James Walton

Satire misfires: Our Country Friends, by Gary Shteyngart, reviewed

Shteyngart sets out to explore the confusion of American liberals, caught between extremes of right and left, but ends up inadvertently exemplifying it

Gary Shteyngart. [Getty Images] 
issue 20 November 2021

It is, as you’ve possibly noticed, a tricky time for old-school American liberals, now caught between increasingly extreme versions of their traditional right-wing adversaries and the new Puritans on the left. In Our Country Friends, Gary Shteyngart sets out to explore their resulting confusion — but ends up inadvertently exemplifying it.

Like his creator, the protagonist is a Russian Jew, born in Leningrad in 1972, who as a boy moved to America with his parents and later made his name writing satirical novels about people from the same background. Unlike Shteyngart, though, Sasha Senderovsky is now facing a stalled career, having abandoned literature in an ill-advised bid for success in TV screenplays.

Luckily, Sasha still has his house in the Hudson Valley, and the bungalows around it, that he bought in more prosperous times. He also has just about enough money (or, at least, access to credit) to invite four city-dwelling old friends to sit out the first Covid lockdown there with him and his family.

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