Ezra's Bookshelf

Vera, or Faith

by Gary Shteyngart · 257 pages · ~4.5 hrs

Fiction

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Gary Shteyngart's novel follows ten-year-old Vera, half-Jewish and half-Korean, as her family falls apart amid an unstable America. Vera's father, a Russian immigrant who runs a satirical website, finds his heritage gaining new currency as American politics turn upside-down. Her Korean-American mother struggles with the demands of assimilation and the strains of marriage. Vera observes it all with a child's mixture of confusion and clarity. Shteyngart, known for satirizing both American and post-Soviet cultures, here combines political satire with family drama. The novel is set in a near-future that extrapolates current trends toward polarization and authoritarianism. Vera's child perspective provides both distance from and intimacy with the adult world's failures. Shteyngart writes with his characteristic wit, but the humor sits alongside genuine pathos. The book examines what it means to belong to multiple cultures when all of them are coming apart. This is a family novel and a political novel, finding in one family's dissolution a reflection of national unraveling.

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