In author Gary Shteyngart’s sixth novel Vera, or Faith, 10-year-old Vera Bradford-Shmulkin swoops through a moment-to-moment life lived between parenthesis. She keeps word lists—“statuses,” “special juice,” “pendulous bosom,” Nostradamus,” “sonorous,”—and a Things I Still Need to Know Diary. Her thoughts are obsessive and subject to multiple “have to’s” and “exceptional American” expectations delivered by her parents. She’s a wondrous soul looking for connection.
There are, in her family, a missing Korean birthmother, Mom Mom; her struggling Russian-Jewish father, Daddy; her WASP mother, Anne Mom; and fair-haired Dylan, Vera’s half-brother. Cast by them and other characters into a cesspool of anxiety, she undertakes a wildly entertaining and sometimes tragic search for identity and love that is profoundly relevant in today’s social media-driven world. (Shteyngart will be in conversation with writer Daniel Handler at JCCSF, Tue/4, 7pm. More info here.)
From an emotional perspective, each of the book’s 256-pages packs a mixed martial arts-style gut punch: a perfect metaphorical expression of contemporary life’s bewildering mix of humor, irony, violence, racism, and bias surrounding physical differences and neurodiversity.
A well-known chronicler of adult anxieties, often pushed into a level of surreal and hilarious absurdism (Super Sad True Love Story, Absurdistan, Little Failure), the Soviet-born, New York-based novelist told 48 Hills over email, “I have had children in my novels before but I’ve never set a whole book from the perspective of a child. It reminded me of my own childhood quite a bit, the difficulty of making a friend, trying to figure out language (although Vera has the advantage of being born to an English-speaking household).
“Also having a child myself and seeing the way he and his peers are growing up in a world becoming ever more cruel and uncertain reminded me in some ways of growing up in the last years of the Soviet Union.”
Vera displays characteristics of a person on the autism spectrum, although Shteyngart never identifies the condition specifically. Inviting him to speak about his experience and interactions with neurodivergent individuals, he said, “Autism has been a subject of mine for several books. I feel very close to autistic people and have been honored to having many in my life. It’s a subject that has been coming up lately especially given the ridiculous views of RFK, Jr. and other people who have no understanding of the subject.”
This latest volume radiates with Vera’s infectious yet clear-eyed optimism about keeping an incredibly diverse family together in a country that’s falling apart. In writing through the eyes of child, Shteyngart unlocks new avenues for his exhilarating prose. While winning and losing in life—be it friends, one’s faith, or the discovery of false illusions held about an admired person—Vera helps us keep believing that love may be “just around the corner” for everyone.
GARY SHTEYNGART in conversation with Daniel Handler, Tue/4, 7pm, JCCSF. More info here.
