Slowly Gripped by Growing Insanity

In an interview with Svetlana Satchkova, Michael Idov explains how he “didn’t want to do a twist on the [spy] genre”—he “wanted to do the thing itself.”

By Svetlana SatchkovaDecember 19, 2024

• Fiction

MICHAEL IDOV’S THIRD book, The Collaborators (2024), marks a departure. His first novel, Ground Up (2009), was a satire inspired by his own attempt to launch a coffee shop in New York City (an endeavor that ultimately failed). His second, the memoir Dressed Up for a Riot: Misadventures in Putin’s Moscow (2018), covered his two-and-a-half years in Russia as editor in chief at GQ Russia during the protests of 2011–13. This time, Idov delves into the spy genre.

Set in 2021, The Collaborators mirrors Idov’s biographical journey, spanning Riga, New York, Moscow, London, Portugal, Morocco, and Thailand. Raised in Riga, Latvia, Idov immigrated to the United States and moved to New York after graduating from the University of Michigan; now, he splits his time between Los Angeles and Berlin. Idov and I connected via Skype in mid-October to discuss his love for the spy genre, his shifts from journalism to novel-writing to filmmaking, and the ways he draws inspiration for fiction from current events.

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SVETLANA SATCHKOVA: In college, you studied film with the intention of writing screenplays, and then you became a journalist in NYC. How did you make the transition?

MICHAEL IDOV: I used to review movies for the newspaper at the University of Michigan. When I moved to New York after school, I had a few half-written screenplays and a whole stack of review clippings. I had no idea what to do with the scripts, so I started showing the clippings around instead. Those got me first an internship, and then a low-level editorial job at The Village Voice. And it just kind of snowballed from there.

The story of how you published your first novel is somewhat miraculous. You were contacted by Nora Ephron, who offered to introduce you to her agent.

It’s as close to a fairy tale as things get in this line of work. This was 2005. I had a kind of funny essay in Slate about my experience trying to open a coffee shop called Café Trotsky on the Lower East Side. (This was back when you could still put your email address at the end of a story without getting death threats, and when you only checked your email once a day, after you got home.) The day after Slate ran the story, I checked my email and was absolutely shocked to see an email from Nora Ephron. I thought it was a prank at first. She wrote that she thought the story would make a great book or movie, and went on to introduce me to her agent, Amanda “Binky” Urban, who is still my agent to this day. So yeah, I’ve been incredibly lucky.

Was Amanda the one who suggested you write the story in the form of a novel?

The story made some noise, so a few agents contacted me, but they all wanted me to write a self-help book, like a “how-not-to-do-business” guide. I had zero interest in that. I thought, perhaps stupidly, that this was my chance to write a cool, satirical novel. The moment I’d tell them I saw it as “modern-day Evelyn Waugh,” they were like, “Oh, I see—he’s insane. Bye!” Binky was the only one who said, “If you feel passionate about it, why not?”

So I took a leap of faith, wrote the whole thing the way I wanted, and it ended up at Farrar, Straus and Giroux. It wasn’t very popular, to be honest—though it did tick a few “success” boxes like having the film rights optioned to HBO. The most surprising outcome was that the Russian version became a bestseller. I had literally translated it for the private bragging rights; I just wanted to be the second writer after Nabokov to publish something in English and then republish it in Russian in my own translation.

How did that lead to a job with Condé Nast?

The book sort of put me on the media radar in Russia. A year later, Condé Nast offered me the chance to edit the Russian edition of GQ. For context: Condé Nast runs multiple editions of its key magazines worldwide. There are about 25 or 30 Vogue editions globally; at that time, there were around 20 GQs. This was 2011, during the Medvedev years, and there was a sense that Russia had a chance for liberalization and a more or less normal future. It was a fascinating time between the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street and similar protests taking place in Russia. I really wanted a front-row seat, especially since I knew some people involved in the movement. So my wife Lily and I took our one-year-old daughter and moved to Moscow, where we stayed for about two-and-a-half years.

And then, in another twist, you found yourself part of the film world—in Russia.

By mid-2014, it was clear that Russia was on a completely different path [from what many of us] had imagined. And I was really burned out on the job. I quit GQ shortly after Russia annexed Crimea, moved to Berlin, went back to screenwriting as a kind of therapy, and got sucked in. For a while, my family bounced between Berlin and Moscow, making film and TV in Russia even though we no longer wanted to live there.

At that point, things were still pretty wide open. We could still do original, uncensored work, including co-productions with countries like Germany, France, the UK—all of which we did. I know it’s a bit hypocritical, but everyone has their own red lines; for me, Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 was a definitive red line. Sometimes I wish it had been 2014. The more I learn about earlier phases of the war, the more I realize that all the signs were there from the start.

You wrote about your experiences in Russia in a memoir, Dressed Up for a Riot: Misadventures in Putin’s Moscow. Were you writing it while you lived there?

