Satire misfires: Our Country Friends, by Gary Shteyngart, reviewed

It is, as you’ve possibly noticed, a tricky time for old-school American liberals, now caught between increasingly extreme versions of their traditional right-wing adversaries and the new Puritans on the left. In Our Country Friends, Gary Shteyngart sets out to explore their resulting confusion — but ends up inadvertently exemplifying it.

Like his creator, the protagonist is a Russian Jew, born in Leningrad in 1972, who as a boy moved to America with his parents and later made his name writing satirical novels about people from the same background. Unlike Shteyngart, though, Sasha Senderovsky is now facing a stalled career, having abandoned literature in an ill-advised bid for success in TV screenplays.

Luckily, Sasha still has his house in the Hudson Valley, and the bungalows around it, that he bought in more prosperous times. He also has just about enough money (or, at least, access to credit) to invite four city-dwelling old friends to sit out the first Covid lockdown there with him and his family.

The three oldest friends are second-generation immigrants too: an Indian and two Koreans — one of them a woman called Karen who’s made millions from an app that makes couples fall in love. The other is his former student Dee, a polemical essayist doing her liberal best to defend the poor whites she grew up with against liberal attack. Both completing and unbalancing the group is a narcissistic film star, known only as ‘the Actor’, who’s come to ‘discuss’ (i.e. reject) Sasha’s latest script — and about whom all the women are soon fantasising.

As good liberals, these people try hard to feel guilty about living in some splendour while people are dying in the places they’ve left behind. The trouble is that they can never quite manage it.