Skip to content

Fools Russian

Gary Shteyngart’s novel of strangers in a changed land

Vera, or Faith by Gary Shteyngart. Random House, 256 pages. 2025.

Once the mise-en-scène of the American immigrant story entailed Ellis Island and Lady Liberty, but by the second half of the twentieth century, the popular romance of second sons leaving Ireland, Italy, and Germany for the prosperous American frontier was dead on arrival. No longer a new beginning, it was more like a last resort; for those arriving from the Global South today, the promised land is paved with strip mall massage parlors while air-sealed U-Hauls clear the southern border on a byzantine quest for official permanence. The children of immigrants, meanwhile, are obliged to strike a balance between traditional expectation and assimilation, existing in a constant schizophrenic state of shapeshifting to adapt to their immediate surroundings. Even before ICE agents were lying in wait at citizenship ceremonies or in restaurant parking lots, the barriers presented by America’s immigration process—the application costs, legal fees, onerous documentation, and coercive employment tactics that keep immigrants working long hours for little pay—hampered any meaningful sense of belonging. The children of these immigrants are raised in an environment of rising commodification where the individual is only as valuable as they are productive. America is a culture of monetization and any tradition that fails to meet that pro forma is deemed unworthy. As novelist Gary Shteyngart once quipped, “It’s my great misfortune to have left one dying empire for another.”

America is a culture of monetization and any tradition that fails to meet that pro forma is deemed unworthy.

It’s from the perspective of a child that Shteyngart writes in Vera, or Faith. The novel, his sixth, marks a departure for Shteyngart. The protagonists of four of his first five novels fill out a nearly identical male figure at different points in his life: a low-esteemed, sex-deprived Soviet emigre yearning for commercial capital and artistic achievements that he hopes will get him laid, quick to spurn his old-world background. Vladimir Girshkin, Lenny Abramov, or Sasha Senderovsky—protagonists of Shteyngart’s first, third, and fifth novels respectively—work, con, and thieve their way into the American ideal, hoping to be taken for an equal by their more generationally secure American peers. Perhaps these are facsimiles of Shteyngart’s own cosmopolitan contemporaries in the New York party scene; it wouldn’t be the first time he mined private angst to speak for the diaspora. Born in Leningrad and raised in the Soviet Union until the age of seven, the author’s family was part of what he calls the Carter-Brezhnev “Jews-for-grain” deal which landed them, and thousands of other Soviet Jews, in New York City in the final decade of the Cold War. But the barriers to assimilation are less cultural, more social, in Vera, though make no mistake: nobody’s at home when split between realities.

The titular Vera Bradford-Shmulkin is a ten-year-old girl who attends a prestigious Manhattan grade school and struggles with social anxiety, the uncertainty of her parents’ unhappy marriage, and her mixed-race identity within a white family. Intellectual beyond her years, Vera agonizes over all of it:

Becoming homeless worried Vera. She read the billboards at the bus shelters very earnestly. One told her that sixty-three percent of the occupants of homeless shelters in the city were members of families, probably failed families like her own would become if she were unable to hold her parents together.

She is overly attentive, listening in and comprehending for the most part her parents’ more mature conversations. When they say something she doesn’t know, she adds the word or term to her Things I Still Need to Know Diary, containing a running list of topics of which she’ll one day learn the meaning. She is unable to muffle her own thoughts, keep from correcting her teachers in class, and has to be reminded by her stepmother, nicknamed Anne Mom, of how to behave with classmates.

It’s never explicit, but along with a tendency of Vera’s to flap her hands—a term which she assertively rejects and instead explains that she is simply shaking out her “excess energy”—the idea seems to be that Vera is on the spectrum. Anne Mom coaches her on how to mask her antisocial tendencies, nod with gratitude at her teachers, and avoid academic topics like Korean topography in favor of playground gossip.

Anne Mom comes from a Boston Brahmin background with the family money to prove it. Vera is the child of her Soviet-Jewish father, Igor, and his Korean-American first wife, referred to as Mom Mom by Vera, though she has no memory of her. Vera is told only that her biological mother “abandoned” her and her father when she was a baby. She has a younger brother, Dylan, the progeny of Igor and Anne Mom, whom Vera believes her stepmother loves more than her given their genetic similarities. Igor Shmulkin, on the other hand, more resembles the author—they even share a first name (Gary, born Igor Semyonovich Shteyngart). A variant of Vladimir Girshkin (if he’d ever gotten his literary career off the ground) or a parallel Sasha Senderovsky (in similarly marital and professional freefall), Shmulkin, a left-leaning essayist, editor, and once-upon-a-time literary celeb, is willing to throw his principles out the window if it means successfully selling his floundering magazine to an unnamed Rhodesian Billionaire (capitals Shteyngart’s). His leftist principles are secondary to his embrace of bourgeois status symbols, like alma maters and private social clubs, but in the novel’s obnoxiously Manhattan setting—filled with references to Swarthmore and apartment envy—his insecurities fit right in. The wealth divide is not between the haves and the have-nots, but the have-everythings and the have-most-things. Anne Mom’s performative politics constitute a familiarly “Ruthkanda forever” liberalism, demonstrated by her rearranging of the bookshelf before guests come over so that female authors and writers of color are featured more prominently.

