Unlike most of us slobs, who wasted the COVID-19 pandemic lounging on the couch while binge-watching reruns of “Friends,” novelist Gary Shteyngart, 49, buckled down and got to work.
In six short months, the author of “Super Sad True Love Story” pounded out “Our Country Friends” (Random House), a comic novel about a group of friends who gather in a country house to wait out the pandemic. The Post recently met with the Leningrad-born, NYC-bred Shteyngart, who shared stories about his “busted schlong” and riding out COVID in his own pandemic pod at his Dutchess County “dacha.”
Where did you spend your pandemic?
Shteyngart: Almost all of it was upstate, from March through almost all of 2020. I don’t think I’ve ever spent such a Iong a stretch up there, but it was amazing. I wrote twice as fast as I do in the city. I can’t get my thoughts together down here. When ambulances go by, it knocks me off my rhythm. I put in ear plugs, I use white noise machines, I got the whole thing but still… Upstate I was with my wife and child, and we had a pandemic pod with a couple friends. It was wonderful but we felt very guilty, because of all that was happening in Elmhurst and Jackson Heights, where all the characters in the book are from and where in some ways I’m from. Here we were, living a full idyllic life and you turn on the news and see nursing homes filled with people dying and urban centers, often of poor people, in the middle of this Black Plague, so it was very disconcerting…
One of the characters in “Our Country Friends” is described as “pouring out inky red wine with the prophylactic aid of an oven mitt.” Did your pod maintain such measures?
We were pouring stuff with an oven mitt, wearing masks, just endless precautions because we didn’t know what was going on. I remember being deathly scared of the plume of a toilet, that aerosol plume that happens when you flush, because at some point all these publications were like “that’s gonna be a killer.” The first time I went to a restaurant I just held it in. I thought, “I’m not going to that death toilet.”
How’d you end up with an upstate residence?
This truly happy place when I was growing up was this Russian bungalow colony upstate. I didn’t speak English real good, and the kids there treated me nicely ‘cuz we all spoke Russian, so I always had a soft spot for upstate. And Russians love their dachas, their summer places.
I read you were bullied a lot growing up in Queens…
Of course, Queens, you have to be bullied! That was all the fun.
So it was no big deal?
It was a conservative Jewish school and I didn’t know much about the Torah, didn’t really care much. So I wrote my first satire, called The Gomorrah, which was a take-off on the Torah, written on an actual scroll. And that’s how I made my first American friends, and the bullying went from “Gary’s this horrible Russian” to “Gary’s just a weirdo who writes crazy stuff.” And that’s a better place! Just eccentric, instead of someone you want to curse at or punch.
In the novel you describe a school the characters attend as a place for “bright beaten foreign youngsters.”
Beaten by our parents, yeah. And sometimes by our fellow students too!
You also mention a time during quarantine when “the middle class is in their beds for the foreseeable future…” Was that you, too? Meaning, did you watch “Tiger King”?
Yeah, I did watch “Tiger King.” I love all that crappy television! I work in bed and sometimes I like to not get out of bed, so I watch things on my laptop.
You write in bed, with the laptop on your stomach? Doesn’t that cook you?
It cooks me a little, and it’s also supposed to cause sterility, but I don’t have to breed anymore so I’m actually fine with that. A form of birth control, yeah…
Did you take up baking bread, too?
No, all I did was bake this novel. I respect people who baked a lot of scones and crap, but I did not bake anything.
How were you so productive?
Well, there was nothing to do! I was with my friends, but when I’m in the city I drink a lot. The city inspires a lot of drinking, writers like to drink, so all the time meeting different writers and artists, TV people, everyone likes to drink, but upstate there’s much less of that. We actually have something to live for up there.
What did you miss about New York City?
Restaurants! Oh God, did I miss the restaurants. I missed Casa Mono on Irving Place. I love their pan con tomate. It’s a very simple dish, bread with tomatoes, but it’s so delicious, and the jamon serrano, this very delicious Spanish ham that you can put on top.
In “Our Country Friends,” you talk about a post-quarantine New York City where “people are running through the streets, illuminated by the fire of burning trash cans, the way the city used to be in its heyday.” Are you enjoying the city’s return to “gritty”?
I’m okay with that! Obviously there are costs involved, and a lot of people aren’t gonna like it, but for me New York was a city of stories. Not of Duane Reades: stories! Jay McInerney’s brilliant “Bright Lights, Big City” begins with a guy walking near Times Square and someone tries to sell him a ferret. I miss the ferret days! Things were more dangerous and I didn’t like that. I didn’t like having to put my wallet in my sock, but I didn’t mind, whatever, as long as someone would try to sell me a ferret instead of a new AT&T subscription for a phone.
Last month you famously wrote a New Yorker essay about your botched circumcision. The question is why?
Ha! I just thought it was something people don’t think about, because speaking even to a few friends I discovered this happens quite a lot, and I thought it would be negligent of me not to try to get that out to a greater audience.
Were you embarrassed to share so much about your personal life?
If I was a twenty-something trying to date, yeah, I might not want to talk about my busted schlong, but, I’m getting better now, I’m able to function. But I wanted to make sure if people are considering this they have all the information. I think it’s important for men, and especially young parents, to know if they do this, there can be consequences.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.