creator of a popular app called Tröö Emotions, and Vinod Mehta, a struggling writer. Ed Kim, also an old friend, is someone Senderovsky is desperate to impress, and Dee is a young protégé who has recently published a successful book of essays. Finally, there’s a famous actor who’s meant to star in an adaptation of Senderovsky’s last book. He is mainly referred to as “the Actor,” leaving the reader the pleasure of casting the leading man of their choice. Shteyngart portrays the characters’ insecurities with his hallmark wit, sending them to ridiculous lengths to appear more wealthy or admired than they actually are. After Vinod admits to having seen the actor in an “avant-garde version of ‘The Cherry Orchard,’” he replies, “When I was much younger. I played the actual orchard, if I remember correctly. Or the personification of it.” and later, “I’m just a vessel. Chekhov was the genius?”

The character of Senderovsky is unabashedly similar to Gary Shteyngart himself, who was featured in the real estate section of the New York Times a few years ago in his own country villa (although with only one guest cottage). In that article, he boasts that he can write much more quickly than in New York, perhaps one of the reasons his pandemic novel is one of the first to emerge. However, “Our Country Friends” feels anything but rushed. It has the leisurely quality of a, yes, Russian novel with a wide cast of characters both rich and poor, youthful and desired, aging and desiring. Shteyngart captures the odd way time moved during the early days of the pandemic, how, despite our isolation, we were bound by fear and confusion. Everyone was obsessed with the same shows on Netflix, everyone looked askance at what other people considered safe practices. While this book couldn’t be any more relevant today, it seems very likely that it might come to represent this moment in history—although very much through the perspective of privileged people who can afford to move away from their homes and jobs for months.

Senderovsky and his friends may be moderately safe in “the familiar environment of the covered porch, the bourgeoisie pleasure dome of their elaborate meals,” but they live in uneasy distance with some of the locals who frighten them with displays of dominance, whether by aggressive driving or white power slogans. Although the neighbors with their pickup trucks and blue flags and the liberals at Senderovsky’s retreat are indicative of the greater reckoning America continues to have, this cast of characters forges on even as the proverbial cherry orchard is chopped down around them. As in any good Chekovian story, a metaphorical gun has been introduced in the first act, and it must go off in the second. What might have begun as silly and satirical veers toward heartfelt and meaningful as the COVID-19 virus makes its way into their secluded and pampered lives. (Kelly Roark)

“Our Country Friends”
By Gary Shteyngart
Random House, 336 pages

Super Sad True Love Story was like a hilarious revelation to me when I read it. This is a very different book. It's not so much laugh out loud funny as wry tongue-in-cheek humor. But it also felt very genuine. I'm not sure I was really ready to read a pandemic novel, but if I had to read one this year, I'm not sad it was this meditation on friendship and love (ish?). I do think I'm over middle aged white man narratives with a diverse cast that feel a good half the novel like caricatures. And I nearly threw the book down at a third of the way through. But by the end I was flying through the pages, needing to know what happened next to our country friends. Four stars, and I can see why it made it into the Tournament of Books.

Our Country Friends tells the story of a group of friends who decide to quarantine together in Upstate New York at the beginning of the COVID-19 Pandemic. Shteyngart shines when he is writing in an absurdist way but his prose weakens when he turns to writing basic contemporary fiction, (i.e. Lake Success) and that seems to be more or less the direction he's decided to go, which is unfortunate. Nothing here reminds you of the quality of writing in Super Sad True Love Story. I had hoped that someone with his talents could make a pandemic novel less headache inducing, but that doesn't seem to be the case. I'm sure plenty will love this novel but I think I'm ready to see pandemic novels go the way of Trump Books.

In the plus column, Shteyngart seems made an effort to explore class in America in an organic way and the cast of characters is more diverse than you would commonly see in a novel of this type. I ultimately found the characters frustrating, and not in a compelling way. This was a miss for me.

You got to love a pod. We all found ways to cope at the height of the pandemic; here we are invited to witness first hand how a selection of characters coped with the health crisis. It’s charming, real and very funny. It is full of insight in humans and hope the fail or begin to adapt to a real global
Health( crisis. I love the cross section we are given . The ebb and flow as rumor becomes reality and money isn’t always the answer. A treat.

I am personally deeply obsessed with Covid lit.
Our Country Friends it’s like Summer House the tv show but with wealthy, mostly academic busybodies. I loved it. I found the first part of the novel easy to get into and struggled a bit halfway through but Shteyngart’s wit and keen character building abilities kept me going.

I feel like this book needs a follow up! Post-Covid. Where are they now?

Thanks again for this copy, Net Galley.

Such a deep read. The author explored some real and raw emotions and it made connecting to the characters very effortless. The writing was incredible. Would definitely recommend!

While I appreciated parts of this story and the richly drawn characters and setting, it fell short of the hype for me. Instead of propelling the story towards a climax the narrative seemed to dissolve. I recognize some of this may have been an intention byproduct of a “pandemic novel” …there hasn’t been a resolution yet in real life either.

I really loved these characters! Aa one of the first pandemic novels I've read, I was a bit wary going into this but I was more entertained than I thought I'd be which is a credit to the author. This is a slow burn, moving story that I'm so glad I read.

Thanks to Random House an dNetGalley for the copy to review.

I knew this book was set in the early days of the pandemic, but beyond that, I was expecting something a bit more light and fluffy. It has a few moments like that, but it was a lot more. The characters were well-developed and realistic, if a bit cliché at times; the plot itself was interesting, but I didn’t love the way it ended. I hadn’t read anything else by this writer before now, but I’ll definitely consider more in the future.

An ARC of this book was provided by the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review (playing catch-up again!).

I requested this book as it was on our shortlist to be assigned to reviewers for feature on BookBrowse. Sadly, it did not get picked up by a reviewer, but we did feature it in our Publishing This Week newsletter to about 35,000 and in our Publishing This Week and Publishing This Month sections on BookBrowse.

Personally, I enjoyed it so, for what it's worth, five stars from me!

It's March of 2020, and as the world is shutting down for what everyone believes will be two weeks, famous author Sasha Senderovsky has invited some of his closest friends and a few work colleagues to spend the quarantine with him and his psychiatrist wife Masha and young daughter Nat at their bungalow compound in rural upstate New York. Ed, Karen, Vinod, Dee and a famous actor (referred to only as "the Actor") accordingly arrive in turn toting their physical and metaphorical baggage to ride the crisis out in isolated safety, but as the virus situation gets more dire and the quarantine stretches on, tempers begin to flare, old animosities and secrets risk being exposed, and survival takes on a whole new meaning.

This book has generally gotten raves, so I'm definitely an outlier here, but it didn't fully work for me, I think mostly because of the difficulty of marrying the funny, at times almost farcical, elements of the story with the serious nature of the time depicted. I appreciated how the characters felt guilty about enjoying themselves in the country while so many less privileged people were suffering back in the city, and understand that mixing comedy with the underlying tragedy was a structural way for Shteyngart to portray this disconnect--but all the elements of this one just didn't come together for me.

Many thanks to NetGalley and Penguin Random House for providing me with an ARC of this title in return for my honest review.