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.
