Our Country Friends

Gary Shteyngart

• Publisher: Allen & Unwin
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN:
  9781838956899
• eBook ISBN:
  9781838956882
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

***New York Times bestseller, shortlisted for 2022 Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction!***

'It's a true pleasure to sink into Shteyngart's expansive, benevolent storytelling' Sunday Times

'A masterpiece . . . There cannot be a more relevant novel for our moment, certainly not one with such beauty of description, depth of feeling, and, as always, humour.'-Andrew Sean Greer, Pulitzer Prize-winning author ofLess

It's March 2020 and a calamity is unfolding. A group of friends and friends-of-friends gathers in a country house to wait out the pandemic. Over the next six months, new friendships and romances will take hold, while old betrayals will emerge, forcing each character to reevaluate whom they love and what matters most. The unlikely cast of characters includes a Russian-born novelist; his Russian-born psychiatrist wife; their precocious child obsessed with K-pop; a struggling Indian American writer; a wildly successful Korean American app developer; a global dandy with three passports; a Southern flamethrower of an essayist; and a movie star, the Actor, whose arrival upsets the equilibrium of this chosen family. Both elegiac and very, very funny, Our Country Friends is the most ambitious book yet by the author of the beloved bestseller Super Sad True Love Story.

ACT FOUR

The Death of Alexander Borisovich

1

RAZGAR LETA. SENDEROVSKY’S two favorite Russian words. The height of summer. Or, to be literal, “the summer’s burn.” A perfect crop circle had been torched into the landowner’s bald spot—he loved the sun so much he did not see why one needed to be “protected” from it—and Masha tended to it daily like a farmhand with a truculent animal. “Nu, vot,” she would say (“Well, now you’ve done it”), rubbing a combination of creams into his red scalp and sighing contentedly.

Nat looked at this newfound public intimacy between her parents with her usual anxious eyes. It wasn’t just them. After the Actor had left, everyone behaved differently, more kindly, less self-consciously, as if this was just any other summer but with blue surgical masks and spent bottles of hand sanitizer littering the side of the road. But without the Actor, the uniqueness was gone, the initial feeling that her parents weren’t really her parents, that she had been granted the permission to choose her own destiny, that this Jin-level famous personage had called her “lovely” and that maybe she was. While her ties to Karen-emo (and Uncle Vinod) remained, she was now unmistakenly also part of that small unit of Levin-Senderovskys that blundered through the world with their strange diets and reminiscences. She loved them, too, even when what passed for their love felt like a tether around the sun-bronzed stalk of her neck. She felt it her duty to make them happier even if some of her own happiness was lost in the exchange.

AS THE MERCURY reached for the tip of the thermometer, the nation celebrated its own birthday with an unrelenting sense of shock. The corpses were stacking up in other parts of the country. The refrigerated trucks were heading south and west. It was becoming apparent that the country’s president might never willingly surrender his power, and Karen’s assistant began proceedings for her to regain her Korean citizenship.

Stranded social novelists up and down the river dutifully photographed hard-to-identify flowers and took notes on the appearance of gathering storm fronts and menacing thunderheads. More than one could be found looking up at a slumbering owl or a sunburned meadow beseeching their higher power to help me make something out of all this stillness.

Meanwhile, the landowner’s estate buzzed with animal and human-animal activity. Steve the Groundhog had decorated his poolside-adjacent hole with lilacs, or so it looked to Nat (actually Uncle Vinod had decorated the lair himself and convinced the child that it was the marmot’s doing). Traveling birds—warblers?—would invade a tree, ravish it with their chirping, and then abandon it just as quickly and for no discernible reason, like bored American tourists at an ancient historical site. Karen and Vinod would sneak into Ed’s outdoor shower and have monumental sex, their four hands pressed against the seashell-studded walls as they worked each other to completion, even as Vinod occasionally put a hand to his mouth to make sure that he wasn’t intubated, that all this was really happening. He had transferred his luggage to Karen’s bungalow and unpacked all but some emergency underwear and the notarized papers at the bottom of one suitcase. He wouldn’t need them now. He was healthy and strong and in love. Karen was helping him prepare query letters to agents. He could at last abandon the character he had written for his father, “the lonely man, his aloneness bordering on the holy.”

