CANR
WORK TITLE: Vera, or Faith
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CITY: New York
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NATIONALITY: Russian
LAST VOLUME: CANR 275
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PERSONAL
Born July 5, 1972, in Leningrad (no St. Petersburg), USSR (now Russia); immigrated to Queens, NY, c. 1979; son of an engineer and pianist.
EDUCATION:Graduated from Oberlin College, 1995.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer. Columbia University School of the Arts, New York, NY, professor of writing. Worked as writer for nonprofit organizations, including New York Association for New Americans; has also taught writing at Hunter College.
AWARDS:Stephen Crane Award for First Fiction, and National Jewish Book Award for Fiction, for The Russian Debutante’s Handbook; named one of the five best new writers, Shout NY, 2002; named one of the ten best books of the year, New York Times Book Review and Time, for Absurdistan; named book of the year, Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, and San Francisco Chronicle, for Absurdistan; listed among the “20 under 40” luminary fiction writers, New Yorker, 2010; Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize, 2011, for Super Sad True Love Story.
WRITINGS
Contributor to periodicals, including the New Yorker, Travel + Leisure, Esquire, GQ, Granta, Slate, Atlantic, and New York Times Magazine.
SIDELIGHTS
Born in the former Soviet Union and transplanted to the United States when he was seven years old, Gary Shteyngart became a heralded new novelist when he poured his conflicted feelings about the old world and new into The Russian Debutante’s Handbook. The book follows the adventures of Vladimir Girshkin, the author’s alter ego, an immigrant to America who gets himself mixed up with organized crime and a circle of American expatriates in the invented European city of Prava. The humorous, cynical, fantastical story quickly went from being material for a graduate school application to a widely reviewed and praised publication. Several critics have noted links between the author’s style and that of Vladimir Nabokov.
Shteyngart came to Queens, New York, with his family in the late 1970s, a move that thrilled his parents and horrified him. He still remains nostalgic for his life in the Soviet Union, of which he said in the New York Times Magazine: “It only became horrible once you were an adult.” Hateful memories of his school days in the United States include being treated badly by fellow students and suffering from depression. Shteyngart also was uncomfortable at Oberlin College, where he wrote his senior thesis on the former Soviet republics of Georgia, Moldova, and Tajikistan. When he returned to New York, Shteyngart felt like an embarrassment to his parents, who had thrived in their professions since moving to the United States and dreamed that he would become a lawyer. He escaped by traveling in Europe, drinking copiously but still engaging in the experiences that would help shape his novel.
When Shteyngart once again returned to New York City he took a series of jobs writing for nonprofit organizations. He also began writing his novel, which was done in secret at work. In 1999, Shteyngart sent a draft to Chang-rae Lee, the Korean-American author of Native Speaker and the director of the creative writing program at Hunter College. Lee sent the manuscript and attached M.F.A. program application to an editor, which resulted in a publishing contract. Shteyngart subsequently began writing a second novel; he told the New York Times Magazine that it had the same theme as The Russian Debutante’s Handbook: “unhappy man flees.”
The autobiographical elements of The Russian Debutante’s Handbook are blended into a satire about Americans living in post-Communist Europe and commentary on the immigrant experience. Twenty-five-year-old Vladimir Girshkin, a Leningrad-born New Yorker, is unhappy with his meddling mother and Medicare-defrauding father, his flaky girlfriend who works at a sex club, and his job at the Emma Lazarus Immigrant Absorption Society. The young man gets into trouble after he helps Rybakov, a client with Russian mafia connections, fake American citizenship. When other problems force him to flee to Prava, Girshkin is befriended by Rybakov’s son, a gangster known as the Groundhog. Together they set up a pyramid scheme designed to fleece Americans with literary aspirations who have come to Prava hoping it will provide the kind of inspiration Ernest Hemingway found in Paris.
The quirky, comic novel was widely reviewed and frequently praised as a strong first novel. Favored elements include the dynamic central character, numerous literary and cultural allusions, and biting humor. Criticisms have included concerns about the novel’s pacing, use of immigrant stereotypes, and lack of convincing background characters. More than one reviewer pointed out that Americans in Europe are perhaps an easy target for satire. Writing on the PopMatters Web site, Sarah Tan called the novel “a painfully clichéd caricature of modern immigrant mentality.” Tan saw evidence of great talent in The Russian Debutante’s Handbook but nevertheless felt the characters are weak and the satirical intent too obscure.
