Our Take

The pandemic novel was always going to be a difficult form to get right — too soon risks shallowness, too distant risks irrelevance — but Shteyngart threads it with remarkable assurance. Our Country Friends is neither a document nor a satire but something more generous: a novel that uses the specific conditions of 2020 to ask perennial questions about how we choose our people, what we owe them, and what happens when proximity strips away the comfortable fictions that hold relationships together.

The Chekhov comparison invited by the novel itself is earned rather than presumptuous. Shteyngart has always been a writer of comic gifts, but here the comedy is in service of something warmer and more vulnerable than his earlier work. The ensemble is beautifully managed — each character distinct, each given their moment of grace and failure — and the arrival of The Actor in the novel's second half genuinely destabilizes things in ways that feel true rather than contrived.

Readers who loved Hanya Yanagihara's A Little Life for its unflinching portrait of a chosen family under pressure, or Amor Towles's A Gentleman in Moscow for its warmth and wit in confined quarters, will find Our Country Friends a deeply satisfying companion. The best novel yet from one of American fiction's most distinctive voices.