Gary Shteyngart on Channeling a Precocious Child Narrator

Vera, the buzzy, brilliant and preternaturally observant ten-year-old central to Gary Shteyngart’s sardonic and profoundly relevant new novel, brings a fresh, necessary perspective to our evolving dystopian universe. Her anxieties as the Russian Jewish-Korean daughter of immigrants surviving in a fraught domestic atmosphere made me pull Shteyngart’s panic-loaded 2014 memoir Little Failure from my bookcase. Yes, there are echoes of the “tightly wound” young Gary, who begins his first unpublished novel in English at ten, in Vera, or Faith. But Vera, in her heart, knows she’s not a failure. And the life of immigrants in 2025 is infinitely more complicated than a decade ago.

Ironically, Vera’s existence may result from a sushi lunch that went sideways. Indeed, Shteyngart wrote Vera, or Faith, in a whirlwind. His editor, David Ebershoff, mentioned that he delivered the novel 51 days after a sushi lunch at which Ebershoff suggested the multigenerational saga Shteyngart had been working on wasn’t working.

How did that happen? I asked the author. “I had written 200 pages of a novel that sucked,” he explained. “I was hoping my editor wouldn’t call me out on it, but he did. Politely. A few weeks before the sushi lunch that sealed my fate, I had rewatched Kramer vs. Kramer while on a long plane ride from Tokyo. The idea struck me of writing the story of a troubled family from a child’s point of view, a la What Maisie Knew. But you know, funnier. Less Henry James-ish. And so we were off to the races.”

Vera, or Faith depends much more on voice and humor than What Maisie Knew. Was that intentional? I asked Shteyngart. “Yeah, like I said, I love me my James, but I need just a little more humor in my work, and it’s gotta be a little rawer, sometimes raunchier.”

Our email conversation reached from one coast to the other.

Jane Ciabattari: Why this title? And the name Vera (or Faith) for your ten-year-old narrator?

I think precocious children in fiction can be pretentious. But what are you gonna do? Write about a dumb one?

Gary Shteyngart: Guess I’m channeling Nabokov’s Ada, or Ardor. But that book was endless, this one is nice and slim. Vera’s a lovely name which also happens to mean “faith’ in many Slavic languages. As for Jewish-Korean, that happens to be my family. Write what you know, as they say.

JC: Did you consider writing this novel in first person? Why did you choose third person?

GS: It’s fun to hover over a ten-year-old as I do over my son who was that age until recently. But the third person is so close the reader gets most of the benefits of being inside Vera’s sweet noggin.

JC: Vera’s idiosyncratic syntax keeps this novel spinning along. How did you develop her distinctive voice, a mix of quoted adult lines, perceptive observations, and interior confessions?

GS: Yeah, her interior voice is like an endless sampling of everything around her. She’s the DJ of language, if you will. Also reminded me of how I learned English as a young immigrant by constantly writing down words. Vera’s not an immigrant, but her social awkwardness with her peers does lend her some of the qualities I had growing up.

JC: Vera’s father is an “intellectual” who edits “a magazine for smarties,” “is funny most of the time,” is known for his “trademark cynicism” and “Russian nihilism” and enjoys several glasses of “mar-tiny” at the end of the day. Her stepmother, Anne Mom, “maintains her beauty,” has “a little trust,” went to Brown for graduate school, makes a lot of delectable ‘WASP lunches’ for the family, and teaches Vera interpersonal subtleties like “Think of your audience.” From the beginning Vera is aware of tensions in the relationship between her parents (“Don’t you care if they get divorced?” she whispers to her younger brother Dylan). Sadly she feels required to help fix it. (“I have to….” As in your chapter headings is her continuing mantra). Both her pediatrician and her psychologist describe Vera as “a very bright ten-year-old” who suffers from “intense anxiety.” How did you develop the details of this marriage at the breaking point and its effect on Vera?

GS: Yeah, as I mentioned above, I rewatched Kramer vs. Kramer and BOOM! But when I was growing up my parents were on the edge of divorce for about fifteen years. Unlike Vera, I was an only child but I constantly had to referee the fights between them, serving as a kind of diplomat without portfolio. (They stayed together in the end.) I think that really changed how I approach relationships. And Vera too constantly shuttles between parents hoping to keep them together.

JC: Vera understands class distinctions and the anxiety her father has when he can’t get the “Rhodesian Billionaire” to buy his magazine, but isn’t clear how to make friends her own age. She is sophisticated and naïve at the same time. How difficult was it to achieve this effect?

GS: Not difficult at all! Look, I think precocious children in fiction can be pretentious. But what are you gonna do? Write about a dumb one? There are few readers left in America, but they’re super smart and usually have achieved some measure of emotional knowledge. I think many of them will enjoy Vera, but many of them were Vera.

I’m pretty good at covering all the ways our world/country are going to hell in a proverbial hand basket.

JC: Midway through the novel, Vera begins to spy on her father (“She had to figure out if Daddy was a traitor”), wearing a hoodie and following him down the street to his private club and garden. She also searches for her birth mother, eager to discover verifiable truths about her identity. How difficult was it to shape this spy novel theme (undergirded by Vera’s references to a YA book called Yoon-a Choi, Middle-School Spy)?

GS: Not difficult at all! My failed novel was a spy novel (my second failed spy novel for those keeping count at home), so I was able to blend those elements in pretty easily. I wish there really was a Yoon-a Choi, Middle School Spy out there somewhere.

JC: Elements of this novel are slightly futuristic but not much. There’s Kaspie, Vera’s AI-powered chessboard, which begins to offer political opinions; Stella, the autonomous car that drives her to Ohio in search of her birth mother, and the ongoing campaign for the Five-thirds amendment, which calls for “exceptional Americans” who can trace their roots to the Revolutionary War to get five-thirds of a vote. Vera becomes immersed in the five-thirds controversy when her teacher assigns her to argue in a debate in favor of the amendment, while Anne Mom prepares to host fundraiser against it. Vera also realizes she wouldn’t be considered exceptional because her father was born in Russia, and her birth mother is Korean. What sort of process led you in toward these concepts?

GS: I’m pretty good at covering all the ways our world/country are going to hell in a proverbial hand basket. Vera is just my latest attempt after Super Sad, which posited that social media was going to destroy our democracy which, um, kinda happened. Like Anne Mom says “I am the Nostradamus of two weeks from now.”

JC: What are you working on now/next?

GS: A children’s book about capybaras, naturally!

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vera, or faith