We Know It’s a Show

Hamilton Cain reviews Gary Shteyngart’s “Vera, or Faith.”

By Hamilton CainAugust 20, 2025

• Fiction

WE’VE ALL HEARD (some among us have preached) well-meaning sermons about the importance of amplifying marginalized voices in literary spaces. Yet despite good intentions—e.g., tropes of the “perceptive outsider” or “staunch individualist”—there remains a dearth of more fully rendered neurodiverse characters. One of our finest contemporary writers, Gary Shteyngart, is here to remedy that problem. Meet Vera Bradford-Shmulkin, the plucky, if often melancholy, 10-year-old protagonist of Shteyngart’s enchanting new novel, Vera, or Faith. An academic overachiever obsessed with language and a future career as “a woman in STEM,” Vera feels alienated from her classmates at her Manhattan magnet elementary. She struggles to calm her “monkey brain” and control her toe-walking and arm flaps, signature behaviors of mild autism, or what we used to categorize as Asperger’s syndrome. Shteyngart portrays these with compassion; his focus is on the potential of the “outsider” as a gifted truth-teller. Far from a subject of pity, Vera is a wise and feeling guide—like a 10-year-old Virgil, shepherding us through the novel’s netherworld of tormented souls while contending with her own angsts.

Set during an autumn a decade in the future, Vera’s isn’t an uncommon story. With her stellar grades, she’s the pride of her teachers but is estranged from her peers. She’ll never be one of the “Populars”—they mock her as “Facts Girl”—yet she yearns for a best friend. She’s also trying to salvage her parents’ faltering marriage: her old money stepmother Anne Bradford (who put aside her Brown degree to raise Vera and Vera’s younger brother, Dylan) is stressed and exhausted; her father, Igor Shmulkin (a famous author and public intellectual whose mandate is the rescue of a legacy journal), keeps his secrets close to the vest. The two quarrel frequently.

Together, the Bradford-Shmulkins achieve a shaky détente in a Downtown apartment combined from a couple of smaller units. Vera’s bedroom is set off by the “Maginot Line,” a floor seam that charts the former wall. She’s literally on the perimeter of her family, close to their psychological warfare (Igor picks at Anne by calling her “Tradwife”) and entrenched in her own battles. Vera refers to her mother as “Anne Mom,” distinguishing her from the Korean American “Mom Mom” who abandoned her as an infant. Anne Mom embraces her adopted daughter wholly, showering Vera with affection and delighting in her prodigious mind. Neither Anne Mom nor Igor mentions Mom Mom, who remains a blur along the edge of the girl’s sense of self. Igor has nicknamed Vera “Doxie”; she’s short but “tubular,” resembling a dachshund. (The jacket illustration alludes to Margret Rey’s 1944 children’s classic Pretzel, which inspired me to demand a dachshund puppy for my fifth birthday—successfully, I might add!) The girl is drawn to her father’s fancy vocabulary, compiling lists of terms like “trope,” “cogent,” and “geopolitics.” Anne Mom is the kind of Maine WASP who loudly cheers on progressive causes, hosting living-room salons and seeking clout from like-minded women. She is high-strung and detail-oriented, a “Nostradamus of two weeks from now.” Dylan is pure boy, scrapping amid the schoolyard and punching his sister.

So goes urban life in the 2030s. An automated car, Stella, chauffeurs the kids to and from school, haranguing them like a yenta. Vera occasionally secludes herself with Kaspie, her AI device and chess mentor named after Russian chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov, whose picture hangs near her bed. (Kaspie knows more than it lets on, a hint of the singularity to come.) Vera looks forward to visits from Aunt Cecile, the Bradford-Shmulkins’ glamorous theater pal who often drops by the apartment for dinner, bantering in the style of repartee immortalized by figures from Dorothy Parker to Rosalind Russell and Woody Allen. Shteyngart hits his marks with relish:

They were discussing Daddy’s new “stewardship,” as he would put it, of the revived magazine for intellectuals and how Daddy had to “position” it in a way that it wouldn’t rub up against the ideologies of other magazines, which was hard because the other magazines had already laid claim to all the “major ideologies.” It seemed like Aunt Cecile was giving Daddy a hard time, but in a totally fun way, about his strategies for total relevance, which involved many more appearances on television and on the right podcasts.

Indeed, Igor is competitive, enlisting his children to spy on colleagues and friends. “When they went to someone’s house,” the narrator explains, “[Vera] and Dylan made a game of seeing if they had a copy of an enormous book called The Power Broker and whether or not its spine had been cracked and then Daddy would give each of them a dollar for the information.”

