Our Country Friends

“Actually, there was a right and a wrong here. Ed reminded her of her husband’s parents. Talking with them was like dealing with a smiling adversary who kept a handful of poisoned toothpicks in his pocket. Every time you let your guard down, there would be a sharp prick at your haunches.”

Masha distrusts Senderovsky’s friends and struggles to connect with them. In this case, with Ed, she sees Senderovsky’s parents in him: Under the smiling façade, she expects him to undercut her when the time is right.

“Senderovsky had failed to notice that, unlike most of his passengers, Vinod did not brace himself against the seat in front of him as he sped off, had not offered a prayer to any god, nor made use of his grab handle as Senderovsky swerved onto the bridge barely pausing to have his toll collected.”

In this early scene, Vinod separates himself from the others by his reaction to Senderovsky’s driving. While everyone else views riding with him as a hazard, Vinod exudes calmness. Not expecting to survive the pandemic, he comes to the House on the Hill to die, and his lack of a reaction to Senderovsky’s driving hints at his intentions.

“He accepted his friend’s invitation to visit the countryside as a chance at dissolution, not so much into the usual alcohol and mild drugs, but into the stories he shared with the others. And if it came to it, he had papers at the bottom of his luggage, notarized papers, which would prepare him for any eventuality.”

Vinod comes to the House on the Hill to die, to be surrounded by his friends at the end of his life. He expects this and comes prepared with the proper paperwork. He wants his life to dissolve, slowly, and he wants to enjoy it with the people that support him through his most difficult times.

“Karen was thinking that Masha had put her in the larger two-room family bungalow as a way to highlight the fact that she had no children and now most likely never would.”

Karen is very insecure about her family situation after her recent divorce. With her marriage dissolved and the expectation of children fleeting, she wonders if Masha, whom she struggles to connect with, has ulterior motives to make her feel poorly about where her life is going.

“He knew that he had been born in a sick country, a country now intent on spreading its disease to others through social media channels and under the cover of night—its true gift of the moment.”

Senderovsky reflects on his own nation of origin, Russia, as the political turmoil of the US becomes more volatile. He must contend with the legacy of Russia, the violence and deception of the USSR, and the misinformation campaign it unleashes on the world. He thinks of the influence this has on him and what influence it will have on his daughter.

“He did not know her thoughts, but he was registering attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, the borderlands of autism, loss of executive function, pragmatic speech deficits—all the therapists and specialized schools wanted a piece of her, all of them had a novel idea about what was wrong, but the only diagnosis that ever stuck was his and Masha’s Ashkenazi one, generalized anxiety disorder.”

Senderovsky struggles to connect with Nat as well as to simply understand her. He, along with others, recognizes many different factors that lead to her unique behavior and her perception of the world, and yet the only one she is officially diagnosed with is anxiety, a legacy she seemingly inherited from her adoptive parents.

“[W]as now watching a man with one lung smoking a joint that had just touched another’s lips. What was more, her husband was dragging Ed toward the Big Island Bungalow, the latter’s arm draped around her husband’s shoulder, alcoholic flop sweat glistening off the both of them.”

Masha shoulders the responsibility of implementing safety guidelines for her guests to prevent an outbreak of COVID-19. She watches the first night as Senderovsky and his friends—whom she does not particularly enjoy—break all of these guidelines. This not only reinforces her misgivings with his friends but further widens the divide between her and Senderovsky, as he seemingly does not respect her enough to follow her guidelines.

“He was thinking of his early years in the country, sitting in a classroom without English, trying to follow the ramblings of some unprepared, anxious educator, while his mind returned home to Leningrad, to the metro, to the whoosh of its rubber-clad tires, to the chess moves of a junior novel he was already plotting in his overstuffed mind.”

Senderovsky and his friends are the children of immigrants and Senderovsky himself spends much of his childhood in Russia. He remembers his time as a child, with the split mind of an immigrant, struggling to hold attention to the American setting of his classroom and finding himself returning in his mind to his homeland.

“She walked out, passed all the familiar sights, the big and little tokens of culture that cluttered her small home, holding her still-wet hands out in front of her like a proof of concept. The concept being that she was alive and strong and wanted, if not loved.”

After Masha helps the Actor to shower and they have a sexual encounter, she goes back to the normal routine of her day with the confidence that she is wanted. She is struggling in her marriage with Senderovsky and does not feel loved or appreciated by him. The Actor’s attention, even if he has ulterior motives, proves to Masha that someone still wants and needs her.

“Had he crossed a line? Many of his Y-chromosome-bearing colleagues were now in the clink, metaphorically speaking, after decades of touching women and instructing women to touch them. The excuse about her generation and her professional standing seemed weak.”

At various points during the novel, different characters worry about being ‘canceled.’ In this case, the Actor worries after his encounter with Masha, that he may have crossed a line and, if people were to find out, he would be ‘canceled.’ However, he soon moves past it, convincing himself that Masha made the decision and he did not use his fame and influence to manipulate the situation.

“‘Eat, eat,’ he said, reminding Karen of something her mother used to say to her over breakfast: ‘Eat, eat, why you so fat?’”

The book explores how parents their children. In this case, Karen remembers her mother’s over-critical approach to Karen’s life and how it impacted even simple aspects, like daily meals. This comment reveals the novel’s focus on how the characters’ parents had a negative influence on them as children.

“Ed looked at Karen, surprised, as did Masha. In addition to the hold she had on her husband (and Vinod, of course), Karen was now teaching her daughter another language. There was nothing inherently wrong with that, except maybe she could have consulted her.”

