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office-worker dad). Vera, however, is desperate to learn what will come of her father’s magazine, and knows all about how a “Rhodesian Billionaire” (detecting hints of Musk) can make or break it. Vera is aware of cliques and in- terpersonal drama among her class- mates, but it is adult-world tension that has her hooked. Her closest non- chessboard friend is Anne Mom’s col- lege friend Aunt Cecile. That’s whom Vera goes clothes shopping and gets a haircut with. That’s her confidante. Vera doesn’t just want her squabbling parents to make it work — she is next- level attentive to her father and step- mother’s marriage, down to the role Anne Mom’s trust fund plays in the union. Vera doesn’t put posters on her walls the way her peers do. There are children, and then there’s Vera. It’s hinted that she may be neurodi- verse in an unspecified and undiag- nosed manner (the hand-flapping, the weighted blanked). But the possible clinical explanations for her alienation from the mainstream culture of child- hood matter less than the fact of her outsider stance, and what that quality permits her to do for the novel. VERA IS (and, yes, subjectivity dis- claimer applies) hilarious. There’s a scene where classmates lightly bully Vera, prompting her to re- flect, “Adults didn’t have it any easier, she knew. ‘How many cocks do I have to suck to get this deal done?’ Daddy had said in the car, and even though this was surely a metaphor for some- thing involving their male chickens up in the country, it implied that Daddy’s status in the world was sometimes as precarious as her own.” This does not ring true for a ten- year-old, but as prose, it’s spectacular. And the idea that the new super- citizens — descendants of white co-
when determining a state’s popula- tion) but a phrasing that gives the il- lusion of a new overclass of moderate- ly short people (as in, five feet, three inches tall, what “five-three” is short- hand for in contexts other than this novel). It’s maybe not one of the book’s laugh-until-you-cry moments, but as a five-two, I got a kick out of it. I was also crying — though this time not from laughter—when I read the book’s ending, though this is only part- ly a testament to Shteyngart’s writing and the intensely moving scene that wraps up the story. It is also a com- ment on his uncanny premonitions (off only in specifics) about American authoritarianism and state violence. The ending is a profound defence of a multicultural vision of American identity— one that will sound heavy- handed if I try to describe it, but abso- lutely convinces on the page. Intentionally or not, the book reads like an homage to Anne Frank’s di- ary. Or, in keeping with the mid- century theme, like a nod to Roth’s nod to Frank in his 1979 novel, The Ghost Writer . Anne Mom, we learn, was born Ann, but added the “e” after a formative experience reading The Diary of a Young Girl . (She may be a self-righteous WASP with unchecked biases and a trust fund, but she means well.) Vera is slightly younger than Anne Frank, and the story isn’t writ- ten in the first person or the form of a diary. And, need this be stated, one is a comedic novel, the other the real-life journal of a girl murdered by the Nazis. But both are about girls living through scary and unpredictable eras, particu- larly for their kind. Both are about girls forced to grow up too quickly because their times are too grim and they’re too attuned to the world around them — girls whose only shot at some- thing approximating adulthood may be the here and now.
It is Vera’s very exceptionality that makes the book work. She is less a child than a literary device — a uniquely positioned outside observer.
lonial Americans — are something called “Five-Three” is not just a clev- er inversion of the Three-Fifths Com- promise (which saw enslaved people in the pre-emancipation United States ‘counted’ as three-fifths of a person
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