Latest news with #Shteyngart
Winnipeg Free Press
19-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Winnipeg Free Press
There's something about Gary
Since his 2002 novel The Russian Debutante's Handbook, Shteyngart has established himself as one of America's foremost satirists, often aiming his whip-smart literary barbs at characters not entirely unlike himself. (He showed off this skill to great effect in his sole book-length work of non-fiction, the 2014 memoir Little Failure.) The Russian-born American novelist is nimble, quick to respond to current events in his fiction — his 2010 novel Super Sad True Love Story was set against the backdrop of the 2008 financial crisis, his 2018 novel Lake Success is set in the days before the first Donald Trump administration and his last novel, 2021's Our Country Friends, chronicled an eccentric group from in and around New York who retreat to a rural home to ride out the pandemic. This time around, Shteyngart has set a potential coming-of-age novel in a near-future (but eerily familiar) dystopian America as it descends into totalitarianism. In Vera, or Faith, precocious 10-year-old Vera Bradford-Shmulkin takes centre stage as she struggles with keeping her family together while working to uncover the truth about her Korean-born birth mother. Brigitte Lacombe photo Gary Shteyngart's fiction often respond to current events — his last novel, 2021's Our Country Friends, followed friends who retreated to a rural home to wait out the pandemic. Vera (the Russian word for faith) lives in New York with her Russian-born Jewish father Igor, an editor at a literary magazine (and Shteyngartian stand-in), his WASPy lefty wife Anne (Anne Mom, to Vera) and Vera's raffish younger half-brother Dylan. Vera's birth mother, who she calls Mom Mom, hasn't been in the picture for as long as Vera can remember. Wise beyond her years, Vera longs to become a woman in STEM when she gets older. She keeps a diary of unknown words and phrases she hears uttered at home by her father and stepmother. (More on this in a bit.) A nervous and awkward child, Vera's an outcast at school; her best friend is an AI-driven automated chess board named Kaspie (after Garry Kasparov) that lives in a drawer in her bedroom. At school, Vera is chosen to debate a classmate over a proposed Five-Three constitutional amendment that would give those who 'landed on the shores of our continent before or during the Revolutionary War' but didn't arrive in chains (read: white Americans) a vote worth five-thirds of everyone else's votes. The teacher assigns Vera and Yumi, the daughter of a Japanese diplomat, the pro Five-Three argument, which spurs a burgeoning friendship Vera has been so desperately craving. Between debate prep sessions, Yumi helps Vera search for clues about her birth mother online. Meanwhile, Igor (called Daddy throughout) grapples with the on-again, off-again potential sale of the magazine to a Rhodesian billionaire, sending him spiraling into a world of booze, doom-scrolling in his underwear and pot smoking. Anne Mom hosts a salon for other well-off anti-Five-Three women at which Igor is to speak, but he's a no-show, sending the family dynamic further south. When Vera covertly follows her father to a secret meeting she thinks has something to do with Mom Mom's health and wherabouts, she discovers something far more sinister that will have significant consequences to the Bradford-Shmulkin household. Yumi and Vera do eventually uncover some information about Mom Mom, and after having spent most of our time in and around the family apartment and school, Shteyngart sends the reader on a road trip with Vera across state lines — where patrol guards make women take a blood test going in and out of the state to prove they've not had an abortion — before a wildly action-packed twist of a final act. The book is written in the third person, following Vera quite closely. Each chapter is titled 'She Had to…' followed by her task in the chapter ('She Had to Tell Anne Mom the Truth,' 'She Had to Figure Out if Daddy Was a Traitor,' etc.). Vera's observations of her family and classmates as well as her own ruminations on kissing, espionage, the looming Five-Three debate and more are a delight to read, with an innocence that wavers but doesn't break as her volatile situation at home and the foreboding state of the nation grow more ominous. Vera, or Faith Shteyngart's wry humour and literary chops are in fine form here. In describing a room in the apartment, he writes 'There was a total of seven enormous bookcases lining the living room, all attesting to Daddy's presence amid the intellectual 'caste'… Daddy liked his books in alphabetical order, but before big events Anne Mom paid Vera ten dollars to reorganize the books in such a way that authors 'of color' and women were 'front and center' at eye level.' Every Second Friday The latest on food and drink in Winnipeg and beyond from arts writers Ben Sigurdson and Eva Wasney. The tone throughout is a touch softer and the humour less barbed relative to Shteyngart's other novels — a sensible choice given we're following a somewhat naive child rather than than author's typically grumpy middle-aged literary type. Influence-wise there's a tip of the hat to Vladimir Nabokov here; the title alludes to 1969's Ada, or Ardor, where the reader meets a girl of a similar age to Vera (which is also the first name of Nabokov's wife). In recent interviews, Shteyngart has also referenced re-watching Kramer vs. Kramer, and wanting to do something similar but from a child's perspective along the lines of Henry James' 1897 volume What Maisie Knew. Regarding Vera's diary of unknown words and phrases: Every time a 'grown-up' term appears in the text, it's marked out by quotation marks. And while the odd such mark here and there wouldn't be an issue, it's not uncommon to find upwards of a half-dozen per page, which took this reader briefly out of the narrative flow on more than one occasion. (As an example: Go back and note the three terms in quotation marks in the previously quoted passage in this review. In one sentence.) This minor quibble aside, Vera, or Faith's endearing 10-year-old hero manages to wins over the reader with her curiosity, her sensitivity and her smarts, with Shteyngart offering a glimmer of hope for humanity in ever-darkening times through his young protagonist. Free Press books editor Ben Sigurdson relates a bit too much to the grumpy, middle-aged literary type. Ben SigurdsonLiterary editor, drinks writer Ben Sigurdson is the Free Press's literary editor and drinks writer. He graduated with a master of arts degree in English from the University of Manitoba in 2005, the same year he began writing Uncorked, the weekly Free Press drinks column. He joined the Free Press full time in 2013 as a copy editor before being appointed literary editor in 2014. Read more about Ben. In addition to providing opinions and analysis on wine and drinks, Ben oversees a team of freelance book reviewers and produces content for the arts and life section, all of which is reviewed by the Free Press's editing team before being posted online or published in print. It's part of the Free Press's tradition, since 1872, of producing reliable independent journalism. Read more about Free Press's history and mandate, and learn how our newsroom operates. Our newsroom depends on a growing audience of readers to power our journalism. If you are not a paid reader, please consider becoming a subscriber. Our newsroom depends on its audience of readers to power our journalism. Thank you for your support.
