Book review: Plucky lead, passable novel

'Vera, or Faith' is written in breezy, readable prose that offers wry observations about family, love, sex, learning, culture wars, and the wider dynamics of American politics and society

Gary Shteyngart: We cheer on his protagonist Vera, but at times wonder what the author is aiming for. File picture: Cindy Ord/ The New York Times/ Getty

• Vera, or Faith 
• Gary Shteyngart 
• Atlantic Books, £16.99

Ten-year-old Jewish-Korean Vera Bradford-Shmulkin’s home life is dominated by selfish arguments between her Russian father Igor, a struggling leftist intellectual magazine editor, and her New England WASPy step-mother, who she calls Anne Mom, a Brown University graduate who hosts events for progressive causes.

What Vera really wants is to find her Korean birth mother, known as Mom Mom, who apparently left her father soon after Vera was born.

Gary Shteyngart’s sixth novel is written in breezy, readable prose that offers wry observations about family, love, sex, learning, culture wars, and the wider dynamics of American politics and society.

The novel’s comedy — and the novel is billed as comic — is generally of the clever-clever, upturned corner of the mouth variety, the kind which occasionally provokes a soft, vaguely approving snort of air.

According to Vera, her father’s sarcasm is ‘famous’, but like much of the humour in the novel, it is not especially biting (‘Russians gonna Russian’ he declares, timidly).

The novel’s strength is in the compelling character of Vera. Writing in the third person, Shteyngart lets the reader see Vera’s complex interior life without ever making her too self-aware.

She develops an amusing, confusing crush on her cool, sexy aunt Cecile. 

Adult phrases, which Vera doesn’t always fully understand, are placed in quotation marks. (This device is initially charming, but overuse soon becomes a slight nuisance to the eye). Nonetheless, Vera is smart, inquisitive, and aspiring.

Naturally, being brilliant and largely ignored by her parents, Vera is also highly anxious, and we can be assured that she is well on her way to achieving full-blown neurosis.

She frets about her grades, ponders her identity, wishes she knew more Russian and Korean, worries about her future college.

Her precociousness leads her to correct her maths teacher (although actually, Shteyngart makes an error — the teacher is correct, not Vera). 

Vera’s mix of youthful ambition and scholarly care provides irony. 

Throughout the novel, Vera diligently prepares for a school debate to put the case for the merits of a planned racist new law that will privilege the white Christian population, and, of course, disadvantage people like her.

Our focus on Vera allows Shteyngart’s picture of America to develop peripherally through glimpses of her parents’ lives, her own school life, and her interactions with her neighbours, relatives ,and artificial intelligence chessboard Kaspie.

As the novel unfolds, we find are in a near-future ‘postdemocratic’ America where there is hostility to LGBT rights, an increasing pervasiveness of technology, stricter information control, ideological interference in education, military grade policing, and general paranoia. 

In this emergent dystopia, countervailing forces cannot hold: the breakdown of Vera’s parents’ marriage signifies the dysfunctional coalition between progressive liberalism and socialism.

The tone significantly darkens towards the end of the novel. This shift does not come without a price. 

The first three quarters of the novel are enjoyable but the final part, where Vera sets out in an automated vehicle to find Mom Mom, involves some clunky gear changes and the plot is not altogether convincing.

Ultimately, Vera is a plucky character with a warm heart who we cheer on, but there is little sense that her future is bright, and one wonders what the author is aiming for.

If one point of the novel is to warn of the slide into a postdemocratic state, then Shteyngart’s book may simply appeal to those who share that feeling and want their sentiments confirmed.

Vera, or Faith is a passably fine novel that is not particularly effectual, not particularly impotent, not particularly funny, not particularly serious, not particularly well or badly made, not particularly anything.