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heritage, profession, educational his- tory). Daddy isn’t a particularly en- gaged father, preferring to squabble with Anne Mom and lament career set- backs. Vera is a genius at a Manhattan school for the gifted. She’s seen as a know-it-all by her classmates (they call her “Facts Girl”) and struggles to make friends. Miserable at home, Vera even- tually goes on a quest for her Korean birth mother. It is a book of missions, each chapter title beginning, “She Had to …” (As in, “She Had to Tell Anne Mom the Truth.”) If 2021 ’s Our Country Friends was Shteyngart’s great American Jewish COVID-19 novel, Vera, or Faith is the same for the MAGA 2.0 era. The book is set in a near-future dystopian New York (the arrival of COVID-19 vac- cines is a decade in the past, putting this circa 2030 ), at a time when men- strual cycles are checked lest people cross state lines for abortions. There’s a Trump-ish regime: it’s not called that, but it both is and isn’t that, in the manner of a dream where something is and isn’t quite like in real life. “Pi- ous Jews,” whom the secular Jewish Igor calls “Hasidics,” support the new- ly dominant nativist movement. They join “ MOTH ” (“March of the Hated”) processions: MAGA -rally-like parades that sometimes pass by Vera’s New York City home. Igor thinks these far- right Jews are being set up, in part be- cause they are followed, in the parades, by a group of white working-class (or decked out to look as such) children, walking behind a sign saying, “THEY HAVE TAKEN MY FUTURE AWAY FROM ME.” Igor senses antisemitism, but this is not a book that will say, outright, that that’s what’s going on. It’s instead pre- sented thusly: “When [Vera] asked Daddy what the sign meant, he said that ‘they’ was a clever reference to the ‘Hasidics’ marching ahead of the ‘benighted white working-class kids,’
a ‘classic trope’ according to Daddy (the word ‘trope’ headlined her Things I Still Need to Know Diary ).” Vera may not know, but the narrator sure knows what to highlight, and Igor just might have a point. There’s something about the light- ness of tone — even when the sub- ject matter is serious — that makes Vera read as speculative rather than prognosticating: it works best as a comment on (an indictment of) the world we’re already in rather than a forecast of what may lie ahead. Two of the characters are AI entities: one (Kaspie, after Garry Kasparov) an electronic chess set that functions as Vera’s confidant, the other (Stella) a self- While the sylistic choices in the book can, at times, read as gently mocking childhood naïveté, it preempts any accusations of sentimentality. Vera is about the frustrations of childhood, when it can seem like there’s a world just out of reach, but also about the grimness of that world.
driving car capable of holding up its own end of a conversation. Vera asks her chessboard what “horseshoe” means, wanting to know about horse- shoe theory in political science but not knowing to ask that, and Kaspie answers, “‘A horseshoe is a product de- signed to protect horse hooves from wear. Horseshoes originated …’” The woes of an AI BFF . Even if such things are not technologically inconceivable, they’re presented in a funny, silly way that makes the effect closer to Woody Allen’s 1973 film Sleeper — comic sci-fi with a Jewish twist — than to anything one imagines a real-life tech bro com- ing up with. You’re free to read this as a book about the potential trajectory of the self-driving car, but that would be to miss the point. Along with Taffy Brodesser-Akner ( Fleishman Is in Trouble, Long Island Compromise ), Shteyngart is a living, prolific middle-aged writer who nev- ertheless produces the kind of novels that feels not just American-Jewish but mid-century American-Jewish. They create fictional universes rife with neu- roses and nose jobs and shiksas , whose resonance for Jews today may be lim- ited but whose motifs align their au- thors with the American-Jewish canon: Allen, Philip Roth, all the way up to Seinfeld in the 1990 s. Igor’s female partners are, succes- sively, a Korean-American woman and a WASP, but we’re perhaps not quite in a world of happenstance intermar- riage. In a 2006 Forward interview with Mark Oppenheimer, Shteyngart elaborated on his own sexual aver- sion to Jewish women: “I kissed one once — she tasted like me. I couldn’t take it.” The remark struck me at the time less as upsetting to me as a Jew- ish woman (I’m good, thanks) than as a kind of bat signal to the Roth-Allen nostalgists that a tradition lives on. (Alexander Portnoy, shiksa -mad pro-
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