Vera’s precocious humility goes a long way toward safeguarding the book from its immediate predecessors’ descent into rote dramas of the urban elite. 2018’s Lake Success, Shteyngart’s fourth novel, was set in the world of hedge funds and attempted to humanize the aggressively wealthy with a high-finance take on “money can’t buy happiness.” Shteyngart, by his own account, spent at least three years fraternizing with hedge fund managers in preparation and, for a book more concerned with the nuances of luxury wristwatches than complex securities trading, it reads like fan fiction for the uber-wealthy. Likewise, the pedigree of the writers, tech entrepreneurs, and A-list actors waiting out the Covid-19 pandemic on a rural estate in his next novel, Our Country Friends, was annoyingly reminiscent of Shteyngart’s own habit of boasting of his celebrity friends in interviews. But Vera’s desire for stability and understanding is that of a child, turning Igor and Anne Mom’s petty socio-political peacocking to semi-satirical white noise. Her only friend is an artificially intelligent chess board named Kaspie, with whom she converses with in her bedroom.

“Our parents invested so much into us,” Kaspie commiserates with Vera after she tells him she received a B in math class. “They have died a thousand deaths for us.” Other than Kaspie, her only other confidant is Anne Mom’s close friend, Cecile, an accomplished actress. Vera enlists her “Aunt” Cecile’s help in preparing for a school project, a Lincoln-Douglas debate on the merits of a new law that in effect reverses affirmative action to privilege white citizens. Vera is assigned the affirmative, arguing that the “Five-Three” law should be enacted and Aunt Cecile gets Vera into character by focusing on her breathing and doing an acting exercise that requires her to mirror Aunt Cecile’s exact words and tone of voice. The debate prep proves transformative: not only does she grow close with her debate partner, Yumi, but Aunt Cecile awakens Vera’s sexuality, noticing the same fluttering in her stomach in the actress’s company as when she sees two women kissing in the elevator of her building. Shteyngart writes that the sun setting over Manhattan, the dusk’s colors mixing with the tail lights of cars, and the shadows of the buildings over the hordes of tourists, “plus the residual coconut smell of Aunt Cecile’s hair, touched Vera, and she, in turn, touched her own stomach and wondered where the nearest bathroom was so that she could pee, and she could picture herself doing it in a way that was very pleasurable, though she couldn’t quite quantify or qualify (and she was good at both) why it would be so pleasurable.”

Shteyngart hasn’t been this endearing since his earlier work, to the extent that we find ourselves celebrating with Igor and Anne Mom when Vera describes her blossoming friendship with Yumi. For once, we are spared rocky relationships rife with adultery, jealousy, and apathy, for an honest depiction of divorce from the rare perspective of a child. As their marriage disintegrates and the threat of Five-Three becoming the law of the land becomes more pronounced, Vera puts aside her jealousy of her younger brother and yearns for the continuity of her homelife—making lists for each of her parents with reasons why they should stay with the other—and confronts her identity by beginning to question the narrative her father has told her about Mom Mom’s absence. When she confesses her qualms to Kaspie, the chess board inflames her doubts:

“No sane Korean mother would abandon her child,” Kaspie said. “Not in this country with all its wealth.”

This really made Vera think. Was Daddy a bad person? Was he keeping her real mother from her? Why would he do that?”

When her father’s career takes a nosedive following the Rhodesian Billionaire’s about-face on Igor’s magazine, Vera asks her drunk and disheveled father “Are we going to be homeless?” “In a sense,” Igor tells her, “we’re homeless already.” When a refugee father laments bequeathing racially inferior status to his offspring, it is a not-so-speculative vision of present-day anxieties in the United States.