Other reviewers strongly recommended the book. Critic Fritz Lanham commented in the Houston Chronicle that the author “modulates between sly and antic humor” in a story that is “often laugh-out-loud funny.” A Publishers Weekly writer remarked: “Although the satire on the expatriate American community is a little too easy, Shteyngart’s Vladimir remains an impressive piece of work, an amoral buffoon who energizes this remarkably mature work.” Noting that Shteyngart dramatically departs from the tradition of “solemn tales of wistful dislocation” in immigrant literature, Laura Miller commented for Salon.com that his is “a blisteringly funny, almost frighteningly energetic novel of adventure, perfidy, and even a car chase or two.”
In numerous instances, reviewers made favorable connections to other writers. Time contributor Lev Grossman noted that because Shteyngart’s protagonist is as much a point of the satire as his victims, “the result is a satisfying skewering all round, as funny and wicked as [Evelyn] Waugh.” Echoing a comparison to Nabokov made by Chang-rae Lee, a Kirkus Reviews critic called the book “ambitious, funny, intelligent, in love with irony and literary allusions, as if by a lighter Nabokov.” Flakmagazine Web site contributor Elizabeth Kiem suggested that the book resembles John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces. In a review for the New York Times Book Review, contributor A.O. Scott likened Girshkin to several of Nabokov’s characters and summarized the work as an “energetic, ambitious first novel.” Scott judged that “Shteyngart’s playful, carnivalesque sensibility fits within a Russian satirical-fantastic tradition” that spans two centuries. At the same time, the critic explained: “The sturdy conventions of the traditional novel … are blithely disregarded in favor of digressive, madcap inventiveness.”
Shteyngart’s follow-up novel is Absurdistan, the story of a young man from Russia who is desperate to gain admittance into the United States. He manages to get in, but once he leaves, he finds himself stuck in a strange no-man’s-land to which the title refers. Again Shteyngart addresses the issues of immigration and the difficulties inherent in leaving the former Soviet Union in an attempt to become an American.
Despite the serious nature of much of his subject, he infuses every page with humor and satire, leaving many reviewers in agreement about his comedic talent. A reviewer for the Austinist Web site remarked: “While we were originally entertained and sucked in by the pop culture correlatives, we soon found that Absurdistan is a complex and enthralling commentary on the world we live in complete with bureaucratic negligence, corporate corruption, and easily-exploitable ethnic differences.” A Publishers Weekly reviewer called the book “a send up of American values abroad and a complex, sympathetic protagonist worthy of comparison to America’s enduring literary heroes.” Patrick Ness, writing for the London Guardian online, noted: “As with all of the very best satires, it’s only a matter of time, maybe even months, maybe even days, before we won’t be able to regard this as a satire at all.” Lev Grossman, in a review for Time, dubbed the book “profoundly funny, genuinely moving and wholly lovable.”
In 2010, Shteyngart published his third novel, Super Sad True Love Story. Set in New York City in the near future, the novel is a satire told through the diary entries of Lenny Abramov, a thirty-nine-year-old Jewish man who must come to grips with the discovery that he will not live forever. This realization comes as a result of his love affair with Eunice, a hip, angry young Korean-American woman who graduated from college with a major in Images and a minor in Assertiveness. The two meet in Rome and share an awkward romance; she is addicted to her handheld device, while he struggles to keep up with technology and loves print books. Lenny nonetheless convinces Eunice to move into his Chinatown studio, but soon the city is wracked by riots, and the nation by war. Lenny, who works for an “indefinite life extension” company, is obsessed with immortality, but death becomes a reality to him when Eunice runs off with his boss. It is then that he realizes that nothing lasts forever.
“The writing is never less than stylish and witty, and the sense of disaster, here as in Shteyngart’s other novels, is unfailingly lyrical, performed for full, funny rhetorical orchestra,” remarked Michael Wood in the New York Times Book Review. “The sheer exhilaration of the writing in this book—Lenny’s confessional tones, Eunice’s teenage slang—is itself a sort of answer to the flattened-out horrors of the world it depicts. It’s not that writing of any kind will save us from our follies or our rulers; but words are a form of life, and we can’t say we haven’t been warned.”
