Kids Say the Darndest Things

WHEN I LEARNED that a new Gary Shteyngart novel was coming out, I figured I’d be reading it, being a Shteyngart near-completist. (Top picks: the 2006 novel Absurdistan and the 2021 New Yorker essay “A Botched Circumcision and Its Aftermath.”) But after seeing in publicity materials that Vera, or Faith was about a family, “told through the eyes of their wondrous ten-year-old daughter,” I hesitated. A child was dubious enough, but a “wondrous” one? This sounded cloying. But Shteyngart doesn’t do cloying — at least, he hadn’t thus far. What was I in store for?

Vera is many things, but cloying isn’t one of them. This is in part because it’s not actually narrated by Vera, the ten-year-old protagonist, but rather by a third-person narrator who puts us in Vera’s thoughts, adding an adult’s knowing edge. “Wondrous eyes of a child” notwithstanding, the narrator knows that “Daddy’s special juice” refers to alcohol, even if Vera herself is oblivious. While this stylistic choice can, at times, read as gently mocking childhood naïveté, it preempts any accusations of sentimentality. It’s a book about the frustrations of childhood, when it can seem like there’s a world just out of reach, but also about the grimness of that world.

Who, then, is Vera? She’s an anxious loner, abandoned by her Korean-American mother and being raised by a stepmother, Anne Bradford — Anne Mom, to Vera — who prefers her biological (and white) son, Dylan. Igor Shmulkin, a.k.a. Daddy, is an American Jew who immigrated from the former USSR and is quickly recognizable as a Shteyngart alter ego (similarities: age, heritage, profession, educational history). Daddy isn’t a particularly engaged father, preferring to squabble with Anne Mom and lament career setbacks. Vera is a genius at a Manhattan school for the gifted. She’s seen as a know-it-all by her classmates (they call her “Facts Girl”) and struggles to make friends. Miserable at home, Vera eventually goes on a quest for her Korean birth mother. It is a book of missions, each chapter title beginning, “She Had to …” (As in, “She Had to Tell Anne Mom the Truth.”)

If 2021’s Our Country Friends was Shteyngart’s great American Jewish COVID-19 novel, Vera, or Faith is the same for the MAGA 2.0 era. The book is set in a near-future dystopian New York (the arrival of COVID-19 vaccines is a decade in the past, putting this circa 2030), at a time when menstrual cycles are checked lest people cross state lines for abortions. There’s a Trump-ish regime: it’s not called that, but it both is and isn’t that, in the manner of a dream where something is and isn’t quite like in real life. “Pious Jews,” whom the secular Jewish Igor calls “Hasidics,” support the newly dominant nativist movement. They join “MOTH” (“March of the Hated”) processions: MAGA-rally-like parades that sometimes pass by Vera’s New York City home. Igor thinks these far-right Jews are being set up, in part because they are followed, in the parades, by a group of white working-class (or decked out to look as such) children, walking behind a sign saying, “THEY HAVE TAKEN MY FUTURE AWAY FROM ME.” Igor senses antisemitism, but this is not a book that will say, outright, that that’s what’s going on. It’s instead presented thusly: “When [Vera] asked Daddy what the sign meant, he said that ‘they’ was a clever reference to the ‘Hasidics’ marching ahead of the ‘benighted white working-class kids,’ a ‘classic trope’ according to Daddy (the word ‘trope’ headlined her Things I Still Need to Know Diary).” Vera may not know, but the narrator sure knows what to highlight, and Igor just might have a point.

There’s something about the lightness of tone — even when the subject matter is serious — that makes Vera read as speculative rather than prognosticating: it works best as a comment on (an indictment of) the world we’re already in rather than a forecast of what may lie ahead. Two of the characters are AI entities: one (Kaspie, after Garry Kasparov) an electronic chess set that functions as Vera’s confidant, the other (Stella) a self-driving car capable of holding up its own end of a conversation. Vera asks her chessboard what “horseshoe” means, wanting to know about horseshoe theory in political science but not knowing to ask that, and Kaspie answers, “‘A horseshoe is a product designed to protect horse hooves from wear. Horseshoes originated …’” The woes of an AI BFF. Even if such things are not technologically inconceivable, they’re presented in a funny, silly way that makes the effect closer to Woody Allen’s 1973 film Sleeper — comic sci-fi with a Jewish twist — than to anything one imagines a real-life tech bro coming up with. You’re free to read this as a book about the potential trajectory of the self-driving car, but that would be to miss the point.