With the Actor gone, it was as if a factory owner had left and the workers strolled dazed past the silenced conveyor belts. How should they behave among one another? Was all this theirs now? What would they do without the boldface name above the front gates? Strangely enough, the seven remaining colonists became closer. They all had their faults and their past tussles (recall Dee’s last outburst at the dinner table), but they all liked one another at heart, were by now as familiarized with each other’s company as siblings or polar explorers. Now they had lunches as well as dinners together, gathering in the kitchen en masse at 12:30 P.M. promptly to throw Masha’s egg salad onto peasant bread. And at 3:00 P.M. during weekdays, when Nat was on a call with her speech therapists, those forty or older ran to the pool for a quick skinny-dip, mixing their happy nudity with the pungency of Karen’s marijuana.

And then there was Dee.

When a lover stalks off, we miss the heat of his touch first, the skin-to-skin contact babies crave and that Nat had never known. (A surviving photo from her orphanage shows her at the beginning of life, dark lashed, squirmy, with many tender folds to her wrists, but no one to clean them regularly or hold her through a night’s cry.) And so Dee felt her abandonment on a dermal level. She tried to readjust, but every single square inch of Senderovian territory that she passed throughout the day called for a handsome man’s touch, called for that skin to skin. And I never even wanted to love him! she would say to herself. But the skin told another story, and when the sun began to set she would touch the nape of her own neck, just to know that touch was still possible. In the future, she thought, the Karen Chos of the world will develop golems instantly conjured from roving atoms who will embrace us and hold us through the night only to dissolve by daybreak, and then there will be no need for any of this cruelty. (Or for humanity, really.) But until then? Until then, she was in pain.

Given that the colony now reminded her of the one failed relationship she had had in the last decade, given the traumatic footage of them having sex down the road, which had destroyed her privacy (her most private parts had been covered by his body in the video, but that didn’t really help), her original impulse was to flee. But where would she go? She swore she would never look at his social media, but she did anyway, and it was clear that his handlers were positioning him as having rediscovered the ills of racism (without mentioning her, of course), and now he was throwing out one obvious initiative after the next, acting camps for Black children on a fifty-acre retreat in Central California (the anti-Senderovsky-bungalow-colony), which also introduced the participants to the complete farming experience (they were now selling produce at the original farmers’ market in Los Angeles) and even a socially distanced re-creation of Gone with the Wind, but with the races of the characters reversed. (This would soon enough lead to a new series of problems for the Actor and his team.) She saw his doe-eyed appeals to donors and sponsors and couldn’t help but think that the extra-winsome sadness he brought to these performances was not just his newfound understanding of structural racism but the fact that he still loved her and missed her.

Well, to hell with that! Her own situation was slowly improving. A group of earnest intellectual men in button-down shirts had written a letter on her behalf in a prominent magazine. The word “censorship” had been used. There were claims that she would be fired from an upcoming teaching appointment, claims which weren’t true. At first, Dee considered writing an angry response, telling the world she did not need their help, that once again they were misunderstanding her, these rich, educated-man types. But in the end she welcomed the intervention, indeed any point of view affirming that she was not a bigoted monster. So now armed with the letter, she could go back to the city to get into new and better fights with the usual combatants, to surprise her accusers and redefine the terms of her banishment. She was about ready to get into her nine-thousand-dollar vehicle and shove off, but someone else kept her glued to the wide-plank floor of the Writer’s Cottage (to whence she had been repatriated from the main house after the rightful owners had reclaimed possession). The reader is correct in assuming the identity of this individual.

She had never stopped going for walks with Ed, not during her three weeks of romancing with the Actor and not after. Remarkably, her affair with the thespian rarely came up as a subject of conversation between them and instead they talked about all the stupid things young (not that Ed was especially young) urban people of the moment talked about, the vagaries of social media, the flavorful mee krops and tom kha gais they had last slurped down in February, their path through the brambles of high society, along with gossip about other people being brought down, forced to recalibrate, rephrase, and recant.

