Book Review: Vera, or Faith by Gary Shteyngart

There is a line midway through Vera, or Faith, when the novel’s eponymous protagonist reflects that her family situation has become ‘worse than the time Daddy had gotten into a terrible fight with someone named Hannah Arendt, a fight he lost badly despite her being dead’, which reflects all that is best about Gary Shteyngart’s latest offering: his central character’s tender concern for her family’s wellbeing balanced by lines that are witty, well-weighted, and genuinely funny in their satire of 21st century America and the online world it has been so central to spawning. On the whole, it is true that the novel’s satirical and dystopian elements are inconsistent and often weak, but, for this reader at least, the depiction of a gifted ten-year-old with the weight of the world on her shoulders is more than compelling enough to overlook a bit of clunky wannabe Swiftianism.

Vera (which means Faith in Russian) finds herself at a pivotal moment in several histories: her own, as she tries to successfully make a friend, locate her birth mother, and generally build human connection more meaningful than that she shares with her AI chessboard Kaspie; her family’s, as she endeavours to keep her parents together while her father’s career as media intellectual/manfluencer is undermined by a distinctly Musk-y ‘Rhodesian billionaire’ and the father’s own rubbishness; and the USA’s, as the nation awaits the referendum that will decide on the adoption of a law giving 5/3 of a vote to every ‘exceptional’ (read: white and privileged) US citizen and thereby end democracy for good.

This is a world where semi-sentient self-driving cars can mimic their drivers and accuse elderly Korean immigrants of human trafficking their own grand-daughter (with the resultant men with very large guns that are obviously crucial in any satirical depiction of America). But it is also a world in which it is desperately difficult being ten, being smarter and simultaneously more ignorant and more powerless than those around you, being a spectator at your own family’s potential disintegration, being a step-child with a more stupid but potentially more fully loved and wanted younger sibling, and having to come to terms with real loss on several levels, including disillusionment about the father you have grown up idolising.

The first of these worlds is sometimes funny, sometimes perceptive, sometimes heavy-handed, usually underdrawn. The second also manages to be comic, but is also always vital, often moving, totally relatable, and resonant well beyond the novel’s relatively few pages. My suggestion is simple: enjoy what’s good about the satire, skim over what’s bad, and dwell lovingly in Vera’s world, which deserves your time, attention, and indeed your faith.