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tagonist of Roth’s 1969 novel Portnoy’s Complaint , is physiologically incapable of consummating things the one time he gives a Jewish lady a try.) The very contours of the authoritar- ianism Shteyngart imagines in Vera are themselves mid-century if not older. The new overclass consists of Ameri- cans whose ancestors, as a teacher ex- plains it, “‘landed on the shores of our continent before or during the Rev- olutionary War but were exception- al enough not to arrive in chains.’” Daughters of the American Revo- lution. Mayflower stock. These are phrases one does not hear so much in the 2020s: this standard for nativism would exclude even Donald Trump. VERISIMILITUDE — an author’s capacity to conjure characters and scenes convincingly— is often in- voked as a measure of artistic success. And yet: Vera is fantastic, but Vera is not a particularly convincing ten -year- old, or at least, she is unlike nearly all ten-year-olds. Where exactly she sits on the atypical-to-implausible spec- trum is for each reader to decide, and would probably take a child psycholo- gist to answer. (I lean toward implau- sible.) But it is Vera’s exceptionality that makes the book work. She is less a child than a literary device — an out- side observer uniquely positioned to cut through a parent’s BS and see them for what they are. Vera mainly functions as a conduit to the story of Igor, who keeps sneak- ing in through her experiences. Vera, for instance, keeps a log of things adults say that she doesn’t under- stand, her Things I Still Need to Know Diary . These terms and expressions (“pontificate,” “whipped out,” “done a number,” etc.) appear sprinkled throughout the book; the list-making comes across less like the behaviour of a language-oriented child and more
plished enough to be an art monster. Vera’s function is to unknowingly lam- poon her self-important father, and to do so all the more cuttingly, via inno- cent observations about him. She no- tices his hypocrisy but doesn’t flag it as such: “Daddy hated the private park on account of he was ‘of the left,’ but he also used it frequently to escape from Anne Mom.” And she has a front-row seat to his low points, as household members do: “Daddy was by the win- dow, his face slightly orange. He was smoking one of his ‘special cigarettes.’” Vera is both in awe of her father and impressed by adults generally. She can’t wait to join their world, or possibly sees herself as already in it: “They were having a super-adult con- versation, the kind of conversation Vera loved, her mind becoming a re- cording device for all the incredible new words, all the postures and ex- pressions.” This is where some of the implausibility enters in: unlike most actual children, who (in my experi- ence with them, and having been one) find their own parents ancient bores, at most intermittently interesting, chil- dren who are literary devices in ser- vice of stories about grown-ups pick up on every nuance of the middle-aged world. It’s not that it’s implausible for a kid to care at all about grown-up stuff. Many children have professional as- pirations (i.e., answers to what do you want to be when you grow up? ). They may also have an interest in their care- givers’ earning a living, once they’re old enough to connect this to their own comfort and the adults’ stress levels. But it pains Vera not to understand, in more detail, her parents’ financ- es and workplace travails. Please, fa- ther, tell me more about the office , said no child ever (apart from Bea in Amy Schwartz’s delightful 1982 children’s book, Bea and Mr. Jones , in which a kindergartener swaps places with her
VERA, OR FAITH By Gary Shteyngart Random House, July 2, 2025
like how an adult would approach learning a foreign language. Along the way, in a parenthetical that adds to this effect: “Daddy supplied a lot of the words for her Things I Still Need to Know Diary .” What, then, is the reader to make of Igor? He’s an egotistical intellectual who gets annoyed at “tourists” for not recognizing him in a neighbourhood restaurant and has a side gig of sorts as a fountain-pen-collecting “man- fluencer.” (Shteyngart collects watch- es.) He’s a selfish jerk who takes the business class seat on trips while his family roughs it in coach. As a young man, he published a book of essays called Kindertransport (a reference to Nazism reminiscent of the novelist Karl Ove Knausgård’s choice to call his multivolume 2009–2011 autofic- tion My Struggle , itself a reference to Mein Kampf ), copies of which are now prominently displayed on a bookshelf in their home, serving as a shrine to what once was. To the great artist that could have been. But Igor, unlike Knausgård or, for that matter, Shteyngart, is not accom-
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