I approached Gary Shteyngart’s new novel, Vera, or Faith (Random House, 2025) with low expectations. With the exception of his memoir, Little Failure, his fiction works have been uniformly disappointing, every novel leaving me with the feeling that he could have done better.
It turns out I was right. In an abrupt change of direction, Shteyngart has sanded down the too-comic edge that so often spoils his writing, and taken a turn for the deeply serious, with a dystopian touch. The result is stunning. Written with great restraint, Vera stays in its lane, never veering off into the weird, pointlessly slapsticky territory of his previous work. In the bargain, it presents us with one of literature’s most compelling, appealing, and moving characters.
The novel’s story is told through the eyes of Vera, an extremely precocious ten-year-old girl who resides somewhere on the Asperger’s spectrum. She is the Korean-American daughter of magazine editor Igor Shmulkin, who emigrated to the U.S. from Russia as a child and was briefly married to Vera’s mother, whom Vera does not remember (the relationship having ended, for reasons unknown to Vera, when she was an infant). Boris has remarried, to Anne Bradford, a WASP with a trust fund, and they have a son, Dylan, who is two years younger and infinitely less intelligent than Vera. One of Vera’s heartbreaking and revealing language tics is her habit of referring to Anne as “Anne Mom” and her birth mother as “Mom Mom.”
The novel is set in a near-future America in which two things are noteworthy. One is the pervasiveness of artificial intelligence including an AI-powered car named Stella, who is an important member of Vera’s family, taking part in conversations, giving advice, and so on. The other noteworthy element is an upcoming state convention in which it will be decided whether to give an “enhanced vote” — worth five-thirds of a vote — to white Americans who can trace their lineage back to pre-Revolutionary times. In the case of Vera’s family, her mother and brother would be thus privileged, while she and her father would be consigned to second-class citizenry.
Of more immediate concern to Vera is the state of her parents’ marriage, which is foundering, largely (or so it seems to Vera) due to financial strain brought on by her father’s failing magazine, his declining career prospects, and what appears to be a futile attempt to sell the magazine to a wealthy oligarch in time to keep the family (getting by largely on Anne Mom’s trust fund) financially solvent. Taking in the growing strain between her parents, Vera is hard at work on lists to present to each parent: “Ten Great Things About Daddy and Why You Should Stay Together with Him,” and “Ten Great Things about Mom and Why You Should Stay with Her.”
The first list, which “mostly used Anne Mom’s nicest words about Daddy,” includes “Is on TV sometimes,” and “His long struggle for full recognition is about to be over.” As for the second list, it ends with, “Five-Three which will keep us safe. That was all she could think of, so she crossed out the ‘Ten’ in ‘Ten Great Things About Mom’ and made it ‘Six.’”
The novel is replete with such tip-of-the-iceberg passages, which give us profoundly revealing glimpses into Vera’s relationships and distressing emotional state. It is clear, for example, that Vera struggles to make friends. “Anne Mom had often said that instead of talking to girls her age using her own thoughts she should listen to them and try to repeat the things that most excited them. The technique was called ‘mirroring’ and even spies used it!”
It is clear early on that Vera is lonely. Her only friend is an AI-powered chessboard she has named “Kaspie” (after Russian grand master Gary Kasparov). With Kaspie she has her most intimate conversations, and from Kaspie she gets a lot of advice. She struggles to navigate her school’s social world: “She always looked forward to recess until it started,” and generally hid in the school restroom for several minutes before going “out onto the playground with her book.”
If she tries engaging schoolmates in conversations, something invariably goes awry. In a typical episode, her attempt at conversation leads to taunts from her classmates, and Vera walks away “with a vacant smile, trying to rehash the conversation, ‘reverse engineer’ it, figure out what she had done wrong.”
Her interior monologues are peppered with words and phrases in quotation marks. Often these are figures of speech or idioms that she is struggling to understand; she keeps a notebook entitled Things I Need to Know Diary in which she writes them down. She is indefatigable in this effort.
When her Aunt comes for dinner, for example: “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 (especially Aunt Cecile’s) that she could write down and rehearse and enjoy in the privacy of her [bedroom].”
This novel includes a thought-provoking examination of our AI-infused future, and it is beautifully plotted, with a surprising (and satisfying) denouement. But what engrosses you from beginning to end is this enchanting, imaginative, struggling child. I can think of very few novels in which I was so emotionally invested in a character.
You read through this book frantically rooting for Vera and smiling at her wit and wisdom, much of which she feels she has to keep to herself for fear of annoying those around her. The way Shteyngart manufactures and manipulates this tension between how the reader sees Vera and how she sees herself is yet another spectacular achievement.
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