Gary Shteyngart’s newest book, Vera, or Faith, is maybe the most heartfelt satire ever written
By Zach Hagadone
Reader Staff
The word vera is alternately translated as a Latin root for “truth” or, in the Slavic context, “faith.” That’s a good — if deceptively basic — way to begin contemplating author Gary Shteyngart’s sixth novel Vera, or Faith, which hit bookshelves July 8 under the aegis of Penguin Random House.
Beginning at the beginning, Shteyngart’s choice of “Vera” for his 10-year-old protagonist’s name is compelling for those linguistic reasons. That is to say, it suggests that “faith” is synonymous with “truth.” And that’s where we begin. Sort of. Maybe. It’s complicated.
Vera, or Faith is a family tragic-dramedy, focused on the eponymous daughter of a crumbling union between her father — a stubby, hairy and thwarted intellectual magazine editor from a Russian immigrant family — and her stepmother, who is his opposite in many ways: tall, blonde and of pure-bred Protestant white American “Boston Brahmin” stock with roots back to the earliest days of the republic.
They live in a near-term, AI-dominated and authoritarian future in what the father in the novel describes as the kind of New York apartment inhabited by the “merely rich.” The mom — rendered as “Anne Mom,” to denote that Vera doesn’t consider her “Mom Mom,” as in her biological mother — has a “small trust” from her family, which helps keep the family afloat as dad flails around with his failing magazine and scrums about with his Russian expat pals… with dubious results.
That means Anne Mom stays home and cares for stepdaughter Vera and her younger half-brother Dylan, who is the child of “Daddy” (a.k.a. Igor Schmulkin) and Anne Mom (a.k.a. Anne Bradford — as in those Bradfords, of hoary New England repute).
Vera’s Mom Mom was from South Korea, and disappeared right after she was born. Vera has never met Mom Mom and knows next to nothing about her, since Daddy won’t talk about it. In her absence, she worships Daddy — excusing all his many flaws while studying everything he says and does.
Vera is brilliant, and a list-maker. She has lists of words she doesn’t understand and endeavors to learn them (often coming from her dad, with his “famous sarcasm,” which gets him invited on various TV talk shows as a commentator, and whom no less than Bloomberg once wrote is someone who might have to be taken “seriously.”)
However, he’s on a downward trajectory and he and Anne Mom fight all the time. Shteyngart conjures their apartment as a battleground: there’s the parental bedroom, next to which Dylan lays down his golden curls to sleep, and a large living room that’s referred to as the “Maginot Line” — a zone of offense and defense, in which the family goes to battle to win or lose by inches but cutting to the bone with every sortie.
Vera has a list of reasons why Daddy and Anne Mom should stay married. Vera is miserable.
Her bedroom is on the other side of the Maginot Line, removed from everyone except her AI-powered chessboard “Kaspie” for company. Named for Russian chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov (one of Vera’s only wall decorations is a poster of Kasparov), Kaspie is a central character in the novel, as is Stella, the AI self-driving family car, who mimics the voice and attitude of whomever has last been in the driver’s seat. This becomes important.
To say that Vera is lonely and dispossessed is an understatement. Between Anne Mom and Daddy’s trench warfare and Dylan’s privileged little-boy assholery, there’s also the drumbeat of nativist fascism outside her Manhattan bedroom window, as the country is on the brink of a constitutional convention to grant “exceptional Americans” three-fifths of a vote in all elections.
Though Shteyngart started working on this book long before Donald Trump and JD Vance were elected as president and vice president, respectively, the same idea was floated in reality by Vance in early July.
Put simply, the notion is that people who can trace their lineage to at least the American Revolutionary period (and didn’t “come in chains,” as Shtenygart put it) should have more political clout than those whose progenitors came to North America later.
As Vance said — though widening the lens of acceptable Americanness to the Civil War — those people “have a hell of a lot more claim over America.”
Vera is terrified that this will render her stateless (she’s 10 and worried about this, God bless her but damn all the rest of us adults); meanwhile, much of the interior of the country has border access controlled by troopers checking for the sexual activity and/or development of women and/or sex trafficking, all in a moral panic that looks a lot like our current muddle-minded, hypocritical political climate.
“Life imitates art,” as Oscar Wilde wrote, and in Vera, or Faith that sentiment is truer than ever. It might be the most — maybe only — heartfelt satire ever written. The dystopian nature of the story hums beneath the major narrative, which is really about a girl, her family and a broken world that ultimately retains hope (or “faith” and “truth”), despite everything.
The book hits every note: from the tortured liminality of immigration to the breakup of an American family (its own liminality) to the quiet intrusion of artificial intelligence into every aspect of everyday life to the pure-hearted human story of a little girl trying to find her way in a world full of adults who don’t know what they’re doing while still being expected to be better than them — it’s a smorgasbord of ideas while remaining full of heart and should be on everyone’s summer reading list.
I dare you not to cry in the last chapter.
Find it where you find books.