Masha experiences intense jealousy of Karen throughout Our Country Friends, seeing her relationship with Nat as a threat to her own. Karen and Nat connect over BTS and Korean, and as a result, Nat listens to Karen in ways she won’t listen to Masha. Masha struggles with this, knowing that Nat’s relationship with Karen is healthy for Nat, but she is saddened not to be a part of it.

“How could he not acknowledge that he was the father of a remarkable child, who noticed everything, processed it differently than those with fewer anxieties, those with quieter minds, and spoke with utmost honesty.”

Once again, Senderovsky struggles to understand Nat. He recognizes her differences but cannot seem to unite them with her identity as his daughter. This places distance between them, and Senderovsky defers matters concerning Nat to Karen and Masha.

“Like a fool, he had carried those words in the little purse he had sewn beneath his heart as a child, a repository of all the American words his parents would never utter.”

After his agent, who once told him he had a lovely family and home, says it about another person, Senderovsky realizes that the statement was not unique to him. He values those words so much because they are words never heard from the mouths of his parents. He seeks that praise and validation because of its absence from the important people in his life.

“He had to act like the man he was. On a busy shooting set, among hundreds of concerns circulating about, each crew member had two others: What is the Actor’s mood? What can I do to please him?”

The Actor possesses a strong sense of self-centeredness, seeing himself as the most important person in the room, with everyone’s attention directed toward him. He believes that everyone should be thinking of how to make him happy and make his life easier and that his audience is there to serve him.

“Her secret weapon: she had no one to impress, not the office cast of code-crunching megalomaniac Aspergerians, many graduates of her specialized math high school, not even her mother or father, both of whom had no idea who she was or what she did, and wanted simply for her to produce two brilliant children, at least one of them male.”

Karen prides herself on her lack of attachment to other people and the absence of any sense of duty to others in her life. She believes that this makes it easier to maneuver through life and do her work without letting the judgments of others impact her. This isolates her, though, disconnecting her from the importance of her work.

“In the video, as the white policeman was draining the air from his Black victim’s lungs with his knee, another cop, a Hmong immigrant, stood in front of him in a wide-open stance, daring anyone to come to the dying man’s aid. He could have been a Russian, a Korean, a Gujarati. All of us, Senderovsky thought, are in service to an order that has long predated us. All of us have come to feast on this land of bondage. And all of us are useful and expendable in turn.”

In the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd, Senderovsky contemplates American civilization. He sees it as a violent system that uses any and all that come to its shores to protect itself and achieve its goals. This murder in particular makes it clear to him that no matter where someone comes from, the American system can and will use people how it needs.

“Dee and the Actor did not know it, but this furniture—and indeed the house itself—had been picked by Masha and Senderovsky because it was happy and light, the opposite of their parents’ dark armoires and heavy Eastern European curtains.”

One of the most important aspects of Our Country Friends is the characters’ attempts to heal from the damage inflicted upon them by their parents. In this example, Masha and Senderovsky design their house and bungalows as exact opposites of the homes they lived in with their parents, bringing in light and happy memories that juxtapose the darkness of their childhoods.

“The child spoke so placidly, with such rare understanding and obedience, that Masha looked away from her and Karen and toward the squat bungalow she shared with her husband.”

As Karen and Nat grow closer, their relationship rivals that of Masha and Nat. Masha is trapped, watching her daughter enjoy a relationship with Karen, that is healthy for her. Even though she is jealous of Karen and wants that kind of relationship for herself, she cannot bring herself to interfere because of the positive effect it has on Nat.

“But without the Actor, the uniqueness was gone, and the initial feeling that her parents weren’t really her parents, that she had been granted the permission to choose her own destiny, that this Jin-level famous personage had called her ‘lovely’ and that maybe she was.”

Nat struggles with her adoptive relationship with her parents, not knowing who she is but feeling the pressures of their expectations. When the Actor recognizes that she is not their biological daughter, she feels the freedom to choose her own destiny and make her own identity. When she leaves, this freedom abandons her and she once again struggles to find her place in her family.

“Oh, no, he thought. Could my asking her to put on a mask be interpreted as an attempt to muzzle her? Or an appropriation of Islamic face covering? What does it mean for me as a—”

When Ed and Dee enjoy their first sexual encounter, Ed suggests that she put her mask on to liven up the event. After she does so, he thinks of the political implications of this request and whether it could result in him being ‘canceled.’ The political implications of one’s actions are on the minds of many of the characters in Our Country Friends.

“Even now, the secret sharer was probing every sector of the divided Berlin that was the Actor’s body, looking for purchase, pulmonary union with this sleepless animal, the constant sour taste of extinction in his mouth.”

This excerpt describes the COVID-19 virus infecting the Actor. It is described as the secret sharer because of the nature of the virus: It can seemingly lie dormant, not causing symptoms in its host, but still be infectious. It is a secret sharer because even though the Actor doesn’t knowingly give it to anyone, his presence infects Karen, and then Vinod.

“The unhappy voices echoed off his magnificent porch, the conversation never ending, like that of his parents, who could battle into the morning off a thimble of vodka and a few cups of tea.”

The legacy of his parents is frequently on Senderovsky’s mind. Their impact on him is strong, and as he sits and listens to Masha and Karen fight, he is reminded of them. His association between fighting and his parents illuminates the relationship he had with them; it is a volatile one, defined by their readiness to fight and their endurance to sustain such arguments.