“Gary Shteyngart might be too funny for his own good,” stated Terrence Rafferty in a review for Slate.com. “His new novel, Super Sad True Love Story, is a spectacularly clever near-future dystopian satire, but it may actually disappoint admirers of his first two, more consistently hilarious, novels,” Rafferty predicted. “What gives this novel its unusual richness is that undercurrent of sorrow. … It’s no small thing for a writer as funny as Shteyngart to refrain from making jokes, as he largely does in the near-apocalyptic final third of Super Sad True Love Story. Being funny is a great blessing for an artist, but it can also be a weird kind of burden, because an audience denied the laughter it expects can turn kind of sullen.”
Ron Charles noted in the Washington Post Book World: “Shteyngart’s most trenchant satire depicts the inane, hyper-sexualized culture that connects everybody even while destroying any actual community or intimacy. This may be the only time I’ve wanted to stand up on the subway and read passages of a book out loud.” Charles concluded: “The only bulwark against despair, Shteyngart suggests with a nod to Matthew Arnold’s ‘Dover Beach,’ is our fidelity to those we love, the persistence of affection on a darkling plain lit only by giddy advertisements. The best satire is always grounded in optimism: faith in the writer’s power to gibe and cajole a dormant conscience to reform.”
Shteyngart followed Super Sad True Love Story with Little Failure: A Memoir. With his characteristic humor, Shteyngart recounts his transition from Leningrad to New York at age seven and his struggles to fit in as a Soviet Jew in Queens, guided by parents who misinterpreted much about American culture and who smothered and insulted him in equal measure. Their insults, or shutki, are intended as affection. The title of the book is one of his mother’s pet names for him, while his father calls him Snotty. At once angry, depressive, jealous, engaging, and loving, Shteyngart’s father looms large in the narrative, as does his charming but overbearing mother.
“Shteyngart summarizes his father’s duality—and his own—by referring to ‘the rage and humor that are our chief inheritance,’” noted Andy Borowitz in the New York Times Book Review. “ Little Failure is so packed with humor, it’s easy to overlook the rage, but it’s there, and it’s part of what makes the book so compelling. It even lurks in some of the photo captions, like the one under a snapshot of Shteyngart and his mother, taken shortly after their move to Queens: ‘One of the few photographs we have from this period. We were too busy suffering.’”
“Can a writer be too good for his own good—too dexterous, too ingratiating?” posited Edward Kosner in a review for the Wall Street Journal. “It’s an odd question but one inescapably raised by Gary Shteyngart. … His memoir, Little Failure, with its ironic title, endless virtuoso riffs and ultimately endearing conclusion, puts his skill on full display, for better or worse. … Mr. Shteyngart is an enormously entertaining writer. But the incessant cascade of cleverness molting into pathos can produce not only heartbreak but heartburn,” Kosner concluded.
Boston Globe contributor John Freeman had a very different reaction, noting in particular Shteyngart’s account of his twenties, in which he traded the love of his family for the advancement of his career. Freeman asserted: “Memoirs often suffer from the self-protective urge embedded in how we tell stories. A satirist at heart, Shteyngart has never possessed such instincts. Little Failure spares its author none of hindsight’s knives. … In its final pages Shteyngart has done something remarkable for someone so rewarded for being someone else. He has dismantled the armor of his humor to give readers his most tender and affecting gift yet: himself.”
(open new)With Lake Success, Barry Cohen is very wealthy but has hit rock bottom after learning about his son’s medical diagnosis. He leaves New York to stay with a friend in Baltimore, where he gets close with Javon, a crack dealer. He travels across the country, driving south to Atlanta and across to La Jolla, where he meets one of his ex-girlfriends. Meanwhile, his wife, Seema, is back in New York raising their children and having an affair with a Guatemalan writer who lives downstairs.
Writing in Spectator, Alex Preston stated: “Having started out portraying Cohen as a nebbish, a likeable klutz who gets lucky and enormously rich, Shteyngart subtly darkens our picture of him until, at the end of the novel, we loathe our hero.” Preston reasoned that the novel’s “bleakly powerful ending feels like just deserts for an industry that so far appears largely to have escaped literary censure for the crimes of the financial crisis.” A Kirkus Reviews contributor claimed that it is “as good as anything we’ve seen from this author: smart, relevant, fundamentally warm-hearted, hilarious of course, and it has a great ending.”
