Gary Shteyngart’s contribution to the burgeoning genre of the lockdown novel is very, very Russian – in the best possible way. The premise is that a group of old friends are to spend a month in the country (well, several months) riding out New York’s pandemic in a little ad hoc colony in the Hudson valley. The cast is a collection of privileged, mournful “lishnii cheloveks” (as the “superfluous men” of 19th-century Russian literature were known) in late middle age, pottering and squabbling in rural exile, wondering what the world is coming to and regretting the past.
The host at what comes to be called the “Dacha of Doom” is Sasha Senderovsky, a dishevelled Russian-Jewish-American author who, like Shteyngart, has had considerable success with a series of comic novels about the Russian-Jewish-American experience. Now, though, his career is on the slide and if he can’t get a troubled TV script across the line he faces losing the country estate (well, house with a few bungalows attached) that is his pride and joy. He doesn’t have an actual cherry orchard, but the reader very much gets the drift. Here’s something of a departure – or at least a mellowing – for Shteyngart; the antic international satire of Absurdistan or the science-fictional Super Sad True Love Story is muted, while on his stylistic mixing board the slider marked melancholy has been notched up to 11.
