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.
This slight, only semi-involving novel is one of Shteyngart’s darkest. It offers us a futuristic, dystopian version of America. The unthinkable has become the inevitable. Yet 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.
A lively, skittish Bildungsroman, shading towards darkness ... The novel is busy and ingratiating, almost to a fault, which is to say that it feels distracted, unsettled; a cultural code-switcher itself ... 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.
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.
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.