In Our Country Friends, successful writer Sasha Senderovsky has established an artist colony in rural New York. The conservative area poses some problems, as does the rough state of the property he purchased. His friends Karen Cho and Vinod Mehta join him, as do Karen’s cousin Ed, Sasha’s former student Dee, and a figure known as the Actor. The House on the Hill colony opens in March 2020 at the start of the Covid-19 lockdowns. His wife, Masha, is sensitive to close contact because of the pandemic. While they are all stuck at the colony, love abounds.
In a review in Times Literary Supplement, Benjamin Markovits stated: “Perhaps strangest of all about this novel is the way Shteyngart seems to lose interest in his own alter ego. Senderovsky, who initiates the whole retreat, plays less and less of a role as the plot wears on. All of this is first-draft stuff, signs of the haste in which the book was presumably dashed off and then published. Shteyngart can certainly write, and there are many great lines, sharp insights, both funny and serious, which deserve a better book to live in.” Markovits concluded that “Our Country Friends has a lot to say about the state of America right now. But one of the things its success tells us is that this is the kind of book America currently wants.”
Writing in New York Times Book Review, Dana Spiotta mentioned that “the novel’s strengths abound. It upends clichés, pieties and commonplaces while also noticing salient details of the lockdown. One character can’t help obsessing over intubation, feeling for the tube in his throat and imagining the sound ventilators make. And how many writers could pull off a sex scene that climaxes with a request to put on a surgical mask for the transgressive kink of it.” A Kirkus Reviews contributor referred to it as “the Great American Pandemic Novel only Shteyngart could write, full of hyphenated identities, killer prose, and wild vitality.”
Vera, or Faith centers on half-Korean, half-Russian ten-year-old Vera Bradford-Shmulkin. The inquisitive but anxious girl likes to write in her Things I Still Need to Know Diary. She is chosen by her teacher to lead a group of students debating in favor of a proposed constitutional amendment allowing for a five-thirds vote for Americans who can trace their ancestry to arriving in the country before or during the Revolutionary War and not as a slave. She wants to win the debate despite the irony of doing so. She also needs to prepare a list of reasons for her father why he should not leave her stepmother and vice versa.
Writing in Times Literary Supplement, Claire Lowdon remarked that the novel has “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. When Shteyngart needs to explain the intricacies of Igor’s politics in relation to Russia, both Vera and her chess-playing robot become conveniently sophisticated thinkers, discussing, among other things, horseshoe theory. Never mind that this ten-year-old is scribbling in her Things I Still Need to Know Diary while Kaspie spews all the answers. At this point in the narrative, both girl and robot are flimsy devices for the delivery of information.” A Kirkus Reviews contributor concluded that “Shteyngart is doing his most important work ever, illuminating the current tragedy with humor, smarts, and heart.”(close new)
BIOCRIT
BOOKS
Shteyngart, Gary, Little Failure: A Memoir, Random House (New York, NY), 2014.
PERIODICALS
Book, July 1, 2002, Kevin Greenberg, review of The Russian Debutante’s Handbook, p. 78.
Booklist, June 1, 2010, Donna Seaman, review of Super Sad True Love Story, p. 32.
Boston Globe, January 11, 2014, John Freeman, review of Little Failure.
Economist, September 15, 2018, review of Lake Success, p. 88.
Houston Chronicle, June 23, 2002, Fritz Lanham, “Breaking away from the Huddled Masses,” review of The Russian Debutante’s Handbook, p. 16.
Kirkus Reviews, April 1, 2002, review of The Russian Debutante’s Handbook, p. 449; May 1, 2010, review of Super Sad True Love Story; December 1, 2013, review of Little Failure; July 1, 2018, review of Lake Success; August 15, 2021, review of Our Country Friends; May 15, 2025, review of Vera, or Faith.
Maclean’s, January 13, 2014, Joanne Latimer, review of Little Failure, p. 76.
Moment, November 1, 2021, Carlin Romano, review of Our Country Friends, p. 68.
