Gary Shteyngart, 49, is the author of six books, including a memoir, Little Failure, and the satirical dystopia Super Sad True Love Story, which won the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse prize for comic fiction. His latest novel, Our Country Friends, opens in March 2020 and follows a group of middle-aged friends sheltering from Covid at a country house in upstate New York, where the author himself spent the early part of the pandemic. Shteyngart, who was born in Leningrad and emigrated to the US in 1979, spoke to me from New York City, where he teaches creative writing at Columbia University.
You’ve had to find a new publisher in the UK for this book.
In America, it seems to have done very well but my usual British publisher, Hamish Hamilton, didn’t want it: they said it was too pandemicky. Even my friends were like: “Who’s gonna read this when it’s published? Covid will be a distant memory.” But when I started writing in late March, early April 2020, I had a feeling that Covid wouldn’t be over in a year as was predicted. I wrote the novel in six or seven months, the fastest I ever wrote. I just think we’re entering a time of permanent crisis. We’re going to be constantly writing about this stuff. Not just pandemic-ravaged New York or whatever; it’s going to be flooded New York, flooded London, burnt-down Sydney and burnt-down Los Angeles. The pandemic is the amuse-bouche to the endless meal of crap we’re going to be getting without any respite. I’m really not selling this book, am I? Now Allen & Unwin’s going to dump me too.
It’s a very funny novel.
I do funny, I don’t do not funny, but actually to me this is probably the least funny book I’ve ever written. I write about tragic things: the collapse of the Soviet Union, now the collapse of America. If you think of an intercontinental ballistic missile, like the sort we and Russia may soon launch at each other, the missile is the humour, but the nuclear payload is the tragedy, right? The humour’s just a way to get that payload across to a reader who doesn’t want to sit down with 330 pages of tragedy. But by the end of my books there usually is some kind of tragedy, as there is in this one. The humour is my way of saying: “Just come along for the ride, I’m not gonna hurt you…” Then blam!