After the dinner with the Actor and Vinod’s hurtful words about her being on the side of her people, Ed began to talk about the members of his own family and their manifold awfulness. If you searched for them online in Korean, you would discover their role in the destruction of labor unions and the many monopolies they wielded since the times of the Japanese occupation. You would learn about scalding cups of tea thrown at subordinates and even the flogging of an elderly chauffeur, a decorated military man, after he had fragranced a company limousine with the wrong type of air freshener. Because rich people were excused from the suffering of the world, they had to invent their own more elaborate and personalized forms of suffering and then to inflict baroque versions of that stunted interiority onto others. And that was just the public stuff. There were arranged marriages to violent schizophrenics, corrupt divorce proceedings, stolen children, suicidal mothers, shamed children shunted off to Rhode Island and London art schools. No one, but no one, was happy, just shuffling through cosmetic surgery clinics and watch boutiques in a Valium haze.

“And yet,” Ed said, “how can I claim to be entirely different from my relatives? How can I claim to be divorced from all those years of feudalism? I’m supposed to throw off the yoke of history all by myself? That’s a nonsense American idea, that one can just”—a very loud snap of his fingers—“change. My skin is too thick to be shed. I can choose not to abuse a chauffeur, but I can’t alter the manner of my gait as I tipsily saunter to the waiting car. My oppressiveness is priced in.”

“I’d rather be considered bad,” Dee said, “than to actually be false. Everything I write is a time stamp in history. Everything, no matter how horrible and self-indicting, is, I swear to God, honest. Can I be blamed that the portrait which emerges does not fit the requirements of the moment?”

This was, she had to admit, the button-down letter-writing men’s prescription for art as well—that it had to be reflective, not revolutionary. The artist, according to them and in line with their experiences at New Haven, stood in the vicinity of history processing its raw nature through her own blemished experiences and typing the resulting observations into the Notes application of her phone. That was the job description. But what if this particular job had suddenly become irrelevant? And what if irrelevancy, not cultural tone deafness, was the real specter that haunted the bungalow colony, haunted her and Senderovsky and the Actor as well? The hour for chronicling the situation had passed; it was time to seize the telegraph station and detain the provisional government. Maybe that was what drew Dee to Ed in the first place: he had placed himself outside the game. He did not publicly render an opinion on anything, and no power could hold him accountable for his action or his speech. If society collapsed, he would put on an ascot and waltz over to the nearest still-functional one. (He had Canadian citizenship.) He did not even own a social media account.

A pickup truck passed and Ed waved to its sole occupant who dutifully waved back within the sunlit dome of his vehicle. Since the Actor had left the colony, there were no incidents with homicidal trucks (cause and effect?), but Ed now took it upon himself to wave to every car rumbling down Senderovsky’s road. He had even acquired something of a reputation among the locals as the Waver of V—— Road. To not wave back at him had become a local faux pas, no matter the color of the flag swinging off one’s porch. Dee thought she understood some of the reasoning for his fake cheer. Senderovsky once accounted for his own self-abusive Russian Jewish humor as a demographic imperative, the need to make fun of himself before the dominant group (Christian Slavs) could get a chance to do so, to self-slap before being punched down. There was something of that in Ed’s happy wave, too, along with an overblown “model minority” smile that disappeared with the sound of the car’s passing swoosh or became genuine when he turned and looked into Dee’s face. This made her happy. There was a lot going on with Ed, but only she got to see the whole of it. The daily Ed walks gave her purpose and pleasure. They saved her from her fruitless encounters with social media, which meant they also saved her from herself.

THERE WAS A restaurant known for its hand sanitizer in a ch...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dramatis Personae
• Act One The Colony
• Act Two Entanglements
• Act Three Out Like a Lamb
• Act Four The Death of Alexander Borisovich
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• About the Type