Along with Taffy Brodesser-Akner (Fleishman Is in Trouble, Long Island Compromise), Shteyngart is a living, prolific middle-aged writer who nevertheless produces the kind of novels that feels not just American-Jewish but mid-century American-Jewish. They create fictional universes rife with neuroses and nose jobs and shiksas, whose resonance for Jews today may be limited but whose motifs align their authors with the American-Jewish canon: Allen, Philip Roth, all the way up to Seinfeld in the 1990s.

Igor’s female partners are, successively, a Korean-American woman and a WASP, but we’re perhaps not quite in a world of happenstance intermarriage. In a 2006 Forward interview with Mark Oppenheimer, Shteyngart elaborated on his own sexual aversion to Jewish women: “I kissed one once — she tasted like me. I couldn’t take it.” The remark struck me at the time less as upsetting to me as a Jewish woman (I’m good, thanks) than as a kind of bat signal to the Roth-Allen nostalgists that a tradition lives on. (Alexander Portnoy, shiksa-mad protagonist of Roth’s 1969 novel Portnoy’s Complaint, is physiologically incapable of consummating things the one time he gives a Jewish lady a try.)

The very contours of the authoritarianism Shteyngart imagines in Vera are themselves mid-century if not older. The new overclass consists of Americans whose ancestors, as a teacher explains it, “‘landed on the shores of our continent before or during the Revolutionary War but were exceptional enough not to arrive in chains.’”

Daughters of the American Revolution. Mayflower stock. These are phrases one does not hear so much in the 2020s: this standard for nativism would exclude even Donald Trump.

VERISIMILITUDE — an author’s capacity to conjure characters and scenes convincingly — is often invoked as a measure of artistic success. And yet: Vera is fantastic, but Vera is not a particularly convincing ten-year-old, or at least, she is unlike nearly all ten-year-olds. Where exactly she sits on the atypical-to-implausible spectrum is for each reader to decide, and would probably take a child psychologist to answer. (I lean toward implausible.) But it is Vera’s exceptionality that makes the book work. She is less a child than a literary device — an outside observer uniquely positioned to cut through a parent’s BS and see them for what they are.

Vera mainly functions as a conduit to the story of Igor, who keeps sneaking in through her experiences. Vera, for instance, keeps a log of things adults say that she doesn’t understand, her Things I Still Need to Know Diary. These terms and expressions (“pontificate,” “whipped out,” “done a number,” etc.) appear sprinkled throughout the book; the list-making comes across less like the behaviour of a language-oriented child and more like how an adult would approach learning a foreign language. Along the way, in a parenthetical that adds to this effect: “Daddy supplied a lot of the words for her Things I Still Need to Know Diary.”

What, then, is the reader to make of Igor? He’s an egotistical intellectual who gets annoyed at “tourists” for not recognizing him in a neighbourhood restaurant and has a side gig of sorts as a fountain-pen-collecting “manfluencer.” (Shteyngart collects watches.) He’s a selfish jerk who takes the business class seat on trips while his family roughs it in coach. As a young man, he published a book of essays called Kindertransport (a reference to Nazism reminiscent of the novelist Karl Ove Knausgård’s choice to call his multivolume 2009–2011 autofiction My Struggle, itself a reference to Mein Kampf), copies of which are now prominently displayed on a bookshelf in their home, serving as a shrine to what once was. To the great artist that could have been.

But Igor, unlike Knausgård or, for that matter, Shteyngart, is not accomplished enough to be an art monster. Vera’s function is to unknowingly lampoon her self-important father, and to do so all the more cuttingly, via innocent observations about him. She notices his hypocrisy but doesn’t flag it as such: “Daddy hated the private park on account of he was ‘of the left,’ but he also used it frequently to escape from Anne Mom.” And she has a front-row seat to his low points, as household members do: “Daddy was by the window, his face slightly orange. He was smoking one of his ‘special cigarettes.’”

