Our Country Friends

As much as I love a well made cup of coffee, a glass of a full bodied Cabernet, a smooth bourbon w/one ice cube, and an engaging movie, there might be nothing I like more than a good book.  Nothing.

To me, reading is in some ways like taking photographs.  I take tons of photos, always searching for the one that stops my heart years after I took it.  I read a lot, all kinds of stuff.  Always - especially with novels - I'm looking for the one that moves me.  The one that resonates and stays with me.  As the years go by, I don't always find the type of book but, damn, it makes it more special when I do.

Earlier this week, in Serenbe, with the Allen's, I downloaded the novel, Our Country Friends, by Gary Shteygart.  I had seen it on various "best of" lists for 2021 but it wasn't until I read and end of year review of it in the New York T'imes Book Review that I bought it.  Damn, I'm glad I did.

Every now and then, I start a book and, immediately, I stop everything else I'm doing and read only that book.  Right or wrong, I read several books - fiction and nonfiction - simultaneously, so when I find a book that grabs me, it's a real pleasure.  And that's exactly what happened with Our Country Friends.  From the minute I started reading it, I knew it was special. 

Honestly, Our Country Friends is reminiscent of a few of my favorite novels of the past decade - The Interestings by Meg Wolitzer, Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk by Ben Fountain, and The Art of Fielding, by Chad Harbach.  All of those novels had characters I felt like I knew, or wanted to know.  I lost myself, literally, in the world the characters inhabited.  And, of course, I didn't want any of those novels to end.  

Occasionally, I recommend a book to Jude's "all girls" book club.  Rarely, they agree to read something I recommended.  Even more rarely, they let me make a cameo appearance at book club to discuss one of the books I recommended that they read.  

That happened with The Art of Fielding, much to my delight.  I read it a second time to be prepared for book club and the ensuing discussion.  One comment I recall, vividly, is that it was impossible to tell who was the main character.  Henry Skrimshander?  Guert Afflenlight?  Mike Schwartz?  Pella Afflenlight?  Owen Dunne?  The members of the group disagreed on that point.  It was a fascinating discussion, really.  The fact that different characters spoke to different members of the book club was a large part of what made The Art of Fielding such a good book, in my mind.

For me, anyway, Our Country Friends, was similar to The Art of Fielding in that I can't decide who the main character is.  Senderovsky?  Vinod?  Karen?  Masha?  Dee?  Ed?  The Actor?  It could have been any of them, or maybe all of them.

Much like The Interestings, Our County Friends involved the nuances and intricacies of friendships formed as teenagers and maintained up to and into middle age.  The setting was a farm - really, artists' colony, outside New York City at the beginning of the pandemic.  It's the first novel I've read, I think, that takes place during the pandemic.  

So much about the pandemic was unknown - to the author and the characters in the novel - during the spring and summer of 2020, the time period in which the story takes place.  I remember, vividly, the feelings of fear, anxiety, and uncertainty in the early days of the pandemic.  In some ways, those feelings have returned as the Omicron variant of Covid-19 has taken hold in the United States, particularly in New York and New Jersey.

I guess that's a long way of saying Our Country Friends was timely, for sure.  

When I finished it on the morning of Christmas Eve, I hated that it had to end.  I wanted more.  I was so stunned by the beauty of the story, and the writing, that I just sat for a few minutes and thought about characters.  Gary Shteygart, whom I had never had before, may have written the perfect novel for the time we're in right now.  That's why it reminded me of Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk, by Ben Fountain.

What a wonderful world we live in, indeed, with writers like Gary Shteygart writing novels like Our Country Friends.  It was the best book I read in 2021, by far.