I have met people, mercifully few in number, who just don’t respond to Chekhov. For me, his four main plays (Uncle Vanya, The Cherry Orchard, The Seagull and Three Sisters) are stone-cold masterpieces, timeless examinations of the human condition. But some people, slap them in the best seat in the stalls and they’ll ask what all the fuss is about: a whole lot of rich people complaining about nothing and achieving even less?
And perhaps now, with Gary Shteyngart’s latest book, I’m beginning to understand their bewilderment. Our Country Friends, a Chekhov-inspired Covid novel, comes lauded with every form of praise from serious Americans, up to and including the word “masterpiece”. And yet here I am in the Crush Bar, staring into my G&T and wondering what I’m missing.
The initial premise is more Boccaccio than Anton Pavlovich. Sasha, a Russian-born and previously successful satiric novelist, has invited his closest friends up to his “house on the hill” somewhere on the east coast to sit out the disease now running rampant through New York. But it opens nevertheless like any good Chekhov – after a self-conscious page of dramatis personae, straight out of a 19th-century playscript – with old retainers running round, preparing the estate. Sasha has near-bankrupted himself to build four bungalows around the main house, each to safely accommodate a guest.
There’s Vinod (Indian immigrant) and Karen (Korean immigrant), Sasha’s friends since maths high school. There’s Ed, also Korean, now a trust-fund idler, and Dee (surname Cameron, making sure we don’t entirely lose track of that Boccaccio analogy), a former creative writing student of Sasha’s, now firebrand essayist. And one extra guest is promised: The Actor. In a Trollopian touch, he is never awarded an actual name but again fills a classic Chekhovian role: the impossibly handsome and successful incomer (think Trigorin or Vershinin) who drives the men to despair and the women to masturbation, including Sasha’s psychiatrist wife Masha.
And now, once they’re nicely settled in? They behave according to Standard Chekhovian Operating Practice: fall in love, bemoan their lack of fulfilment, fall out of love and then the estate is sold. In a slight deviation, a Shakespearean touch is required to trigger The Actor’s amour fou for Dee: Karen is a newly minted tech billionaire following the sale of her app, Tröö Emotions. This app, by toying with a selfie of two willing participants, somehow induces unstoppable love (usually). It’s slightly less credible than Oberon’s wild thyme bank but still generates the kind of intense, semi-requited passion that runs through most Chekhovs.
Which is not to say that all the action is old world. Dee’s shtick is “y’all-ism”, trading on her Poor White Roots (think Hillbilly Elegy) but when the George Floyd murder erupts outside, bifurcating the country, she finds herself at the wrong end of Twitter for standing by “my people”, namely southern whites with racist inclinations. Social media may have anointed them “The First Couple of Quarantine” but now The Actor’s retinue strongly advises him to cut and run.
But he is soon back, still agonisingly in love, and craving the antidote. Somehow Karen (off you go again, Puck) knows exactly what to say to him, which images of his former self to show him in order to explode this ersatz, algorithmic passion of his. She sits and talks him through it – bizarrely staying indoors, bungalow windows closed – and thus, the final Chekhovian piece slots in: bang goes that Covid gun that was on the wall in the first chapter. The disease has breached the commune.
The American praise quoted on the dust jacket promises a “brilliant” “laugh out loud” tragicomedy, but I didn’t laugh and I didn’t cry. I wonder if too many of its culture-war references – the dark foreboding on the roads around the estate, a menacing “black pickup” which seems to embody the White Lives Matter backlash – simply lack the same pungency for a British readership. The friction between self-regarding Manhattan creatives and barely managing upstate farmers should be fertile enough ground for any novelist, but I constantly felt as though I’d forgotten to pack the codebook. Which left me with the mere domestic shenanigans of the characters, namely a whole lot of rich people complaining about nothing and achieving less.
• Our Country Friends by Gary Shteyngart is published by Allen & Unwin (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
