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WHEN I LEARNED that a new Gary Shteyngart novel was coming out, I fig- ured I’d be reading it, being a Shteyn- gart near-completist. (Top picks: the 2006 novel Absurdistan and the 2021 New Yorker essay “A Botched Cir- cumcision and Its Aftermath.”) But af- ter seeing in publicity materials that Vera, or Faith was about a family, “told through the eyes of their wondrous ten-year-old daughter,” I hesitated. A child was dubious enough, but a “won- drous” one? This sounded cloying. But Shteyngart doesn’t do cloying — at least, he hadn’t thus far. What was I in store for? Vera is many things, but cloying isn’t one of them. This is in part be- cause it’s not actually narrated by Vera, the ten-year-old protagonist, but rath- er by a third-person narrator who puts us in Vera’s thoughts, adding an adult’s knowing edge. “Wondrous eyes of a child” notwithstanding, the narrator knows that “Daddy’s special juice” refers to alcohol, even if Vera herself is oblivious. While this stylistic choice can, at times, read as gently mocking childhood naïveté, it preempts any accusations of sentimentality. It’s a book about the frustrations of child- hood, when it can seem like there’s a world just out of reach, but also about the grimness of that world. Who, then, is Vera? She’s an anx- ious loner, abandoned by her Korean- American mother and being raised by a stepmother, Anne Bradford—Anne Mom, to Vera — who prefers her biological (and white) son, Dylan. Igor Shmulkin, a.k.a. Daddy, is an American Jew who immigrated from the former USSR and is quickly recognizable as a Shteyngart alter ego (similarities: age,
Kids Say the Darndest Things Gary Shteyngart’s Vera, or Faith finds the humour in dystopia by PHOEBE MALTZ BOVY
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