Gary Shteyngart Hands Off To the Next Generation

Gary Shteyngart’s new novel, Vera, or Faith, arrives with a sly sidestep. Like Borat before him, he steps away from center stage in favor of his fictional daughter. Instead of boring us with a middle-aged writer mining his own neuroses, Igor Shmulkin just provides a sad sideshow for his hopeful fictional child.

Vera starts with yet another version of Shteyngart’s forever stand‑in: a bumbling Russian‑Jewish expat, half in love with irony, half in love with money, and fully in love with himself. Unlike his daughter Vera, Shmulkin barely has faith in anything: love, capitalism, America, or even his alma mater.

Vera, his precocious 10-year-old daughter is saddled with a father who desperately wants to believe he can protect her from the rot he’s spent his life skewering, while he can barely keep himself afloat. She, though, can differentiate herself. She is half Korean, living with her father and white liberal step-mother, “Anne Mom.” The book follows her quest to find her mother’s family and, perhaps relatedly, who she is in the world.

Vera is the rare Shteyngart protagonist who doesn’t at all share his terminal irony — and that’s the book’s secret weapon. She’s the rebuke to Shmulkin’s cynicism, the one thing he hasn’t yet managed to turn into a joke or a tool. Her sincerity in finding out who she is in a confusing world pushes back at his slippery irony. The novel’s satire stops winking at the reader and gets uncomfortably close to something real: the desperation of any parent who wants their kid to have a better story.

Does Vera get the dignity she deserves? Sort of. She escapes the worst neuroses of her parents, but not the crazy world (and diverse grandparents) that caused them. Vera is a protagonist who can hold a mirror to her father’s failings, and also his last hope that faith might mean something beyond a clever title.

As usual, Shteyngart’s writing is as slippery and sardonic as ever. Nobody skewers the immigrant striver class or New York City liberals’ moral performativity quite like him.

Vera, or Faith wants to convince you there’s hope — that we can build something better, that maybe the next generation won’t inherit our fatal cynicism. But the book itself can’t quite muster the faith it’s selling. Which, in a way, is the most honest part.