Los Angeles Times
03-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
Gary Shteyngart's ‘Vera, or Faith' is a witty (and anxious) child-led tale about status in the Trump era
Vera, the heroine of Gary Shteyngart's sixth novel, 'Vera, or Faith,' is a whip-smart 10-year-old Manhattanite, but she's not quite smart enough to figure out her parents' intentions. Why is dad so concerned about 'status'? Why does her stepmom call some meals 'WASP lunches'? How come every time they visit somebody's house she's assigned to see if they have a copy of 'The Power Broker' on their shelves? She's all but doomed to be bourgeois and neurotic, as if a juvenile court has sentenced her to live in a New Yorker cartoon. Since his 2002 debut, 'The Russian Debutante's Handbook,' Shteyngart has proved adept at finding humor in the intersection of immigrant life, wealth and relationships, and 'Vera' largely sticks to that mix. But the cynicism that has always thrummed underneath his high-concept comedies — the dehumanizing algorithms, the rapacious finance system — is more prominent in this slim, potent novel. Vera is witnessing both the slow erosion of her parents' marriage along with the rapid decline of democracy in near-future America. Her precocity gives the novel its wit, but Shteyngart is also alert to the fact that a child, however bright, is fundamentally helpless. Not to mention desperate for her parents' affection, which is in short supply for Vera. Her father, the editor of a liberal intellectual magazine, seems constantly distracted by his efforts to court a billionaire to purchase it, while her stepmom is more focused on her son's ADHD and the family's rapidly dwindling bank account. Things are no better outside in the world, where a constitutional convention seems ready to pass an amendment awarding five-thirds voting rights for 'exceptional Americans.' (Read: white people.) Vera, the daughter of a Russian father and Korean mother, may be banished to second-class citizenry. Even worse, her school has assigned her to take the side of the 'five-thirders' in an upcoming classroom debate. So it's become urgent for her to understand the world just as it's become inexplicable. Shteyngart is stellar at showing just how alienated she's become: 'She knew kids were supposed to have more posters on their walls to show off their inner life, but she liked her inner life to stay inside her.' And she seems to be handling the crisis with more maturity than her father, who's drunk and clumsy in their home: 'If anyone needed to see Mrs. S., the school counselor with the master's in social work degree, it was Daddy.' It's a challenge to write from the perspective of a child without being arch or cutesy — stories about kids learning about the real world can degrade to plainspoken YA or cheap melodrama. Shteyngart is striving for something more supple, using Vera's point of view to clarify how adults become victims of their own emotional shutoffs, the way they use language to at once appear smart while covering up their feelings. 'Our country's a supermarket where some people just get to carry out whatever they want. You and I sadly are not those people,' Dad tells her, forcing her to unpack a metaphor stuffed full of ideology, economics, self-loathing and more. Every chapter in the book starts with the phrase 'She had to,' explaining Vera's various missions amid this dysfunction: 'hold the family together,' 'fall asleep,' 'be cool,' 'win the debate.' Kids like her have to be action-oriented; they don't have the privilege of adults' deflections. Small wonder, then, that her most reliable companion is an AI-powered chessboard, which offers direct answers to her most pressing questions. (One of Shteyngart's most potent running jokes is that adults aren't more clever than computers they command.) Once she falls into a mission to discover the truth about her birth mother, she becomes more alert to the world's brutal simplicity: 'The world was a razor cut … It would cut and cut and cut.' Shteyngart's grown-up kids' story has two obvious inspirations: One, as the title suggests, is Vladimir Nabokov's 1969 novel 'Ada, or Ardor,' the other Henry James' 1897 novel 'What Maisie Knew.' Both are concerned with childhood traumas, and if Shteyngart isn't explicitly borrowing their plots he borrows some of their gravitas, the sense that preteendom is a crucible for experiencing life's various crises. In its final chapters, the novel takes a turn that is designed to speak to our current moment, spotlighting the way that Trump-era nativist policies have brought needless harm to Americans. A country can abandon its principles, he means to say, just as a parent can abandon a child. But if 'Vera' suggests a particular vision of our particular dystopian moment, it also suggests a more enduring predicament for children, who live with the consequences of others' decisions but don't get a vote in them. 'There were a lot of 'statuses' in the world and each year she was becoming aware of more of them,' Vera observes. Children will have to learn them faster now. Athitakis is a writer in Phoenix and author of 'The New Midwest.'
Washington Post
02-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Washington Post
As usual, Gary Shteyngart's new novel arrives right on time
Few novelists risk jumping on the runaway horse of contemporary life as recklessly as Gary Shteyngart. For the fiction writer, stuck at the plodding speed of publishing, such a maneuver requires gauging both political velocity and cultural direction. And yet, book after book, Shteyngart arrives just where — and when — we need him to.
