Not Funny: The Pandemic

Gary Shteyngart in 2018, maybe in his house. (source)

Our Country Friends: published November 2

If anyone could write a comic novel about the pandemic, it would be Gary Shteyngart. In Our Country Friends, he almost did it. But when I think about it, the very funny parts, which he excels at, are funny about the world as it was before the Covid disaster. This novel covers the time period from the spring of 2020 until late summer. It was not a funny time, and my opinion is that the more the novel presented the era's illness and danger and isolation and horror, the less it could be funny. How sad is that?

I've read other things by Shteyngart: a couple of novels, a few New Yorker articles... and they mostly are very funny, especially about food and culture clashes. This book abounds in food and culture clashes, but those are things that endured at least for a while. His characters are a multi-ethnic group of 40-somethings, mainly connected through their New York high school background. They love to eat and also sometimes verge on being sex fiends when driven by isolation and fear. 

The central figure, Sasha Senderovsky is a Russian-American the same age and background as the author. Senderovsky loves to buy lavish and extravagant quantities of luxury food to feed to these friends, who have been invited to his lavish country house (sort of a dacha) to wait out the pandemic. 

At the very beginning, anticipating their arrival, Senderovsky goes into the small, gentrified village for provisions:

"First, he visited his butchers, two former catalog models from the city, now a husband and wife, who plied their trade out of a barn so red it verged on the patriotic. The two magnificent twenty-five-year-olds, all teeth and coveralls, presented him with a wrapped parcel of sweet and Italian sausages, glistening hamburger patties, and his secret weapon: lamb steaks that clung to the bone, so fresh they could only have been rivaled by a restaurant Senderovsky admired in Rome’s abattoir district. The very sight of meat for tomorrow’s cookout inspired in him a joy that in a younger man could be called love. Not because of the meat itself, but because of the conversations that would flow around it as it was marinated, grilled, and served, despite the growing restrictions on such closeness." (p. 4)

"...he sped to the liquor store in the richest village in the district, which occupied the premises of a former church. He bought two cases of Austrian Riesling at the south transept, another of rosé at the north, along with a fourth case of Beaujolais, wildly out of season, but a nostalgic wine for him and his high-school friends, Vinod and Karen. Ed, as always, would be the hardest to accommodate. Deep in the sacristy, Senderovsky picked out an eighteen-year-old bottle of something beyond his means, two bottles each of cognac and rye, and, to show his frivolous side, schnapps and a strange single malt from the Tyrol. The proprietor, a shaggy Anglo with a rosacea nose peeking out from his loosely worn mask, looked very pleased as he rang up the many purchases, his fingers clad in black disposable gloves. ... Senderovsky sighed and bought an extra case of the Riesling and two bottles of an artisanal gin he had never heard of. He could picture Ed pursing his lips around a glass and pronouncing it 'drinkable.' When the final bill, adding up to just over four digits, meandered out of the machine in many long spurts, Senderovsky’s hand could barely slalom through his signature. A special occasion, he consoled himself." (p. 5)

Later, more expensive groceries are purchased. Eventually, Senderovsky's friend Ed prepares some of this food, with special attention to a secret recipe for vitello tonnato:

"He prepped over the next hour, the vintage sixties Campari growing low in its bottle. He had blanched the sugar snap peas, one of the secret ingredients to his tonnato, and was now carefully charring them on the grill. The anchovies and tuna had been pureed and introduced into the mayonnaise, capers, lime juice, and, another secret ingredient, three quartered habanero chilis, then blended into a silky smoothness and strafed with kosher salt. The cold veal was then covered with cilantro leaves and pumpkin seeds, a dash of the pimento and citrus confit, and finally the creamy avalanche of the tonnato itself. By the time he was finished, his fingers burned with habanero heat, and he wondered if the dish wouldn’t offend the more timid palates." (p. 124).

That's just the beginning, but I'll stop the food talk here. You get the idea. There's also a lot of satiric cultural stuff. For example, Dee, a character whose modestly successful essay collection is titled The Grand Book of Self-Compromise and Surrender. Or Karen, whose vastly successful app called "Tröö Emotions" had been sold for a vast amount of money to "the pudgy-faced chairman of a happy-go-lucky Japanese bank." (p. 120). Also a lot of ethnic satire: the characters' families come from India, Appalachia, Korea, Turkey (along with a melange of other places), and of course Senderovsky and his wife's native Russia. They have predictable hangups about their mothers and all that jazz. There's also quite a bit about a precocious child who loves Korean pop music, but the less said about her, the better, as far as I'm concerned.

Quickly the book becomes dark, and then darker, as the threat of Covid sinks in and the dangers of social life become haunting. Obviously, readers of the novel right now when it's new will bring vivid memories of what they were doing (or more likely, NOT doing) in 2020, and how they survived. I liked the cultural and foodie parts -- that is, the elements of the book with roots in 2019 and before. Although the book is in fact about survival, I'm not comfortable with the essence: what it's like to be in a real pandemic. I'd rather forget.

Review © 2021 mae sander.