Tastes at first like a cherry-flavored gumdrop, but it’ll burn a hole in your tongue ... Long been Shteyngart’s genius, his ability to make us feel the toothache under the laughter ... As the comedy seeps out of this story like air from a tire, the novel keeps picking up speed until it’s grinding on its rims.
Delightfully bittersweet ... His canny fiction doesn’t make me any happier to be living through the times he is memorializing, but it does provide commiseration and amusement, maybe even a bit of faith in the possibility of something better on some distant horizon.
Times like these demand great comic novels and thank God we have Gary Shteyngart to provide. His shortest, sweetest and most perfectly constructed novel ever, Vera, or Faith is here to save the day ... This is probably the most endearing book about anxiety ever written ... More heart, but as funny as ever.
Compelling ... [Vera is] a hugely engaging character ... The setup is vivid. Vera’s voice is persuasive and credible...and her combination of misunderstanding and perspicacity feels perfectly judged ... In creating her, Mr. Shteyngart joins a small cohort of authors (including Mark Haddon and, arguably, J.D. Salinger) who have successfully and movingly captured the perspective of a young person with autism ... The broader world-building is cleverly done and not over-egged ... Mr. Shteyngart’s political imagination is precisely calibrating ... The reader is swept happily along, though things do begin to fray toward the end, and the denouement...further picks at the seams of credibility ... Charming.
Slight, only semi-involving ... One of Shteyngart’s darkest ... Dystopias have become the pre-chewed meat at the end of every novelist’s fork ... Hovers, like a blinking cursor, between tragedy and comedy. It lacks the bounce of Shteyngart’s best fiction, and there is no driving emotional energy to replace it. The impact of Shteyngart’s own personality on the page has always been greater than the impact his characters make. In quieter novels like this one, those characters seem under-examined and under-felt. He works hard to never appear as if he is working too hard, but here that seems like a liability ... No Shteyngart novel is a waste of time. Vera’s under-construction sense of herself is almost enough to pull you along—but not really and not quite.
Shteyngart has proved adept at finding humor in the intersection of immigrant life, wealth and relationships, and Vera largely sticks to that mix. But the cynicism that has always thrummed underneath his high-concept comedies...is more prominent in this slim, potent novel ... It’s a challenge to write from the perspective of a child without being arch or cutesy...Shteyngart is striving for something more supple.
There remains a dearth of more fully rendered neurodiverse characters. One of our finest contemporary writers, Gary Shteyngart, is here to remedy that problem ... Enchanting ... Shteyngart hits his marks with relish ...
Vera glitters with irony, rich as buttercream frosting, and flavorful notes of hope ... Shteyngart seems liberated, reminiscent of Colson Whitehead in his svelte, sharp-edged novel The Nickel Boys (2019) ... Shteyngart gracefully sketches the contours of an intricate plot ... His sentences move with customary vim and verve, attending to his serious themes .... My single quibble: Vera’s frequent use of scare quotes feels gimmicky and intrusive as the story accelerates. Otherwise, the book is a rip of a read, erudite and entertaining in equal measure.
Lively, skittish ... Simple, breezy and conversational ... The novel is busy and ingratiating, almost to a fault, which is to say that it feels distracted, unsettled; a cultural code-switcher itself ... [Has] messy vitality ... 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 ... Has to be deserving of a solid B grade at least.
Written with his distinctive blend of buoyant satire and bruise-your-heart poignancy ... Because Shteyngart lands one beautifully crafted phrase after another, you’re both entertained by and made very aware of how mysterious adult argot can be to children ... In barbed comic passages, Shteyngart tempers the humor enough to show how vast swaths of the citizenry now accept as normal what once would have been considered dangerously extreme ... Tenderly charming.
Vera, or Faith brilliantly inhabits the consciousness of a young girl to produce a story of family and friendship that pleasingly engages the mind as it slowly insinuates its way into the heart ... Combining deep humanity with Gary Shteyngart's customary intelligence and wit, Vera, or Faith is a reminder of why he's a writer whose works are good ones to keep close at hand in challenging times.
Obnoxiously Manhattan ... Vera’s precocious humility goes a long way toward safeguarding the book from its immediate predecessors’ descent into rote dramas of the urban elite ... Shteyngart hasn’t been this endearing since his earlier work ... [There's a] pointless and ham-fisted subplot ... Fearless and real in confronting the consequences, tragedy is neither averted nor overdramatized into bathos. It’s where Shetyngart is his most honest ... A coming-of-age story of evergreen quality.
Further proof that not the least of the damage Donald Trump has done to the country is the effect he’s had on its literati, whose obsession with the damage he’s done to the country may be understandable, but by now feels wearingly predictable ... In his defence, Shteyngart does hit out in all directions ... In his further defence, Shteyngart at least varies the angle of attack on Trump ... Scarcely subtle ... There's a hysterically over-the-top ending ... This clumsiness/Trump Tourette’s is an especial shame given how sharp, funny and touching the depiction of Vera remains ... Shteyngart may not be the first novelist to contrast a child’s innocence with the wicked adult world, but he does it with a winning combination of sure-footedness, mischief and a kind of melancholy sweetness that never curdles into sentimentality.
Like many young people in contemporary fiction, Vera loves a good list and draws up several, each designed to make us chuckle at her precocity, but the problem is they’re just not funny and the concept has been done so often that it has grown tired ... Vera’s attempts to ingratiate herself with a classmate, Yumi, will be relatable to anyone who went through school as a bit of a loner, but I reached the end with a sense of time wasted and the impression that the author is nowhere near as amusing as he thinks he is ... Why don’t comic novels make us laugh out loud any more?
Nabokov is perennially present in Shteyngart’s distinctive linguistic flamboyance ... The credulous ventriloquism provides an ironic perspective on the adults in Vera’s life ... Beautifully observed—[could be] enough to keep this reader interested without any speculative, futuristic fireworks ... All of this is inventive and mildly diverting; but it is hard to know how to take it. Is it all just a bit of silly fun, or is the hyperbolic handwringing seriously meant? ... The novel’s predictably heartfelt ending includes a paean to diversity ... There is, then, a lot going on, and it all has to be filtered through Vera’s limited perspective. The voice—which is the best thing about this novel—inevitably suffers ... A frictionless, lively read with a moral to the story, mostly cosy, a little bit edgy, occasionally cloying ... But Vera won’t stick with me—as Selin does, as Maisie does.
Charming ... Combining deep humanity with Gary Shteyngart's customary intelligence and wit, Vera, or Faith is a reminder of why he's a writer whose works are good ones to keep close at hand in challenging times.
