June 1, 2021
In March 2020, as pandemic descends, a group of friends bringing along their friends gathers for the duration at a country home. They range from a Russian-born novelist and his psychiatrist wife to an aspiring Indian American writer, a successful Korean American app developer, and a movie star who disrupts everything. Love and friendship flare and sputter during the six months that unfold here. Following Shteyngart's multi-best-booked Lake Success.
Copyright 2021 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
October 4, 2021
Shteyngart (Lake Success) returns with the droll and heartfelt story of a Russian American couple who invite a group of friends to ride out the lockdown with them on their Hudson Valley “estate” in March 2020. Sasha Senderovsky, a bumbling writer, clumsily prepares for his guests: “Because he did not believe in road marks or certain aspects of relativity, the concept of a blind curve continued to elude him,” Shteyngart writes of Sasha’s driving, which ends with a case of liquor shattered in the trunk. Sasha’s wife, Masha, bans smoking on the property, which Sasha allows his friend Ed Kim to break immediately after showing Ed to his bungalow, one of five along with the main house. There’s also Vinood Mehta, a once aspiring writer whose abandoned manuscript factors into a late-breaking plot involving jealousy and betrayal. The couple’s eight-year-old adopted daughter, Nat, who is of Chinese descent and is obsessed with K-pop, bonds with their friend Karen Cho, who, like Ed, is Korean, and Shteyngart drops in about as many illuminating details about the Korean diaspora as he does about Russian immigrants and their American children. The author shows great care for his characters, making Sasha’s vulnerability particularly palpable when an uncertain screenwriting project threatens his financial stability. Shteyngart’s taken the formula for a smart, irresistible comedy of manners and expertly brought it up to the moment. Agent: Denise Shannon, Denise Shannon Literary.
Starred review from September 15, 2021
In Shteyngart's (Lake Success, 2018) clever Chekhovian satire, once-successful writer Sasha Senderovsky, his psychiatrist wife, Masha, and their precocious adopted daughter, Natasha, have abandoned the city for their upstate bungalow colony to ride out the COVID-19 pandemic. They are joined there by Sasha's childhood friends Vinod and Karen and Karen's dandyish distant cousin, Ed. Sasha's former student Dee adds a sexual charge to the proceedings with her southern drawl and the literary success of her hip, zeitgeist-capturing novel. Rounding out the group is the Actor, a narcissistic sex-symbol and method actor with whom Sasha hopes to adapt his early novel and thus revive his career and finances. This petri dish of personalities provides ample conditions for simmering jealousies, fervent glances, and unrequited love to thrive inside the idyllic compound while the country is ravaged by disease and fractured by political discord. Alas, human nature will prevail. Compelled by urges, riven by desires and the unearthing of long-buried betrayals, the group splinters. Situated in the summer of 2020, Shteyngart's big-hearted drama is timely yet timeless with its penetrating and nuanced social commentary exploring identity, racism, celebrity culture, social media, and humanity. Above all, Shteyngart artfully exemplifies love in its many registers--parental, brotherly, romantic--in what is ultimately a ""super sad true love"" story.
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October 1, 2021
This latest from Shteyngart (Lake Success) isn't the first work of fiction to touch on COVID-19, but it is the most explicit pandemic novel yet. Kicking off during the virus's uncertain early days, the book concerns a group of family, friends, and lovers who gather at a sprawling bungalow colony to idle away lockdown with food and booze and contend with the inevitable discord that arises as their stay stretches on. After 18 months of inuring ourselves to new normals, Shteyngart's journey back to the beginning is dizzying, all action bathed in early-pandemic surreality. He details guesswork safety protocols with a light comic absurdity, and his always-bold prose is as strong as ever: In his world, glasses of wine are poured with the "prophylactic aid of an oven mitt." But as vividly as this novel recalls a dreamlike near-past, it's reductive to think of it only as pandemic portraiture. The pandemic is more like set dressing for Shteyngart's usual humanism; his concerns widen to encompass the menace of technology and the ill feeling so often rooted in enduring relationships, romantic or platonic. COVID-19's most essential role here is as symbol: of division, of isolation, of fear, of living in modern America, but also of overcoming, persisting, surviving. VERDICT Both the definitive COVID-19 novel and not, this work captures an uncertain modernity and speaks to the existential peril of contemporary life.--Luke Gorham, Galesburg P.L., IL
Copyright 2021 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
Starred review from August 15, 2021
The Levin-Senderovskys--Sasha, Masha, and little Natasha--wait out the virus at their country estate with four close friends and one movie star. One of Sasha Senderovsky's fondest memories of his childhood is the bungalow colony catering to Russian immigrant families where he first met his wife, Masha. With the proceeds of his once-successful writing career, he has built a colony of his own, though it's in an area of New York state where a deconstructed swastika is becoming a popular bumper sticker, and he's having trouble scraping together the cash to get the dead tree limbs out of the driveway before the party starts. Karen Cho and Vinod Mehta have been his best friends since high school. She's stratospherically rich after creating an app that makes people fall in love; he's failed at everything except being a very good person and loving Karen ceaselessly from afar. They are joined by Karen's distant cousin, an international dandy named Ed; Senderovsky's beautiful former student Dee, who leverages her Southern drawl and heritage to great effect on and off the page; and someone known only as the Actor, whose fame, charisma, and good looks are almost beyond description. Except Shteyngart, most recently of the fantastic Lake Success (2018) and most famously of Super Sad True Love Story (2010), can describe anything. Russian: "a language built around the exhalation of warmth and pain." Cheeses: "so filled with aromatic herbs they inspired (on Senderovsky's part) memories that had never happened." One could go on. When the curtain rises on the House on the Hill, as the place is known, it's early March 2020; Senderovsky has to ask his guests to refrain from hugging because "Masha's gone all epidemiological." Everyone seems to gather that they'll be staying for a while, but, of course, they have no idea. Uncle Vanya, K-pop, and Japanese reality TV will all play important roles, and just about everyone gets to fall in love. The Great American Pandemic Novel only Shteyngart could write, full of hyphenated identities, killer prose, and wild vitality.
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