Vera is both in awe of her father and impressed by adults generally. She can’t wait to join their world, or possibly sees herself as already in it: “They were having a super-adult conversation, the kind of conversation Vera loved, her mind becoming a recording device for all the incredible new words, all the postures and expressions.” This is where some of the implausibility enters in: unlike most actual children, who (in my experience with them, and having been one) find their own parents ancient bores, at most intermittently interesting, children who are literary devices in service of stories about grown-ups pick up on every nuance of the middle-aged world. It’s not that it’s implausible for a kid to care at all about grown-up stuff. Many children have professional aspirations (i.e., answers to what do you want to be when you grow up?). They may also have an interest in their caregivers’ earning a living, once they’re old enough to connect this to their own comfort and the adults’ stress levels. But it pains Vera not to understand, in more detail, her parents’ finances and workplace travails. Please, father, tell me more about the office, said no child ever (apart from Bea in Amy Schwartz’s delightful 1982 children’s book, Bea and Mr. Jones, in which a kindergartener swaps places with her office-worker dad). Vera, however, is desperate to learn what will come of her father’s magazine, and knows all about how a “Rhodesian Billionaire” (detecting hints of Musk) can make or break it.

Vera is aware of cliques and interpersonal drama among her classmates, but it is adult-world tension that has her hooked. Her closest nonchessboard friend is Anne Mom’s college friend Aunt Cecile. That’s whom Vera goes clothes shopping and gets a haircut with. That’s her confidante. Vera doesn’t just want her squabbling parents to make it work — she is next-level attentive to her father and stepmother’s marriage, down to the role Anne Mom’s trust fund plays in the union. Vera doesn’t put posters on her walls the way her peers do. There are children, and then there’s Vera. It’s hinted that she may be neurodiverse in an unspecified and undiagnosed manner (the hand-flapping, the weighted blanked). But the possible clinical explanations for her alienation from the mainstream culture of childhood matter less than the fact of her outsider stance, and what that quality permits her to do for the novel.

VERA IS (and, yes, subjectivity disclaimer applies) hilarious.

There’s a scene where classmates lightly bully Vera, prompting her to reflect, “Adults didn’t have it any easier, she knew. ‘How many cocks do I have to suck to get this deal done?’ Daddy had said in the car, and even though this was surely a metaphor for something involving their male chickens up in the country, it implied that Daddy’s status in the world was sometimes as precarious as her own.”

This does not ring true for a ten-year-old, but as prose, it’s spectacular.

And the idea that the new super-citizens — descendants of white colonial Americans — are something called “Five-Three” is not just a clever inversion of the Three-Fifths Compromise (which saw enslaved people in the pre-emancipation United States ‘counted’ as three-fifths of a person when determining a state’s population) but a phrasing that gives the illusion of a new overclass of moderately short people (as in, five feet, three inches tall, what “five-three” is shorthand for in contexts other than this novel). It’s maybe not one of the book’s laugh-until-you-cry moments, but as a five-two, I got a kick out of it.

I was also crying — though this time not from laughter — when I read the book’s ending, though this is only partly a testament to Shteyngart’s writing and the intensely moving scene that wraps up the story. It is also a comment on his uncanny premonitions (off only in specifics) about American authoritarianism and state violence. The ending is a profound defence of a multicultural vision of American identity — one that will sound heavy-handed if I try to describe it, but absolutely convinces on the page.

Intentionally or not, the book reads like an homage to Anne Frank’s diary. Or, in keeping with the mid-century theme, like a nod to Roth’s nod to Frank in his 1979 novel, The Ghost Writer. Anne Mom, we learn, was born Ann, but added the “e” after a formative experience reading The Diary of a Young Girl. (She may be a self-righteous WASP with unchecked biases and a trust fund, but she means well.) Vera is slightly younger than Anne Frank, and the story isn’t written in the first person or the form of a diary. And, need this be stated, one is a comedic novel, the other the real-life journal of a girl murdered by the Nazis. But both are about girls living through scary and unpredictable eras, particularly for their kind. Both are about girls forced to grow up too quickly because their times are too grim and they’re too attuned to the world around them — girls whose only shot at something approximating adulthood may be the here and now.