Gary Shteyngart is the observational standup of American letters, a puckish, playful Russian-born author who views the US through the eyes of an inquisitive tourist. The immigrant melting pot of New York is his stage; the intricate English language his prop. Shteyngart’s characters, typically lightly veiled alter egos, are always getting lost, tripping up and mangling basic social interactions. It’s the missed connections and short circuits that give his fictions their spark.
Shteyngart’s sixth novel is a lively, skittish Bildungsroman, shading towards darkness as it tracks the journey – literal, educational, emotional – of 10-year-old Vera Bradford-Shmulkin, an overanxious, over-watchful academic high achiever whose run of straight As has just been blighted by a B. “Being smart is one of the few things I have to be proud of,” laments Vera, who diligently maintains a “Things I Still Need to Know Diary” in which she makes note of difficult words and intriguing figures of speech. The girl is articulate and precocious, bent on self-improvement, and never mind the fact that she confuses “facile” with “futile” and “hollowed” with “hallowed” and is wont to wax lyrical about the “she-she” districts of Manhattan. Her vocabulary is almost – but crucially not quite – sufficient to give us the whole story and explain what it means.
Always happy to show his workings, Shteyngart cites Henry James’s 1897 novel What Maisie Knew as the prompt for Vera, or Faith’s child’s-eye account of complicated adult affairs, although his gauche heroine bears a passing resemblance to the author himself as portrayed in his 2014 memoir, Little Failure. Friendless Vera lives with her rackety Russian-Jewish father, Igor (Shteyngart’s name at birth), who edits a floundering liberal arts magazine, her harried Wasp stepmother, Anne (who added the “e” in tribute to Anne Frank), and a boisterous younger half-brother, Dylan, who likes exposing himself to houseguests. But she also has (or possibly had) a Korean-born mother, long since vanished from the scene. Invisible Iris Choi plays the tale’s white whale or MacGuffin; the elusive hidden figure that Vera is determined to locate.
The eccentric Bradford-Shmulkins are lurching towards crisis, but they seem a model of stability when compared with the rest of the country, which reveals itself in unflattering flashes in the corners of the narrative. Shteyngart’s novel, we come to realise, plays out a decade from now, in a “post-democracy” USA where red state officials monitor menstrual cycles, self-driving cars shop their owners to the feds and the news platforms are abuzz with Russian disinformation. Desperate to redeem herself at school, Vera prepares to debate in support of the proposed “Five-Three Amendment”, a piece of racist legislation that would grant added voting weight to those “exceptional Americans” whose ancestors arrived before the revolutionary war, “but were exceptional enough not to arrive in chains”. In so doing, of course, she’s arguing against her own interests. Blond, blue-eyed Dylan would count as an “exceptional American”. Dark‑haired, brown-eyed Vera would not.
Henry James provides the prompt but his involvement begins and ends there, because Vera, or Faith isn’t Jamesian at all. The prose is simple, breezy and conversational, even when it’s stumbling artfully over its words. If Shteyngart’s novel possesses anything so fixed as a north star or a patron saint, it’s surely not James but Vladimir Nabokov. The title references Ada, or Ardor, while its protagonist comes styled in the manner of a pint-sized Timofey Pnin: a dogged innocent caught between cultures and half-lost in translation. In the course of her adventures, Vera learns that she was named after Nabokov’s wife, “a woman who was a genius herself but in the olden days she had to serve her husband”. Vera Nabokov’s 21st-century namesake – driven and decent and at the top of her class – similarly risks being dismissed as a second-class citizen.
The novel is busy and ingratiating, almost to a fault, which is to say that it feels distracted, unsettled; a cultural code-switcher itself. Vera, or Faith was reputedly drafted at speed in a little under two months, incorporating elements from a spy novel that the author had recently abandoned. That accounts for its messy vitality and its frequent, perturbing shifts of gear. Shteyngart’s ode to a good American in a bad America conspires to be, by turns, a rueful human comedy and a coming-of-age caper, a dystopian chiller and an espionage yarn. The colourful tale never satisfyingly hangs together; its component pieces tend to jar more than gel. But Shteyngart sets about his material with abundant energy and charm. He sketches a convincing caricature of a near-future USA and provides a stoical heroine that we can uncomplicatedly root for. Even in a degraded, compromised, up-is-down social climate, that has to be deserving of a solid B grade at least.
• Vera, or Faith by Gary Shteyngart is published by Atlantic (£16.99). To support the Guardian order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
