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!
You say you wrote fast, but it’s less hectic than your other novels.
This was the sloooowest period of our lives, especially around the pandemic’s first iteration, as they’d call it in Silicon Valley. Things were super, super slow. There was so much time and endless silence that I could almost hear the turtles crossing the road, scraping across the gravel. But if you were a writer in a safe place, it was also an opportunity to slow the pace of your thinking, the pace of your sentences and paragraphs, which for this book was very helpful. And here’s the other thing: I was able to be more functional because there weren’t these evenings with other writers where you consume five drinks at a clip and then wake up in the morning, you know, urgh, now I’ve gotta write my three pages. I was like, I’m gonna write six pages, I’m completely sober! So that was really super-helpful to the process.
The pandemic prompts the novel’s migrant cast to reflect on what their adopted country has become.
A lot of the characters are Asian-American and one of their concerns – which is a concern of people in America and maybe in the UK as well – is that their parents gave up their culture and moved here because they thought they might find a sense of safety. Some of that safety feels very much like a mirage now. My wife is Korean-American and we’re having this conversation about, you know, if Trump wins in 2024, where do we go? She says maybe we can move to Seoul – she can probably reclaim her citizenship – and our son is already taking Korean lessons. You know, our parents brought us here because they wanted us to have a better chance and now we’re thinking of where to escape. The rightwing establishments talking about “China flu” and “the China virus” aren’t gonna tell that my wife’s Korean, not Chinese, it’s all the same to them. The book reflects that danger we felt; it’s funny, yeah, but under the surface are real fears.
What were you reading while you wrote?
I reread all my Chekhov, not just the plays but the short stories, in Russian and in English. There’s a very good new translation, Fifty-Two Stories, by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. I had a great time rereading him, because in all Chekhov’s books, people are in the countryside turning a certain age talking about their regrets, which was perfect for this novel. I also watched the Japanese reality show Terrace House, which is highly recommended. Everyone just sits around, makes soba noodles and has these low-stakes conversations that actually aren’t really low stakes. There’s 500 episodes and we’d watch three or four a night.
What books do you assign your writing students?
I’m about to start teaching a course about comic fiction, so I’ve been rereading a lot of very contemporary humorous fiction. Andrew Sean Greer’s Less is in there, so is Raven Leilani and Fleishman Is in Trouble. Going back further we have Nabokov, Philip Roth and Zadie Smith’s White Teeth, which is a very funny novel still and holds up well I think. I started writing around the same time as Zadie and we’ve known each other since about that time. It’s interesting to read it now because that book so much ushered in the idea of multicultural fiction, at least in the UK. There’s almost a kind of optimism about this new kind of society being born and now it’s like, oh shit, it didn’t work out the way we expected it to work out. To me, it’s a really strong story about these two families and the children they have, their origins and the after-effects of colonialism and how British society fails and sometimes works.
• 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
