Gary Shteyngart's ‘Vera, or Faith' is a witty (and anxious) child-led tale about status in the Trump era

Los Angeles Times

2 days ago

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.'