Book Notes: Vera, or Faith by Gary Shteyngart

The plot based on an encounter of an innocent child with the hypocritical world of adults has been done to death. To revive this exhausted topic, Gary Shteyngart sets his novel Vera, or Faith in a near future where Eastern Europe has formed a Coalition of Illiberal States, Ohio constantly tests women to see if they have had an abortion, AI and self-driving cars are everywhere, and Russia is colluding to make the votes of immigrants in the US count for less than people whose ancestors have been here since the revolutionary war.

None of this, however, is what makes the novel fail. You can be an ideologue but still be great at your craft. Shteyngart’s main failure in Vera is that of a writer whose plotting is too lazy and character development is careless. He’s not a talentless author but he wants to write political manifestos more than novels. And this destroys the literary quality of the book.

One great problem is that Shteyngart writes the little 10-year-old heroine, Vera, like she’s a boy. He hasn’t made the slightest effort to understand the experience of a girl growing up, although there’s a trillion coming of age novels about little girls. Suffice it to say that the brilliant, well-read Vera with a mega progressive mother never heard of menstruation. That the daughter of left-wing parents doesn’t carry around “a menstruation kit” since at least age 7 defies belief.

This is only one thing out of many that makes it clear that Shteyngart doesn’t care much about the characters he creates. The plot is equally carelessly constructed, accelerating at the point where the author gets bored with his own story and is eager to get to the end as fast as possible. When a character becomes inconvenient, Shteyngart writes him out of the novel in a sloppy way.

Shteyngart is not devoid of talent. I did finish the novel, which means there’s enough in it to hold my interest. But he’s lazy. Yes, his gift is on the modest side but that’s precisely why he needs to grind more than authors with greater natural gifts. I won’t be reading anything else by this author because, at the age he is, I don’t believe he’ll rethink his entire life strategy and start to work to defeat his sloppiness and laziness.