New York Times Book Review, June 30, 2002, A.O. Scott, “In the Shadow of Stalin’s Foot,” p. 8; August 6, 2010, Michael Wood, review of Super Sad True Love Story; January 5, 2014, Andy Borowitz, review of Little Failure; November 14, 2021, Dana Spiotta, review of Our Country Friends, p. 1; July 27, 2025, Dwight Garner, review of Vera, or Faith, p. 10.
New York Times Magazine, June 2, 2002, Daniel Zalewski, “From Russia with Tsoris,” pp. 54-57.
Publishers Weekly, April 29, 2002, review of The Russian Debutante’s Handbook, p. 40; March 13, 2006, review of Absurdistan, p. 36; May 3, 2010, review of Super Sad True Love Story, p. 27; March 19, 2018, review of Lake Success, p. 46.
Spectator, September 29, 2018, Alex Preston, review of Lake Success, p. 37; August 9, 2025, Susie Mesure, review of Vera, or Faith, p. 38.
Time, June 17, 2002, Lev Grossman, “Innocents Abroad: A Generation of Would-Be Hemingways Went to Eastern Europe for Inspiration—and Found It,” p. 72; May 8, 2006, Lev Grossman, “From Russia with Love,” review of Absurdistan, p. 187.
Times Literary Supplement, January 21, 2022, Benjamin Markovits, review of Our Country Friends, p. 8; August 15, 2025, Claire Lowdon, review of Vera, or Faith, p. 17.
Wall Street Journal, January 10, 2014, Edward Kosner, review of Little Failure.
Washington Post Book World, July 27, 2010, Ron Charles, review of Super Sad True Love Story.
ONLINE
Austinist, http://www.austinist.com/ (May 1, 2006), review of Absurdistan.
Basil & Spice, http://www.basilandspice.com/ (August 3, 2010), review of Super Sad True Love Story.
Chicago Reader, http://www.chicagoreader.com/ (January 22, 2014), Dmitry Samarov, review of Little Failure.
Flakmagazine, http://www.flakmag.com/ (July 21, 2007), Elizabeth Kiem, review of The Russian Debutante’s Handbook.
Fresh Air, https://www.npr.org/ (November 2, 2021), Dave Davies, “How Gary Shteyngart’s Pandemic Pod Inspired a Novel about Friendship.”
Granta Online http://www.granta.com/ (March 15, 2014), interview with author.
Guardian Online, http://books.guardian.co.uk/ (June 9, 2007), Patrick Ness, review of Absurdistan; (February 26, 2011), Chris Cox, review of Super Sad True Love Story; January 29, 2022, Anthony Cummins, “Gary Shteyngart: ‘We’re Entering a Time of Permanent Crisis.’”
Hazlitt, https://hazlitt.net/ (September 4, 2018), Eric Farwell, author interview.
Literary Hub, https://lithub.com/ (July 8, 2025), Jane Ciabattari, “Gary Shteyngart on Channeling a Precocious Child Narrator;” (July 24, 2025), Whitney Terrell and V.V. Ganeshananthan, “Gary Shteyngart on Vera, or Faith, and American Authoritarians.”
NPR.org, http://www.npr.org/ (January 7, 2014), Terry Gross, interview with author.
PopMatters, http://www.popmatters.com/ (August 21, 2002), Sarah Tan, review of The Russian Debutante’s Handbook.
Punch, https://punchdrink.com/ (September 4, 2018), “Drinking with Novelist Gary Shteyngart.”
Salon.com, http://www.salon.com/ (June 20, 2002), Laura Miller, review of The Russian Debutante’s Handbook.
School of the Arts, Columbia University website, http://arts.columbia.edu/ (December 16, 2025), faculty profile.
Slate.com, http://www.slate.com/ (March 15, 2014), Terrence Rafferty, review of Super Sad True Love Story.
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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
In this name that follows East Slavic naming customs, the patronymic is Semyonovich and the family name is Shteyngart.
Gary Shteyngart
Gary Shteyngart at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, 2008
Gary Shteyngart at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, 2008
Born Igor Semyonovich Shteyngart[1]
July 5, 1972 (age 53)[2]
Leningrad, Russian SFSR, Soviet Union (present-day Saint Petersburg, Russia)
Occupation Novelist
Alma mater Oberlin College
Spouse Esther Won
Children 1
Gary Shteyngart (English: /ˈʃtaɪnɡɑːrt/ SHTYNE-gart; born Igor Semyonovich Shteyngart on July 5, 1972) is a Soviet-born American writer. He is the author of six novels (including The Russian Debutante's Handbook, Absurdistan, Super Sad True Love Story, Vera, or Faith), and a memoir. Much of his work is satirical.