¤

Vera glitters with irony, rich as buttercream frosting, and flavorful notes of hope—Shteyngart has peered into the future and, wonder of wonders, there’s still a market for print journals and media tied to the world of ideas! But menacing forces play out as well. The strained Bradford-Shmulkin union mirrors a broader American division, at once futuristic and familiar. The book inhabits a 2030s New York bristling with demonstrations and rollbacks of rights that catch its protagonist’s attention. The Marches of the Hated, or “MOTHs,” and nativist protests smack of insurrection and danger, triggering nightmares. A forthcoming series of constitutional conventions will decide whether people with Revolutionary-era ancestry can claim “five-thirds” citizenship, Shteyngart’s clever inversion of the real-life Constitution’s original Three-fifths Compromise.

Xenophobia thereby spirals around Vera, Dylan, and their classmates while their school’s liberal faculty members use the impending vote as a teachable moment. Vera’s social studies instructor, Ms. Tedeschi, organizes a debate between two pairs of students (one pro-five-thirds, the other anti-) to underscore the need for civic engagement. Vera is teamed with Yumi, the smart daughter of Japanese diplomats, to advocate in favor of the legislation. Davis, a Taiwanese émigré, and Stephen, the embodiment of L.L.Bean five-thirds privilege, are assigned the contra position (one of Shteyngart’s many contrarian sleights of hand, given Stephen’s pedigree). The girls spend weekends preparing their brief, and Yumi is charmed by her friend, confiding a crush on Stephen; Vera may have found her bestie after all.

Vera shares familial features with the rest of Shteyngart’s oeuvre, from Catskills shtick to relationships on the rocks to questions of identity in a country churned by massive change. (His 2018 novel Lake Success, a personal favorite of mine, reimagines the Great American Road Novel and, like Vera, projects into the future.) Vera departs from his other works in one key aspect: the book is his shortest to date. It grows outward, layer upon layer; Shteyngart seems liberated, reminiscent of Colson Whitehead in his svelte, sharp-edged novel The Nickel Boys (2019), which followed his lush, speculative masterpiece, The Underground Railroad (2016). In just a few pages, Shteyngart gracefully sketches the contours of an intricate plot. In just a few pages, Shteyngart gracefully sketches the contours of an intricate plot. His sentences move with customary vim and verve, attending to his serious themes.

My single quibble: Vera’s frequent use of scare quotes feels gimmicky and intrusive as the story accelerates. Otherwise, the book is a rip of a read, erudite and entertaining in equal measure. Though Vera is a witness to overwhelming unrest, her resilience never fails her—she is an updated, neurodiverse homage to narrators such as Scout Finch, Mattie Ross, and even Harriet the Spy. She stitches together a patchwork of mysteries, meditating on inequity as she goes: “There were a lot of ‘statuses’ in the world and each year she was becoming aware of more of them.”

¤

With the fate of our constitutional order unclear, American writers are grappling with the death of empathic imagination. Optimists like Jess Walter and Ann Patchett seem to be gambling that we’ll absorb the shocks to our political and economic systems and come out the other side wiser, possibly stronger—Emersonian self-reliance for the win. Shteyngart, meanwhile, immigrated to the United States from the Soviet Union at age seven and thus brings a distinct European pessimism to bear in his books. Both the tone and topicality of his writing are close to that of recent work from three literary titans from across the pond: Ali Smith, Joe Mungo Reed, and the 2023 Booker laureate, Paul Lynch. Smith’s Gliff (2024) tackles the emerging hazards of AI and income inequity, as well as a gestapo on the hunt for subversives. Smith’s voice is witty, experimental, and mordant; she interrogates the humanitarian nature of art as we stare down the gun barrel of tyranny. Reed taps the conventions of science fiction in Terrestrial History (2025), a multigenerational tale knotted with time travel and the death throes of an ailing planet. The Irish writer Paul Lynch’s Prophet Song (2023)—which parallels Vera yet is dubious of redemption—is darkest of all: Eilish Stack is barely holding her family together after her husband is “disappeared” in a fascist takeover, and she dissociates until she can no longer maintain a pretense of normalcy (and she tries really, really hard.)

