Review of Vera, or Faith by Gary Shteyngart

Gary Shteyngart's story of an uncommonly intelligent fifth-grader, Vera, allows for a precocious child's point of view and observations that are delightfully spot-on and insightful. This is zany, heartwarming, often funny, and just lovely.

Through precocious fifth-grader Vera's point of view in Vera, or Faith, we get to know her family, the Bradford-Shmulkins, and its various dynamics.

The family lives in New York City, and Vera's parents, Anne Mom (her stepmother, a stay-at-home-mom at times derogatorily called Trad Wife) and Daddy (a culturally Russian, self-aggrandizing magazine editor and sometimes-writer), struggle to cope with financial pressures and relationship issues, while young Vera tries to simply make a friend at school and find her biological mother--while avoiding her annoying little brother's roughhousing and meathead games.

We can see that Vera's father is often insufferable; he's a disappointing parent, an unreliable partner, emotionally childish, professionally insecure, and arrogant in manner. Yet Vera idolizes him for much of the book, until she comes to some sober realizations.

There were a lot of tourists on the old elevated railroad and Daddy would surely hate most of them for not recognizing that he was special.

Vera (which means "faith" in Russian) often can't turn off her mind and can't help a spray of thoughts from escaping; she realizes that incessant chattering is not considered cool in fifth grade, so in a heartbreaking attempt to control her output she often spends time alone in the bathroom during recess rather than potentially spouting off-putting amounts of information to her peers.

Her main friend seems to be her talking chess game, who was made in Korea so understands some of Vera's fascination with her absent and unknown Korean-born mother. But when Vera is assigned an intriguing, intelligent new student from Japan as a debate partner, the duo falls into a promising friendship in which Vera can be her true self.

She is caught between young childhood and young womanhood, and her vocabulary is growing exponentially, although she's not always certain of proper use or context. Many of the key elements of her observations are placed in quotation marks, and this is a very funny, endearing element. Her sometimes-hesitant takes on the family and world around her are often delightfully spot-on, and she sees many layers whose import she doesn't fully understand.

"Enjoy the simulcacrum of actual learning," Stella the Car said as the deposited them in front of the school.

The story is placed sometime in the future, with a self-driving car, Stella, who speaks to the family (often hilariously taking on Anne Mom's exasperated manner and messaging), and with intrusive testing for women regarding fertility and stringent border checks for human trafficking. But these elements are in the background; the real story is Vera's finding her way while feeling lost between cultures, parents, ages, and without a cemented identity. It's wonderful to witness her conviction and how she eventually begins to fully realize her full, true self.

This was wryly funny, sometimes zany, and so very heartwarming.

More from Shteyngart

Gary Shteyngart is also the author of The Russian Debutante's Handbook, Absurdistan, Super Sad True Love Story, and other novels.

I received a prepublication edition of this title, which was published July 8, courtesy of Random House Publishing Group and NetGalley.