Gary Shteyngart’s new novel, Vera, or Faith, arrives with a sly sidestep. Like Borat earlier than him, he steps away from heart stage in favor of his fictional daughter. As a substitute of boring us with a center-aged author mining his personal neuroses, Igor Shmulkin simply gives a tragic sideshow for his hopeful fictional youngster.

Vera begins with yet one more model of Shteyngart’s without end stand‑in: a bumbling Russian‑Jewish expat, half in love with irony, half in love with cash, and totally in love with himself. Not like his daughter Vera, Shmulkin barely has religion in something: love, capitalism, America, and even his alma mater.

Vera, his precocious 10-yr-previous daughter is saddled with a father who desperately needs to consider he can defend her from the rot he’s spent his life skewering, whereas he can barely hold himself afloat. She, although, can differentiate herself. She is half Korean, residing along with her father and white liberal step-mom, “Anne Mother.” The ebook follows her quest to search out her mom’s household and, maybe relatedly, who she is in the world.

Vera is the uncommon Shteyngart protagonist who doesn’t in any respect share his terminal irony — and that’s the ebook’s secret weapon. She’s the rebuke to Shmulkin’s cynicism, the one factor he hasn’t but managed to show right into a joke or a device. Her sincerity to find out who she is in a complicated world pushes again at his slippery irony. The novel’s satire stops winking at the reader and will get uncomfortably near one thing actual: the desperation of any father or mother who needs their child to have a greater story.

Does Vera get the dignity she deserves? Type of. She escapes the worst neuroses of her mother and father, however not the loopy world (and various grandparents) that precipitated them. Vera is a protagonist who can maintain a mirror to her father’s failings, and additionally his final hope that religion would possibly imply one thing past a intelligent title.

As traditional, Shteyngart’s writing is as slippery and sardonic as ever. No one skewers the immigrant striver class or New York Metropolis liberals’ ethical performativity fairly like him.

Vera, or Religion needs to persuade you there’s hope — that we will construct one thing higher, that perhaps the subsequent era received’t inherit our deadly cynicism. However the ebook itself can’t fairly muster the religion it’s promoting. Which, in a manner, is the most sincere half.