Homelessness is a consistent theme in immigrant and refugee literature, just as proximity to liminal spaces—lives left behind and futures lost—are in Shteyngart’s novels, as demonstrated in the social and civic instability of his younger emigre surrogates in his first three books. Super Sad True Love Story accurately predicted the rise of mobile dating apps, and Shteyngart is similarly on-point in Vera, or Faith when Vera realizes she can manipulate Anne Mom’s autonomous vehicle, named Stella, via Kaspie’s ability to mimic her stepmother’s voice. Futuristic tech is normalized, allowing Vera to travel unaccompanied in Stella and leverage Kaspie’s translation skills to spy on her father’s shady business dealings: “It took her a while to ‘dial in’ what was happening . . . but it was clear that they were speaking in Russian.”

Shteyngart’s place of birth has always been uniquely singled out for contempt in his fiction (even more so on his X feed). Russian characters in Shteyngart’s novels often appear as criminals, drunks, and fools; Igor Shmulkin is all three and a traitor to boot. In a relatively pointless and ham-fisted subplot, Igor leaves the country after he is caught having made a secret agreement with Russian agents to leverage his magazine as a funnel for right-wing misinformation. “Full horseshoe in four to six months,” Kaspie translates the instructions Igor has received from his Russian handler. Horseshoe, another entry in Vera’s Things I Still Need to Know Diary, is explained by the intelligent chess board as a strategy to gradually “pivot” the editorial slant of Igor’s magazine from left to right. It’s a lazy formula: if the character is Russian, they must be treacherous. It’s as though, for Shteyngart, denouncing the people and place from where he was born are dues of assimilation. The distinct odor of Cold War-era anti-censorship censorship guidelines rises off the page in these scenes, harkening back to an era of prolific publication of samizdat literature in Western countries, provided the work of Soviets was sufficiently anti-Soviet.

When a refugee father laments bequeathing racially inferior status to his offspring, it is a not-so-speculative vision of present-day anxieties in the United States.

Try as he may to distance himself, though, Shteyngart writes like a Russian. Fearless and real in confronting the consequences, tragedy is neither averted nor overdramatized into bathos. It’s where Shetyngart is his most honest. Barry Cohen goes from hedge fund manager to bus station crackhead by the end of Lake Success, and Vladimir Girshkin, the hero of The Russian Debutante’s Handbook, is left bloody and bruised by his fellow conmen, resigned to his own banal, immigrant existence. It’s a cynical yet honest acceptance of life as it is, not as it should be, a watermark that he shares with Dostoevsky, Babel, the semi-autobiographical fiction of Sergei Dovlatov, and the current generation of emigre writers like Katya Kazbek and Ilya Kaminsky. By the end of the novel, Vera’s curiosity leads her to the bitter truths she’s been after, but she is unprepared for the gravity of their revelations. She and Yumi have located her biological maternal grandparents in Ohio and she sets off in Stella to find them. With her traitorous father living in Budapest, Vera asks her chess board companion, “Is there anything more important than finding my mother?” Maybe her mystery parent won’t shame her for her social abnormalities, maybe she’ll be normal at last.

“I’m safe now,” Vera thinks upon reaching Ohio and enjoying a customary Korean lunch of galbi-jjim in her grandparents’ kitchen. “And soon my real mother will come.” But she does not. Her grandparents explain that adapting to life in America was difficult for her mother. Mom Mom’s decision to “abandon” Vera was not to live as a secret agent or vanguard scientist, as the ten-year-old imagines, but borne out of an inability to cope with a life of unfamiliarity and designated inauthenticity. Her grandparents show Vera photos of Mom Mom from her childhood and college graduation. As they dig through a box of Mom Mom’s things, they find a notebook her mother kept upon first arriving in America. Her Book of Words, Mom Mom called it. Words, like Vera’s Thing’s I Still Need to Know, that didn’t make sense to the young Korean immigrant:

Money.

Spend.

Spending.

Discount.

Bus.

Ticket.

Transfer.

Money transfer.

Emergency.

Kidney.

Liver.

Diabetes.

Library.

Due date.

Fine (penalty).

Foreign language section.

The isolation Vera experiences in her split home and the misfortune of never knowing her mother, an ancestry lost and her identity obscured, is inherited from Shteyngart’s predecessors of Russian and emigre writers. Babel’s hero in Red Cavalry can’t go back to the gentle journalist he was prior to killing his first goose, and Vera now knows the sad, irreversible reason for her mother’s abandonment. There is no going back to the innocence she possessed at the start of the novel. Vera, or Faith is set in the universal community of loss, grief, loneliness, and the depressive state of America inherited from the harsh reality of life in the old world. Despite his feelings about Russia and Russians, Shteyngart’s America doesn’t look much different. As readers wade through the author’s courtier sympathies and progressive politicking, Vera’s vulnerability in the face of life’s unfortunate verities coalesce into a coming-of-age story of evergreen quality.