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New York Times
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- New York Times
The Future Looks Dark, but Familiar, in Gary Shteyngart's New Book
VERA, OR FAITH, by Gary Shteyngart 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. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Boston Globe
01-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Boston Globe
In Gary Shteyngart's latest, a wise child trying to survive a near-future New York
'Vera, or Faith' is told from the perspective of 10-year-old Vera, who lives in an anonymous incarnation of New York City with her Russian immigrant father Igor Shmulkin and her Boston Brahmin stepmother Anne Bancroft, whom she calls Anne Mom. The child believes her Korean biological mother left because she was a 'tough baby,' and, like many kids of divorce, feels responsible for keeping her current parents happily together. Vera suffers 'intense anxiety,' partly because of her demanding Upper East Side elementary school and partly because her overbearing parents micromanage her every emotion and interaction, trying to ensure her likability by hammering into her juvenile head the importance of 'knowing your audience.' Absorbing these pressures without possessing the ability to process them, the girl is laser-focused on pleasing her parents by becoming a 'woman in STEM' who attends Swarthmore College. Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up Vera's parents do love her and her younger half-brother, but don't necessarily love parenting. Anne Mom acts perpetually put-upon by the demands of childrearing and is additionally frustrated by Vera's unconditional adoration of her often absent father, someone who is, even when present, absentminded, at best good for an encouraging bromide thrown out while staring into his phone. Bloomberg News once considered Daddy someone who 'might need to [be taken] seriously,' but these days, the controversial lefty intellectual is focused on trying to resurrect an 'old magazine people had completely forgotten about,' even if it means selling — or selling out — to a Rhodesian billionaire. Related : Advertisement Aside from the challenges of home life, Vera is growing up in a world where 'Cycle Through' states stop women and girls to monitor their menstrual cycles and city streets routinely resound with the rage of MOTHs, or Marches of the Hated, put on by aggrieved, working-class white people who feel they've been left behind. This downtrodden majority bemoans their cruel fate despite a proposed constitutional amendment, known as Five-Three, that would give weighted votes to the 'new marginalized class,' defined as anyone who can trace their ancestry to 'those who landed on the shores of our continent before or during the Revolutionary War but were exceptional enough not to arrive in chains.' (Shteyngart's inversion of the Constitution's original Three-Fifths clause is a deplorable but creatively inspired invention.) Anticipating the upcoming constitutional conventions, Vera's school schedules a mock debate on Five-Three, with Vera and her classmate Yumi, the daughter of Japanese diplomats, assigned to argue the amendment's merits. While always eager to excel academically, Vera is more thrilled at the opportunity to befriend someone besides Kaspie, her Korean-made chess computer. (The novel's technological prognostications, which feel less imminent than its political changes, include AI devices that provide genuine — if still godforsaken — friendship and autonomous cars that navigate urban grids and cross-country trips.) Related : Advertisement As should be clear, Vera is preternaturally precocious, fueled by logging unfamiliar words and facts into her 'Things I Still Need to Know' diary, an ingenious plot device that allows Shteyngart to write a novel for adults from the point of view of a child by putting in quotes anything Vera is parroting from grown-ups, be it individual words, esoteric concepts, euphemisms, or curse words. He also brilliantly apes the agile, almost hyperactive, sponge brain of a child, peppering Vera's thoughts with continual callbacks and recapitulations. Anybody familiar with Shteyngart's writing, or even his social media or Substack, knows that he has a clever wit, which is on full display here, despite operating within a world that feels drawn from the sweaty fantasies of those who authored 'Project 2025.' Along with winking allusions to cultural titans like Mike Nichols and Vladimir Nabokov, whose indispensable wife Vera gets a shoutout as 'a genius herself,' there are innumerable nods to New York City esoterica, my favorite of which is the fact that Daddy pays Vera to inspect copies of 'The Power Broker' in other people's homes to see if the tome has a cracked spine or is just for show. Vera, like too many children with comparatively much less privileged lives in our real world, is forced to grow up much too quickly, but what Shteyngart does by the end of the novel, and perhaps does better than any other current American author, is pinpoint a glimmer of hopefulness in the seemingly impenetrable gloom. His canny fiction doesn't make me any happier to be living through the times he is memorializing, but it does provide commiseration and amusement, maybe even a bit of faith in the possibility of something better on some distant horizon. Advertisement VERA, OR FAITH By Gary Shteyngart Random House, 256 pages, $28 Cory Oldweiler is a freelance writer.