Early life
Igor Semyonovich Shteyngart (Russian: Игорь Семёнович Штейнгарт) was born on July 5, 1972,[3][1] in Leningrad—which he alternately calls "St. Leningrad" or "St. Leninsburg". He spent the first seven years of his childhood living in a square dominated by a huge statue of Vladimir Lenin. He comes from a Jewish family, with an ethnically Russian maternal grandparent,[4] and describes his family as "typically Soviet". His father worked as an engineer in a LOMO camera factory; his mother was a pianist. When he was five, he wrote a 100-page comic novel.[5]
Shteyngart immigrated to the United States in 1979 and was brought up in Queens, New York,[6] with no television in the apartment in which he lived, where English was not the household language. He spoke with a Russian accent until he was around 14.[7]
He is a graduate of Stuyvesant High School[8] in New York City, and Oberlin College in Ohio, where he earned a degree in politics, in 1995,[9] with a senior thesis on the former Soviet republics of Georgia, Moldova and Tajikistan.[6]
Career
After Oberlin, he worked a series of jobs as a writer for non-profit organizations in New York.[6][10]
Shteyngart took a trip to Prague in the early 1990s,[11] and this experience helped spawn his first novel, The Russian Debutante's Handbook, set in the fictitious European city of Prava.[6]
In 1999, as part of the application to Hunter College's MFA program[5] he mailed a portion of his first novel to Chang-Rae Lee, the director of the creative writing program at Hunter College.[11] Lee helped Shteyngart get his first book deal.[12] Shteyngart earned an MFA in creative writing at Hunter College of the City University of New York. Shteyngart had a fellowship at the American Academy in Berlin, Germany, for Fall 2007.[13] He has taught writing at Hunter College, and currently teaches writing at Columbia University.
Awards
Shteyngart's work has received many awards. The Russian Debutante's Handbook won the Stephen Crane Award for First Fiction, the Book-of-the-Month Club First Fiction Award and the National Jewish Book Award[14] for Fiction. It was named a New York Times Notable Book and one of the best debuts of the year by The Guardian.[15]
In 2002, he was named one of the five best new writers by Shout NY Magazine. Absurdistan was chosen as one of the ten best books of the year by The New York Times Book Review and Time magazine, as well as a book of the year by the Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, San Francisco Chronicle and many other publications. In June 2010, Shteyngart was named as one of The New Yorker magazine's "20 under 40" luminary fiction writers.[16] Super Sad True Love Story won the 2011 Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for comic literature. His memoir Little Failure was a finalist for the 2014 National Book Critics Circle Award (Autobiography).[17][18]
Work
Shteyngart's novels include The Russian Debutante's Handbook (2002), and Absurdistan (2006). Super Sad True Love Story (2010) was promoted by a film trailer with Paul Giamatti and James Franco.[19][20] Thirty-five years after he emigrated to the U.S., in January, 2014, Random House published Little Failure: A Memoir,[21] and promoted it by a film trailer with James Franco and Rashida Jones.[18][22] His 2018 book Lake Success was promoted by a film trailer with Ben Stiller.[23][24]
His fifth novel, Our Country Friends, was published by Random House in 2021. It is a story about friends who spend the pandemic together.[25][26] His sixth novel, Vera, or Faith, published in 2025, is a story about a 10-year-old Korean American girl living in a near future dystopian U.S.[27]
His other writing has appeared in The New Yorker,[28] Slate, Granta,[29] Travel and Leisure,[30] The New York Times,[31] and The Atlantic.[32]
Blurbs
Shteyngart has also become known for his prolific blurbing,[33][34] which has inspired a Tumblr website devoted to his Collected Blurbs,[35] a live reading,[36] and a fifteen-minute documentary narrated by Jonathan Ames.[37]
Bibliography
Novels
Shteyngart, Gary (2002). The Russian Debutante's Handbook.
— (2006). Absurdistan.
— (2010). Super Sad True Love Story.
— (2018). Lake Success.
— (2021). Our Country Friends.