Smith, Reed, and Lynch bend and torque the novel form, grasping that the perils ahead require innovation and a clear-eyed gaze into the abyss. Deceptively sunnier in tone, Vera nevertheless proves similarly true to its European (in this case, Russian) soul—more skeptical than, say, American author Jess Walter’s novel So Far Gone, which was published this June and dares to hope all will end well even as partisan tensions escalate and Congress appropriates billions of taxpayer dollars for its far-right agenda. Shteyngart, immersed in European history and the machinations of totalitarian governments, recognizes that we can’t wave away the gutting of civil rights, the rise of armed militias, the creation of Alligator Alcatraz. Apps and other tech toys can’t save us from helicopters and stormtroopers; his satire remains subtle but no less scathing.

At the same time, the book’s title, “Vera,” translates to “faith” in Shteyngart’s native Russian. In Romance languages, the word evolved from “veritas,” or Latin for “truth” (the translators of the King James Bible were fond of such early 17th-century turns of phrase as “verily, verily, I say unto you”). Both etymologies feel apt: Vera’s faith that she can discover the truth about Mom Mom, as well as her clarity surrounding her adopted parents’ fraught relationship, propels the novel forward. Her school debate becomes a hook for Shteyngart’s underlying concerns; the outcome surprises. Costumed in judicial robes, Vera and Yumi make a persuasive case. But Stephen’s off-the-cuff declaration shifts the mood:

“It’s like the MOTHs,” Stephen said. “It’s all a show, right? We know it’s a show. So those are, like, actors? […] Like in a just world Vera would be president and Yumi would be vice president.” […] He stopped to look at his parents in the back row. Vera thought he was about to mention his town house or his down-filled jacket. “I mean how much longer can we live like this?” He shrugged and sat down.

Borders, however porous, aren’t just racial and socioeconomic. They’re also linguistic, and Shteyngart sprinkles his prose with idioms from Russian, Korean, Japanese, Yiddish, and King’s English. He allows himself a bit of fun, from wordplay (in Russian, he shares the name “Igor” with his character) to interfaith marriage, taking out the rusty yiddishe-kop-goysiche-kop canard for a spin. When the Bradford-Shmulkins visit Igor’s “old country” parents in the suburbs, Baba Tanya, the children’s grandmother, admires Dylan’s blond curls:

“Our little German. Seig heil, seig heil!” […]

“I am only kidding,” Baba Tanya said. ‘Inside he is still Jewish. Half Jewish, but that is good enough. Although Vera has the Jewish brain.” […]

Anne Mom looked stricken by the exchange, maybe because she had added an e to her name to be more like Anne Frank. Daddy was trying to ‘suppress’ his laughter. He could laugh for weeks about Anne Mom’s interactions with his parents. “Not all worlds were meant to collide,” he would say.

¤

Early in the novel, Vera overhears whispered conversations and assumes that Mom Mom may be dying of cancer; she must find her mother, especially now that Igor and Anne Mom’s marriage is in jeopardy. The girl’s mission impossible leads her across Shteyngart’s Manhattan, with glimpses of tony Gramercy Park, the High Line, and freeways that girdle the island; and then to the Midwest—flat, studded with flags and billboards and “preggers” checkpoints (the substructures of criminalized abortion that were unthinkable 10 years in the past).

Next year, the United States will commemorate a milestone birthday. The Declaration of Independence emphasized “certain unalienable rights,” including—famously—“Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” For the Founding Fathers, only property-owning white men were intended to enjoy those advantages. Yet the rapid enfranchisement of all white men, including dockhands and shopkeepers, startled the elites who’d composed the document, stirring backlash.

Definitions of “liberty” and “free speech,” then, were contested from the get-go. Shteyngart approaches this history with the reverence it deserves, though with a European cynicism deftly dressed up as a neurodiverse 10-year-old’s lark. Midway through, the story’s comic scaffolding falls away, exposing Shteyngart’s grim question: who inherits the supposed mantle of “American identity”—and how, and why? The question isn’t merely rhetorical. When the United States celebrated its 200th birthday in 1976—Gen Xers will recall Bicentennial Minutes and America Rock, or tall, historic ships in New York Harbor—one in 21 citizens were foreign-born. By 2026’s semiquincentennial, that ratio will be one in six. Who, then, are the real “aliens”?

Are we all somehow double agents, betraying a commonweal, pledging allegiance to a multicultural polity while withdrawing into silos, echo chambers of the internet? What do the colors red, white, and blue actually signify? As an inquisitive outsider, an astute observer who tells all the truth but tells it slant, Vera won’t rest until she understands herself, and her country, better. Shteyngart keeps it light until he doesn’t. The sudden twist is well worth Vera’s journey—and ours.