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There’s no time like summer to get me excited about diving into a fantasy novel, bonus points if it’s a literal beach read because it’s like a vacation while already on vacation!  If you enjoy fantasy (or perhaps if you want to give it a try), join us for the next Virtual Book Club discussion on Friday, August 26 at 7:30pm CST.  For August, we’re reading From Blood and Ash #1 by Jennifer Armentrout and then we’ll travel to that world discuss it together.  If this sounds like fun, sign up here to get the link to join in! 

It doesn’t happen often that I struggle with how to describe a book or what I really think about it, but Our Country Friends by Gary Shteyngart made it happen.  I am not sure how this got on my holds list, but it did, and I’m still sort of on the fence, but I think I’ve learned some things, so I’m calling it good enough.  The book premise is really interesting – eight friends spend the first six months of the pandemic (yes THE pandemic, as it opens in the spring of 2020) together at a country house.  As writers do, this includes an interesting, complex group of characters, all with their own backstory, some of which is combined, because three of our group go way back to high school (just like your favorite book bloggers).  Even just two years after that very strange summer of 2020, it felt like an interesting read with a lot of potential, and it is.  Here’s the part of the marketing copy that perhaps should have given me (or maybe us) more pause – it “reads like a great Russian novel, or Chekhov on the Hudson.” If that sounds too serious for your preferred summer reading, well, it could be.  Near the end of my reading, I looked up the author online to learn more about him (sorry not sorry, perhaps Ashley will get to more), and he was described as an absurdist author, which is something else that could have helped me.  

Even books that aren’t favorites can help us learn more about ourselves as readers.  It’s really just all data to get to an improved chance of picking up the right book at the right time.  Perhaps great Russian novels have their time and place (which isn’t summer for me), but absurdist just isn’t my thing, and now I have a word to help me describe that.  I also really need characters to root for, otherwise a book feels like a slog.  There was one character I was rooting for in Our Country Friends – the child, and as much as I wanted good things for her, it wasn’t enough.  These adults are a mess.  Some of them are trying, others are not (that we can see), and I just cannot with all of it.  I did finish the book because I wanted to know how the story ended, mostly for the child, but I also wanted to see how this train wreck finally happened and what occurred after.  I did, and the “wreck” happened, differently than I anticipated, and it made me like some of the characters even less than I already did.  

If you’re looking for an interesting character study that doesn’t feel dissimilar to reality TV (but like the better old school kind a la MTV), then this might be a book for you.  If you want something heartwarming, think again before picking up Our Country Friends because that’s not the vibe here.  I’m giving this book two and a half stars, and rounding up to three.  The plot is interesting, the writing is great, but the characters are just meh.  I considered rounding down, but I genuinely think the author accomplished what he set out to do and executed it well, it’s just not my thing.  

What’s a book that isn’t for you, but helped you figure out how to better select books that are for you?

~Nikki

Gary Shteyngart is the author of six books. His 2014 memoir Little Failure was a National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist. The Russian Debutante’s Handbook was his debut novel, published in 2003, and the winner of the Stephen Crane Award for First Fiction and the National Jewish Book Award for Fiction. His award winning debut novel was followed by four more: 2006’s Absurdistan, 2010’s best selling Super Sad True Love Story, and 2018’s best selling Lake Success, and the focus of our review today, 2021’s Our Country Friends. His website says nothing additional than “his books appear on best-of lists around the world and have been published in 30 countries.”  I had to traverse to wikipedia to find out that Shteyngart lives in New York, has taught writing at Hunter College, and currently teaches writing at Columbia University. The most important note for our purposes here is that in the “Personal Life” section of wikipedia it states thus: “Shteyngart is married to Esther Won, who is of Korean descent. They have a son, born October 2013. Shteyngart now lives in the Gramercy neighborhood of Manhattan. He spends six months out of the year at a house in northern Dutchess County, in the Hudson River Valley where he does nearly all of his writing.” 

The vibe I am getting is that Shteyngart used his own personal life before and during the pandemic, then embellished it to these absurd and ridiculous reaches of human tolerance of other humans’ actions to create the plot for Our Country Friends. The setting is the country house of a Russian-born Jewish immigrant writer who grew up and was educated in New York… this sounds awfully autobiographical. Even a New York Times review of the novel states: “This [omniscient] narration also allows the novel to adopt a tone of wry self-reflexivity, as in this slap at the very idea of writing a pandemic novel: ‘Stranded social novelists up and down the river … beseeching their higher power to help me make something out of all this stillness.’” If a New York Times reviewer can find a quote about writers living in the country and creating novels during the pandemic, then we can infer that this is exactly what Shteyngart was doing. I know all works of fiction pull something from real life, but this is a little on the nose for me. Honestly, my entire problem was that this was not a summer beach read, even though the majority of the novel takes place during the spring and summer of 2020. It was heavy in the way these adults had no real redeeming qualities and acted so foolishly towards each other and the way the world functions. I do think that these characters are the outcome of privilege run amok with no temperance by those who are less monied than they are. I’m not a fan when the book is a modern story set in modern times. The absurdist actions of the characters and the narrator are just nails in the coffin for me.

I am giving Our Country Friends two stars and I am not sad about it. I STRUGGLED through the entire book. Did the book meet the expectations and goals of the author? Yes. But, the book didn’t meet my expectations and if it weren’t for the narrator’s teaser that the country cottage colony wouldn’t have the same owner by the same time the next year I wouldn’t have stuck around to figure out what these strange people kept getting up to. I’m always interested in how real estate passes from one person to another. Additionally, Nikki reminded me that A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole is also an absurdist novel, and I DNF’ed that sucker back in college and have never looked back.

~Ashley

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