In each of his five previous novels, which include The Russian Debutante's Handbook and Lake Success, Gary Shteyngart has delivered consistently high-quality fiction while avoiding the curse of predictability. Vera, or Faith brilliantly inhabits the consciousness of a young girl to produce a story of family and friendship that pleasingly engages the mind as it slowly insinuates its way into the heart.
Shteyngart's protagonist, precocious, charming 10-year-old Vera Bradford-Shmulkin, lives with her Russian-born father, Igor, a magazine editor desperately trying to sell his publication to a "Rhodesian Billionaire"; her "Tradwife" stepmother, Anne Bradford (known to her as Anne Mom); and her annoying younger stepbrother, Dylan, in an unidentified city that feels undeniably like New York. There, she aches to reunite with her Korean birth mother, Mom Mom, who she's been told abandoned her and Igor and who she believes is dying of cancer.
Forced to navigate between "Daddy's famous sarcasm or Anne Mom's web of love and despair," Vera acts as something of a mediator, compiling heartbreaking "Marriage-Saving Lists" of "Great Things" about each parent and why they should stay together. She also must survive in the status-conscious hothouse that is her upscale elementary school, where she's tagged with the nickname "Facts Girl." Vera is an inveterate collector of words like "delectable" and "exquisite," frequently adds to her "Things I Still Need to Know Diary," and frets about any quiz grade below an "A," even as Anne Mom repeatedly insists that "grades don't matter." But above all, she longs for friendship with classmates like Yumi, the daughter of Japanese diplomats, who becomes her debate partner.
Though the setting of Vera, or Faith, is, on its surface, more identifiable than Shteyngart's Super Sad True Love Story, it takes place in a United States roughly a decade removed from the Covid-19 pandemic that has undergone some disturbing changes. The states are in the process of considering a constitutional amendment known as "Five-Three" that will grant an enhanced vote to Americans like Anne Mom whose ancestors arrived during or before the Revolutionary War (and were "exceptional enough not to arrive in chains"). A "merely rich" family like Vera's owns a self-driving car named Stella, but when crossing certain state lines in their vehicles, occupants may face questions about child trafficking, and women anywhere close to childbearing age must submit to intrusive questions and even blood tests according to the anti-abortion "Cycle Through" program.
What Vera discovers when she reaches the culmination of her search for her birth mother is a moving surprise that must be reserved for the experience of finishing this beguiling story. Combining deep humanity with Gary Shteyngart's customary intelligence and wit, Vera, or Faith is a reminder of why he's a writer whose works are good ones to keep close at hand in challenging times. ---Harvey Freedenberg, freelance reviewer
Shelf Talker: This is the charming story of a 10-year-old girl wise beyond her years and forced to grapple prematurely with some of the challenges of adult life.