Best-selling author Gary Shteyngart writes about the modern world writ large, and he’s never been afraid to delve into politics. He does it again to great effect with his newest novel, Vera, or Faith — this time from a child’s perspective.
Ten-year-old Vera is a charmingly precocious Korean American girl growing up in a privileged Manhattan household. Her father is a political pundit and struggling editor of Russian-Jewish heritage. His wife, whom Vera refers to as “Anne Mom,” is a progressive blue blood from Boston. Vera doesn’t remember anything about her birth mom, or “Mom Mom,” but yearns to know more.
Her first priority, though, is finding a friend. Vera’s relentless curiosity and almost debilitating anxiety make her the object of bullying at school, where the kids call her “Facts Girl.” At home, she finds comfort in an AI-powered chess computer named Kaspie, which offers life advice along with his chess moves. And while Vera focuses on her “Things I Still Need to Know” diary, the world around her is devolving into a totalitarian nightmare.
A new Constitutional Convention is in the works, where representatives will vote on a measure to give certain Americans a five-thirds vote — those who can trace their heritage back to the American Revolution. In other words, not Vera. Reproductive rights have also gone full-scale Handmaid's Tale, with checkpoints that track women of child-bearing age.
During a political salon in her home, Anne Mom tells the crowd: “We thought the pain of what was happening in this country wouldn’t come to our doorstep, but it has.” Shteyngart manages to illustrate that pain in a moving fable of one struggling family in a broken world.
It’s smart and sad and funny and disturbing, with a nod to What Maisie Knew by Henry James. A masterful story worthy of discussion.
