I really enjoyed this novel even if it did take me much too long to register “Dee Cameron” -> Decameron. Paying homage to Boccaccio and Chekhov, here we have a group of friends gathering together at a secluded country estate outside NYC as Covid descends upon the city. The characters are mostly immigrants and children of immigrants, uncomfortably situated in a country symbolized by the abandoned and decaying International Children’s Camp nearby and its seeming replacement by menacing black pickup trucks and white supremacist slogans on the flags, bumpers, and tattooed bodies of the locals.

While the outside menace, both viral and human, hovers in the background and occasionally intervenes directly, it’s really the comic and pathetic interactions of this group of people that dominate the novel up until the final pages. They lust and ache for each other in ways physical, fraternal, spousal, and parental. They are petty and they are generously warm hearted. Shteyngart very funnily sends himself up as the character of Sasha Senderovsky, aka “the landowner”, once a successful novelist but now a struggling screenwriter known as “Return to Sender” by his would-be benefactor because of all the unsatisfactory scripts he sends in.

In the end it’s not a great Shteyngartian satire or the Great Pandemic Novel as much as it is a surprisingly humane (and comic, yes) novel about people, which is pretty much my favorite kind of novel.

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I wanted to like this, as it's clever and sort of dazzling, in a writerly pyrotechnics kind of way, but I didn't care one whit about any of the characters. Alas. ( )

I started out enjoying the writing and the humor. I got tired of the characters and was bored with the second half of the book. ( )

It stands to reason that the pandemic will inspire a lot of fiction. I had very high hopes for this one, but couldn't quite get into it. The characters were almost universally off-putting (with the exception of Natash) and there is a section near the end where the author really lost me, to the point where I was mentally begging for it to stop. I appreciated the satire (and there has been so very much to satirize) and the bittersweet last scene, but overall, a disappointment. ( )

read 2022