The Future Looks Dark, but Familiar, in Gary Shteyngart's New Book
One reason Gary Shteyngart's shtick has worn so well is that he's an insistent self-satirist. A few years after publishing his manic-impressive first novel, 'The Russian Debutante's Handbook' (2002), he lampooned it in 'Absurdistan,' his second. The novel, written by 'Jerry Shteynfarb,' is referred to as 'The Russian Arriviste's Hand Job.' It's not a subtle joke, but people can become fond of artists who are aware enough to stay two beats ahead of their detractors.
Shteyngart's new novel, 'Vera, or Faith,' offers us another of his many stand-ins. His name is Igor Shmulkin. He's a writer and magazine editor in Manhattan who might put you in mind of David Remnick — if Remnick were Russian, grievously depressed, flatulent and rumpled, carried hipster satchels and smoked a lot of pot. He's like Shteyngart in that he's a martini super-enthusiast and an online 'manfluencer' in the world of expensive pens, the way Shteyngart is for flashy watches.
The best thing about Shmulkin — for the reader, at any rate — is that he's a bookshelf spy and a bookshelf fraud. At other people's homes, he orders his kids to surveil the host's copy of Robert Caro's 'The Power Broker' to see if the spine is broken. Before his own parties, he pays them to rearrange his books so that those by women and people of color are at eye level, to better polish his injustice-righting credentials.
We're not allowed to get too close to Shmulkin, perhaps for good reason. This slight, only semi-involving novel is one of Shteyngart's darkest. It offers us a futuristic, dystopian version of America. The unthinkable has become the inevitable. Yet dystopias have become the pre-chewed meat at the end of every novelist's fork.
This story is owned instead by Shmulkin's 10-year-old daughter, Vera. She's a handful — bright, anxious, lonely, working to keep her splintering family together. One of her closest companions is a chess simulator, Kaspie, named after her hero, the Russian chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov.
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