Gary Shteyngart′s Our Country Friends: Idolatry of the Self in America and the Global Era

Despite the communality invoked in its title words, Shteyngart’s pandemic novel Our Country Friends (2021) presents several characters who are primarily identified by self-absorption, whether through solipsism, narcissism, egotism or competitiveness. The present article proposes a close reading of the human group presented in the novel as displaying these types of profiles, which socially and culturally originate in Christopher Lasch’s classic assessment of narcissism in American culture (1979), profiles which, I argue, have today become intensified, both in the US and the First World at large, by the pervasive influence of a global neoliberal paradigm which celebrates unchecked individualism, the accumulation of wealth, and the commodification of the self.