VERA, OR FAITH, by Gary Shteyngart
One reason Gary Shteyngart’s shtick has worn so well is that he’s an insistent self-satirist. A few years after publishing his manic-impressive first novel, “The Russian Debutante’s Handbook” (2002), he lampooned it in “Absurdistan,” his second. The novel, written by “Jerry Shteynfarb,” is referred to as “The Russian Arriviste’s Hand Job.” It’s not a subtle joke, but people can become fond of artists who are aware enough to stay two beats ahead of their detractors.
Shteyngart’s new novel, “Vera, or Faith,” offers us another of his many stand-ins. His name is Igor Shmulkin. He’s a writer and magazine editor in Manhattan who might put you in mind of David Remnick — if Remnick were Russian, grievously depressed, flatulent and rumpled, carried hipster satchels and smoked a lot of pot. He’s like Shteyngart in that he’s a martini super-enthusiast and an online “manfluencer” in the world of expensive pens, the way Shteyngart is for flashy watches.
The best thing about Shmulkin — for the reader, at any rate — is that he’s a bookshelf spy and a bookshelf fraud. At other people’s homes, he orders his kids to surveil the host’s copy of Robert Caro’s “The Power Broker” to see if the spine is broken. Before his own parties, he pays them to rearrange his books so that those by women and people of color are at eye level, to better polish his injustice-righting credentials.
We’re not allowed to get too close to Shmulkin, perhaps for good reason. This slight, only semi-involving novel is one of Shteyngart’s darkest. It offers us a futuristic, dystopian version of America. The unthinkable has become the inevitable. Yet dystopias have become the pre-chewed meat at the end of every novelist’s fork.
This story is owned instead by Shmulkin’s 10-year-old daughter, Vera. She’s a handful — bright, anxious, lonely, working to keep her splintering family together. One of her closest companions is a chess simulator, Kaspie, named after her hero, the Russian chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov.
She has a poster of Kasparov on her bedroom wall but not much else. (“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.”) Vera is adopted. She refers to her WASPy mother — whose too on-the-nose name is Anne Bradford — as “Anne Mom.” Her birth mother, whom she has not met but is determined to find, is Korean.
The reader will have noticed that this book’s title owes a debt to Vladimir Nabokov’s novel “Ada, or Ardor” (1969), which is about a lifelong love affair between aristocratic cousins who discover they are siblings. Shteyngart’s novel chimes with Nabokov’s in several ways, though the similarities are glancing.
In both we clock inappropriate sexual longings and putative parents who are not what they seem. Each has science fiction elements, and involve unlikely methods of communication. Vera wears bow ties, like a character in “Ada”; it did not pass Nabokov’s notice that these resemble his beloved butterflies. And Vera, of course, was the name of Nabokov’s wife. A full list of these resemblances will no doubt be compiled by a future graduate student, bent over an A.I. as if it were a Moog synthesizer.
Another similarity worth mentioning is Vera’s passion for language — also like Ada’s. (“I am sentimental,” Nabokov’s Ada said. “I could dissect a koala but not its baby. I like the words damozel, eglantine, elegant. I love when you kiss my elongated white hand.”) Vera keeps a notebook in which she writes down words and phrases she wants to remember. Many words in both novels appear in scare quotes — those marks that undermine, like termites, the meaning of a word or phrase. Nabokov thought that the word “reality” should always appear in them.
In his biography of John Steinbeck, “Mad at the World” (2020), William Souder wrote about one of Steinbeck’s sons that “the great epiphany of his childhood was realizing that his father was an asshole.” Vera has a similar epiphany about her own father, who turns traitor, or so it seems, toward nearly everything in his life. Her nostrils are attuned to the stench of his lies.
Kids: They’re pint-size spies. They’re little data processors, soaking things up and spitting them back, until one day they’ve grokked enough to knock you into the gutter. Vera actively spies on her dad. There are scenes set inside the locked gates of Gramercy Park that might play better on film than they do in this novel.
Before long, Vera is on a road trip to find her lost mother. At the borders of certain states, women are pulled over at checkpoints to check the status of their menses. (Men whoosh past in male-only lanes.) The novel ends with SWAT teams that resemble ICE. Who are they after? Is it possible that a half-sentient, self-driving car has ratted someone out? Here come the men with helicopters and long guns, knocking at your thin door. This overkill action feels expedient.
“Vera, or Faith” hovers, like a blinking cursor, between tragedy and comedy. It lacks the bounce of Shteyngart’s best fiction, and there is no driving emotional energy to replace it. The impact of Shteyngart’s own personality on the page has always been greater than the impact his characters make. In quieter novels like this one, those characters seem under-examined and under-felt. He works hard to never appear as if he is working too hard, but here that seems like a liability.
I would hate to break this butterfly upon a wheel, to use a line that Nabokov borrowed from Pope. No Shteyngart novel is a waste of time. Vera’s under-construction sense of herself is almost enough to pull you along — but not really and not quite.
VERA, OR FAITH | By Gary Shteyngart | Random House | 243 pp. | $28
Dwight Garner has been a book critic for The Times since 2008, and before that was an editor at the Book Review for a decade.
The post The Future Looks Dark, but Familiar, in Gary Shteyngart’s New Book appeared first on New York Times.