— (2025). Vera, or Faith. Random House.
Memoirs
Shteyngart, Gary (2014). Little Failure: A Memoir.
Short stories
Shteyngart, Gary (August 26, 2002). "Shylock on the Neva". The New Yorker.
— (March 19, 2006). "A Love Letter". The New Yorker.
— (June 7, 2010). "Lenny Hearts Eunice". The New Yorker.
— (June 18, 2018). "The Luck of Kokura". The New Yorker.
Essays and reporting
Shteyngart, Gary (March 10, 2003). "Teen Spirit". Letter from Russia. The New Yorker.
— (June 10–17, 2013). "From the Diaries of Pussy-Cake". Memoirs. The New Yorker.
— (August 5, 2013). "O.K., Glass: Confessions of a Google Glass Explorer". Our Local Correspondents. The New Yorker.
— (March 20, 2017). "Time Out: Confessions of a Watch Geek". Personal History. The New Yorker.
— (October 4, 2021). "A Botched Circumcision and Its Aftermath". Personal History. The New Yorker.
— (April 4, 2024). "Crying Myself to Sleep on the Biggest Cruise Ship Ever". The Atlantic.
— (April 24, 2024). "A Martini Tour of New York City". Annals of Gastronomy. The New Yorker.
— (August 13, 2024). "The Case for Robert F. KENNEDY Jr". The Atlantic.
— (March 2025). "The Man in the Midnight-Blue Six-Ply Italian-Milled Wool Suit". The Atlantic.
Personal life
Shteyngart is married to Esther Won, who is of Korean descent. They have a son, born October 2013.[38] Shteyngart now lives in the Gramercy neighborhood of Manhattan.[34][39] He spends six months out of the year at a house in northern Dutchess County, in the Hudson River Valley where he does nearly all of his writing.[40][31][41][42][30][43]
Professor, Writing
Teaching Spring 2026
Gary Shteyngart
Gary Shteyngart was born in Leningrad in 1972, and came to the United States seven years later. His memoir, Little Failure (2014) was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and was selected as one of the best books of the year by over 45 news magazines and journals around the world. Shteyngart is also the author of the novels Lake Success (2018), Super Sad True Love Story (2010), Absurdistan (2006) and The Russian Debutante’s Handbook (2002). His work has been translated into 29 languages. Super Sad True Love Story won the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize and was selected as one of the best books of the year by over 40 news journals and magazines around the world. Absurdistan was chosen as one of the 10 best books of the year by The New York Times Book Review and Time. The Russian Debutante’s Handbook won the Stephen Crane Award for First Fiction and the National Jewish Book Award for Fiction. His fiction and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, Esquire, GQ, The New York Times Magazine, and many other publications.
Gary Shteyngart on Channeling a Precocious Child Narrator
Jane Ciabattari Talks to the Author of “Vera, or Faith”
Jane Ciabattari
July 8, 2025
Vera, the buzzy, brilliant and preternaturally observant ten-year-old central to Gary Shteyngart’s sardonic and profoundly relevant new novel, brings a fresh, necessary perspective to our evolving dystopian universe. Her anxieties as the Russian Jewish-Korean daughter of immigrants surviving in a fraught domestic atmosphere made me pull Shteyngart’s panic-loaded 2014 memoir Little Failure from my bookcase. Yes, there are echoes of the “tightly wound” young Gary, who begins his first unpublished novel in English at ten, in Vera, or Faith. But Vera, in her heart, knows she’s not a failure. And the life of immigrants in 2025 is infinitely more complicated than a decade ago.
Ironically, Vera’s existence may result from a sushi lunch that went sideways. Indeed, Shteyngart wrote Vera, or Faith, in a whirlwind. His editor, David Ebershoff, mentioned that he delivered the novel 51 days after a sushi lunch at which Ebershoff suggested the multigenerational saga Shteyngart had been working on wasn’t working.
How did that happen? I asked the author. “I had written 200 pages of a novel that sucked,” he explained. “I was hoping my editor wouldn’t call me out on it, but he did. Politely. A few weeks before the sushi lunch that sealed my fate, I had rewatched Kramer vs. Kramer while on a long plane ride from Tokyo. The idea struck me of writing the story of a troubled family from a child’s point of view, a la What Maisie Knew. But you know, funnier. Less Henry James-ish. And so we were off to the races.”
