Her name is Vera Bradford-Shmulkin and she is 10 years old and extremely clever. She lives in a near-future New York with her Daddy, chaotic Russian Jew Igor, and Anne Mom, her smart, put-upon WASP stepmother. Vera has been told her real mother, Mom Mom, abandoned her as a baby. The other member of the household is her younger half-brother Dylan, spoilt and annoying. The family has a comfortable, politically aware, well-insulated existence, which includes a self-drive car named Stella and, for Vera, a communicative chess computer named Kaspie.
But their lives buzz and crackle with tension, mostly between the sniping, self-regarding parents, and it is Vera who feels she must hold the family together – every chapter title begins with the words “She had to” – and prevent a divorce. Her days, and her often sleepless nights, are measured out in obligation and in struggling to quell her intense anxiety. Her coping mechanism of shaking out her hands to release tension is condemned by Anne Mom as “flapping”. She is a maker of lists: new words yet to be attributed with meaning go into her Things I Still Need to Know Diary, and for each parent she draws up a list of “great things” about the other to show why they should stay together.
It is through Vera’s observant eyes that the novel unfolds, and Gary Shteyngart has triumphed with his touching, tender portrait of this gifted child, who doesn’t fit at school, who naturally uses such adjectives as “exquisite” and “delectable” (to the despair of Anne Mom, who is trying to improve her stepdaughter’s “Social Component”) and who longs for steady affection and friendship. These do appear, thanks to the occasional joy and licence brought by Aunt Cecile, her stepmother’s friend, and later, at school, by fellow smart girl Yumi.
But Vera’s striving, exhausting life – her grades at school must remain high so she can attend the right college – becomes even harder when she overhears her parents talking about someone who is dying of cancer and assumes it is Mom Mom. When Vera discovers what is happening, the result is completely unexpected.
One of Anne Mom’s good points on Vera’s list is that she is “Five-Three which will keep us safe”. Shteyngart has set his novel in a dystopian post-Trumpian world, where democracy has diminished and where ethnicity dictates; Vera’s birth mother is Korean. The chilling explanation of Five-Three comes from Vera’s teacher, who tells the class that the states are about to decide whether to give an “enhanced vote”, equivalent to five-thirds of an ordinary vote, to “so-called ‘exceptional Americans’, those who landed on the shores of our continent before or during the Revolutionary War but were exceptional enough not to arrive in chains”.
This threat spawns the Marches of the Hated, MOTH: protesters bearing signs that read “Blacks for 5/3” or “Pious Jews for 5/3”. Then there are Cycle Through States, which check women’s menstrual cycles on entry and exit “and made them pee in a cup to make sure they hadn’t gotten ‘preggers’ and then had an ‘abortion’”. Later in the novel, armed members of the Human Trafficking Rapid Response make an appearance.
Political correctness doesn’t escape Shteyngart’s pen. He is razor-sharp and funny in his merciless puncturing of Daddy and Anne Mom’s pretensions. Copies of Igor’s collection of short stories, written when he was young and translated into German – “provocatively”, says Anne Mom – as Kindertransport, occupy one of seven enormous bookcases lining the living room. He prefers books to be in alphabetical order, but when Anne Mom holds important meetings, such as an anti-Five-Three evening, Vera is paid to reorganise the volumes, so that female authors and those of colour are at eye level. Daddy, who is over-fond of what Vera registers as “mar-tinys”, does a nice line in world-weary and rueful despair.
This is a book of humour and anger and intelligence and spiky energy. Somehow, though, Shteyngart’s latest novel does not quite cohere or entirely satisfy. His cleverness rather gets the better of him, at the expense of plot focus. Vera is a delight, but her view of the world can produce a slightly cloying cuteness – her take on the Cycle Through States, for example: “Perhaps they would even check Aunt Cecile’s bicycle if she crossed state lines, though it only had one gear.” And is she sometimes just too precocious? The frequent use of quotation marks for the words that Vera appropriates becomes annoying and the anti-Trump pedal could have been pressed rather less heavily and obviously. The ending is disappointing – too sentimental, too neat, too rushed. Vera, or Faith is original, clever and immensely readable, but more subtlety and less tricksiness would have made it a stronger, better book.
Vera, or Faith, by Gary Shteyngart (Atlantic, $37.99), is out now.
