Interview With Author Gary Shteyngart
Interview With Author Gary Shteyngart
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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.
Originally published by theguardian.com as ̈ Wére Entering A Time of Permanent Crisis̈
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!
This is probably the least funny book I have ever written
You say you wrote fast, but it’s less hectic than your other novels.
This was the slowest 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….
