Screenshot Photo by Tim Davis
By Dan Friedman
July 8, 2025
Vera, or Faith
By Gary Shteyngart
Random House, $28, 256 pages
If you had told the author of the freewheeling rambunctious Russian Debutante’s Handbook (2002) or Absurdistan: A Novel (2006) that in 20 years time he would be penning a gently dystopian novel from the point of view of a 10-year-old girl living in New York City, he would probably have been surprised.
What might be more surprising, and perhaps more frightening to Gary Shteyngart (for it is he) and the readership of Vera, or Faith (for that is his new book), is that in the year between locking the book’s text in 2024 and publishing it in 2025, reality leapfrogged his anxieties.
The book arrives in stores prophesying a racist and sexist United States where a group of white Americans are clamoring to get more votes per person, where an electric car’s AI can call armed police on a Korean family, and where women of childbearing age need to be tested as they arrive and leave a red state to show they have not had an illegal abortion while in state.
Meanwhile, the United States in which Shteyngart’s novel arrives has just allocated over $170 billion — a bigger budget than most of the world’s militaries — to a barely accountable force whose masked paramilitary employees are snatching legal residents off the streets and sending them to concentration camps, with a leader who wants to send citizens to join them.
Vera Bradford-Shmulkin, the eponymous protagonist, is a precocious but anxious student in a tony neighborhood of Manhattan. She lives with her Jewish, Russian-American father, her WASP-y step-mother, Anne Mom, and Dylan, her younger half-brother who has a penchant for demanding affection by exposing his tiny boy penis and running around yelling about it. “‘You’re going to be the president of your frat,’ Daddy had told him.”
Vera’s Korean-American biological mother “Mom Mom” named her for Vladimir Nabokov’s Jewish wife. Although it was a difficult name for her Korean relatives to say, her grandfather tells her: “This was your mother’s idea. She loved the name. The wife of her favorite Russian writer was named that. A wife who was a genius herself, but in the olden times she had to serve her husband.”
As always in Shteyngart books, the father of the family is skewered. Igor Shmulkin (Vera’s father) is no exception. His parents, Baba Tanya and Grandpa Boris, are a caricature of Russian-American émigrés who never leave “the vicinity of the house because they were not vaccinated,” though “Grandpa Boris like to ‘haunt’ his richer neighbors’ backyards under ‘cover of night,’ stealing their various backyard implements.” They delight in Dylan’s blond-ness – “He is only getting blonder every year. Our little German. Sieg heil, sieg heil!” When the family are appalled, Baba Tanya hilariously recants, “I am only kidding,… Inside he is still Jewish. Half Jewish, but that is enough. Although Vera has the Jewish brain.”
Vera takes this as a compliment, though she recognizes that the situation is complicated. Vera notes that “‘With a family like mine,’ Daddy liked to say, ‘how do you not become a writer?’”
But, despite his patchy self-consciousness, Igor is as laughable as his parents: sneaking off for snarky drinking sessions with his gay Jewish friend “the Seal.” Unlike Shteyngart and his character Barry Cohen from Lake Success who collect expensive watches, Igor and the Seal love expensive fountain pens. Aside from their ostensible function the pens serve all the same purposes as watches – value, status, shiny workmanship – but sometimes a cigar is not just a cigar, and each pen also represents a tiny pathetic phallus.
An Oberlin graduate like Shteyngart, Igor (which is also Gary Shteyngart’s birth name) is obsessed with status and also with overthrowing the bourgeois concepts of status. His innate hypocrisy comes out in small, plausible one liners that become grosser on reflection. They read as if Shteyngart has taken things he has caught himself saying or almost saying and loathed himself for the instinct. Things like “Social media work is work” while sitting “on the big gray couch in his underwear.”
Igor has invested too much time and money into his startup magazine and needs to find proper funding for it. As he tells Vera — who “liked to be exact” and spends the novel trying to work out how she fits into the world — “‘We’re what’s called merely rich,’ Daddy explained, ‘but our position is very precarious especially with how much I’ve staked on this goddamn magazine. We could lose everything, and your mother’s trust just pays for the incidentals.”
Anne Mom, for her part, is impeccably liberal. Born “Ann” she had added an e to her name after reading the diary of Anne Frank. She wrings her hands at the MOTH (March of the Hated) demonstrations through which bullies and bigots throng the streets. They are the anti-intellectual inheritors of the “basket of deplorables” who have taken their privilege and married it to victimhood as part of the Five-Three movement.
This fiction is a dark reversal of the Three-Fifths Compromise, from the original U.S. Constitution, that determined that only three out of every five enslaved people would be counted in the state’s population for representation in Congress. In Vera, the Five-Three movement agitates for special treatment for the self-defined “exceptional” Americans. Vera’s class at school stages a Lincoln-Douglas debate in which she has to debate in favor of Five-Three. The book is able to explain through her work that they think that those “who landed on the shores of our continent before or during the Revolutionary War but were exceptional enough not to arrive in chains,” should get five thirds of a vote.
Anne Mom is especially vexed because she (and by extension Dylan) could belong to the MOTH, could throw in her lot. But, instead, she holds a parlour meeting for those opposing the white nationalists, at which Vera’s father’s bad behaviour brings things to a head.
But the book is about Vera and how she tries to make sense of her bizarre home, the society around that home and the world around that.
Rather than indulging in indecency like her brother, she deals with the uncertainty by making lists of facts and observations that are intended to bring people together. These barely work, but she strikes up a friendship with the daughter of a Japanese diplomat and, together with input from Kaspie, “the Chess Computer with whom she shared her room” and Aunt Cecile “who was not really her aunt” she forges a plan.
Kaspie is named for Garry Kasparov, the chess master, but the AI that drives the Chess Computer was designed and programmed in Korea. As a Russian-Korean in America, Kaspie is the big brother that Vera never had. And, though Kaspie is undoubtedly creepy and assumes a strangely conservative Korean agenda, as a chess computer he is not beholden to Google, Amazon, Microsoft, or OpenAI, so comes off as relatively benign and of service to Vera.
The voyage of adventure and discovery that Vera undertakes to find her Mom Mom and, thus, herself, constitutes the culmination of the book. As a miniature bildungsroman — she discovers a truth about her mother, she eats the galbi jjim that they both love — and bleak, if mild satire, Vera is entirely satisfactory. As a small family drama released at a moment of incipient American fascism, though, it feels sadly inadequate.
