Gary Shteyngart has often been linked to Vladimir Nabokov and Philip Roth. This is not simply because of the identities he shares with these writers (Shteyngart is Soviet-born, American and Jewish). References to them also abound in his work. The protagonist of his new novel, Vera, or Faith, was named by her mother after ‘the wife of her favourite Russian writer’, the man who wrote Ada, or Ardor. Like Sasha Senderovsky in Shteyngart’s 2021 novel Our Country Friends, Vera’s father is a middle-aged writer with a biography that closely parallels Shteyngart’s (unlike Roth, he tends to create a new alter ego each time). But Vera’s mother is ethnically Korean. Shteyngart is more interested in what immigrant groups have in common with each other than in the distinctiveness of his own heritage. 

Vera, or Faith is set in a near-future version of the USA in which a movement called Five-Three (apparently a reference to the notorious Three-Fifths Compromise of 1787) seeks to grant greater voting rights to ‘exceptional Americans’, meaning those whose ancestors arrived ‘before or during the Revolutionary War but were exceptional enough not to arrive in chains’. Although AI is ubiquitous, parents seem to have figured out how to regulate children’s screen time. Vera’s only screen – and her only friend – is a Korean-made chess computer named Kaspie, after Garry Kasparov. 

We meet Vera on her first day of fifth grade. Shteyngart has said that the idea for this novel came to him while watching the Oscar-winning divorce drama Kramer vs Kramer on a flight and wondering what the story would look like from ‘the kid’s point of view’. But for