From the moment we landed in Russia, I knew it was going to be a very strange and unique period. So, for the first and only time, I kept a daily diary. Every evening, I’d come home and write down what happened, without any literary flourishes—just the people I met, how I felt. Later, I compiled and edited those diaries into the book.

What are your thoughts on that memoir now? Do you think it captures the full scope of the time and place?

I’m very happy that the book exists and that I had the opportunity to put my experiences down on paper. But I don’t think anyone should use it as a definitive guide to that time and place because it’s—intentionally—limited to my own very weird and privileged optics. A lot of the reporting in that book reflects only a very thin slice of Russian society, by design: it’s basically about hobnobbing with the Moscow elites at a time when the entire culture was slowly gripped by growing insanity. One of the fun things that happened afterward was that two comedy writers I greatly admire, Dave Finkel and Brett Baer, ended up writing a sitcom pilot based on it. This is an amazing experience for an author—to see your life turned into comedy. But then, of course, the war in Ukraine began, and all TV projects involving Russia as a setting were justifiably frozen.

You’ve published a contemporary satirical novel and a political memoir. Pivoting to the spy genre doesn’t seem like an obvious choice. What led you in that direction?

I’ve loved the genre my entire life. I admire its roots, from novels like Graham Greene’s The Confidential Agent (1939) to those of John le Carré—who is one of my favorite writers of all time and a great satirist of British manners. The spy thriller is an amazing umbrella genre because it allows you to blend in satire, farce, horror, etc.

Here’s why it took me so long to write my own: I told Binky that I didn’t want to do a twist on the genre, I didn’t want to riff on it. I wanted to do the thing itself—to write something that could withstand comparison with books by people like Robert Ludlum, Tom Clancy, Nelson DeMille. That was the goal, along with bringing my generation’s perspective and my experience to it. It took living in Russia and Berlin for me to finally figure out how.

What were the personal experiences that you brought into The Collaborators?

So many spy novels are written by retired spies. They know their world well, but they don’t necessarily know the places where their novels are set. I had the opposite problem. How does a non-spy write a spy novel that feels true to life? My attempt was to lean all the way into the most bizarre parts of my own biography. Ironically, my first genre novel is also the most autobiographical and personal thing I’ve ever written.

When I started writing, I gave myself two hard rules. The first was that no scene would take place in a location where I haven’t lived for at least a few months. The second rule was that no character would speak a language I didn’t speak myself—and if I spoke it badly, so would they. The book’s geography—Riga, New York, Moscow, Berlin, Los Angeles, Thailand, the south of Portugal—is basically the geography of my life. The only place I haven’t been to is the setting of the 1980s flashback, the Soviet Jewish refugee camp outside of Rome. My family moved to the US a couple of years after these camps closed, so that part of the book relies on interviews with people who went through that experience.

What did you start with? Did you have a sense of what the plot might be right away?

I started with the main character, Ari Falk, and with identifying my own wants as a reader. I remember watching some iteration of Jack Ryan when something struck me: here’s an iconic character who’s been played by some of the most iconic actors in Hollywood, and I don’t know what his favorite band or movie is. And I thought of this as a challenge. The clandestine world is not this parallel universe where people are just their jobs. I know people who work in the intelligence community, and they’re like the rest of us. So I wanted to create spy characters in their thirties, with “normal” millennial interests, perspectives, a healthy skepticism about what their organization does.

Then I slowly figured out the plot. The real-life Ryanair incident from 2021 was a huge inspiration for me—the opening scene of the book basically recreates it verbatim. Anyone who follows the news will recognize details from that incident. The same goes for most of the major action set pieces in the book: nearly all are based on real events, actual headlines. Even the climax of the Moscow car chase—where hundreds of Yandex Taxis are summoned to the same address—is something that really happened. (There was an unexplained incident in 2022 when someone hacked Yandex Taxi and called hundreds of cabs to one address; people are still debating whether it was a Ukrainian op or just a prank.) So, a lot of what might seem invented is pulled straight from real life, which then gave me the freedom to make up my own connections between these events.

Did you consult anyone from the CIA, or perhaps even the GRU, while working on the novel?

A lot of this is based on open sources. I do have friends and friends of friends in the intelligence community—on the US side, in case this needs to be clarified. But I approached them only after finishing the book, to check for inconsistencies. This felt like a healthier dynamic. I also needed some guidance when it came to guns (I’m not a gun guy myself). There’s a plot point that hinges on a specific quality of a particular handgun. And I had a German friend check my German. Everything I know about the GRU org chart comes from a few public sources, especially an article by Daniil Turovsky in Meduza, an independent Russian-language outlet.

How did you keep track of all the characters and their movements?

I had a lot of supplementary documents—for example, a 40-page Google Doc that’s just a calendar of everything that happens: an hour-by-hour account of where everyone is and what time it is. Once you start with the globe-trotting, the time zones alone become a huge headache. I pretend-booked every flight and train that my characters take. Every time someone crossed a border, I needed to know what visa they were on. A lot of spy fiction forgets this part.