Vera, or Faith depends much more on voice and humor than What Maisie Knew. Was that intentional? I asked Shteyngart. “Yeah, like I said, I love me my James, but I need just a little more humor in my work, and it’s gotta be a little rawer, sometimes raunchier.”
Our email conversation reached from one coast to the other.
*
Jane Ciabattari: Why this title? And the name Vera (or Faith) for your ten-year-old narrator?
I think precocious children in fiction can be pretentious. But what are you gonna do? Write about a dumb one?
Gary Shteyngart: Guess I’m channeling Nabokov’s Ada, or Ardor. But that book was endless, this one is nice and slim. Vera’s a lovely name which also happens to mean “faith’ in many Slavic languages. As for Jewish-Korean, that happens to be my family. Write what you know, as they say.
JC: Did you consider writing this novel in first person? Why did you choose third person?
GS: It’s fun to hover over a ten-year-old as I do over my son who was that age until recently. But the third person is so close the reader gets most of the benefits of being inside Vera’s sweet noggin.
JC: Vera’s idiosyncratic syntax keeps this novel spinning along. How did you develop her distinctive voice, a mix of quoted adult lines, perceptive observations, and interior confessions?
GS: Yeah, her interior voice is like an endless sampling of everything around her. She’s the DJ of language, if you will. Also reminded me of how I learned English as a young immigrant by constantly writing down words. Vera’s not an immigrant, but her social awkwardness with her peers does lend her some of the qualities I had growing up.
JC: Vera’s father is an “intellectual” who edits “a magazine for smarties,” “is funny most of the time,” is known for his “trademark cynicism” and “Russian nihilism” and enjoys several glasses of “mar-tiny” at the end of the day. Her stepmother, Anne Mom, “maintains her beauty,” has “a little trust,” went to Brown for graduate school, makes a lot of delectable ‘WASP lunches’ for the family, and teaches Vera interpersonal subtleties like “Think of your audience.” From the beginning Vera is aware of tensions in the relationship between her parents (“Don’t you care if they get divorced?” she whispers to her younger brother Dylan). Sadly she feels required to help fix it. (“I have to….” As in your chapter headings is her continuing mantra). Both her pediatrician and her psychologist describe Vera as “a very bright ten-year-old” who suffers from “intense anxiety.” How did you develop the details of this marriage at the breaking point and its effect on Vera?
GS: Yeah, as I mentioned above, I rewatched Kramer vs. Kramer and BOOM! But when I was growing up my parents were on the edge of divorce for about fifteen years. Unlike Vera, I was an only child but I constantly had to referee the fights between them, serving as a kind of diplomat without portfolio. (They stayed together in the end.) I think that really changed how I approach relationships. And Vera too constantly shuttles between parents hoping to keep them together.
JC: Vera understands class distinctions and the anxiety her father has when he can’t get the “Rhodesian Billionaire” to buy his magazine, but isn’t clear how to make friends her own age. She is sophisticated and naïve at the same time. How difficult was it to achieve this effect?
GS: Not difficult at all! Look, I think precocious children in fiction can be pretentious. But what are you gonna do? Write about a dumb one? There are few readers left in America, but they’re super smart and usually have achieved some measure of emotional knowledge. I think many of them will enjoy Vera, but many of them were Vera.
I’m pretty good at covering all the ways our world/country are going to hell in a proverbial hand basket.
JC: Midway through the novel, Vera begins to spy on her father (“She had to figure out if Daddy was a traitor”), wearing a hoodie and following him down the street to his private club and garden. She also searches for her birth mother, eager to discover verifiable truths about her identity. How difficult was it to shape this spy novel theme (undergirded by Vera’s references to a YA book called Yoon-a Choi, Middle-School Spy)?
GS: Not difficult at all! My failed novel was a spy novel (my second failed spy novel for those keeping count at home), so I was able to blend those elements in pretty easily. I wish there really was a Yoon-a Choi, Middle School Spy out there somewhere.
JC: Elements of this novel are slightly futuristic but not much. There’s Kaspie, Vera’s AI-powered chessboard, which begins to offer political opinions; Stella, the autonomous car that drives her to Ohio in search of her birth mother, and the ongoing campaign for the Five-thirds amendment, which calls for “exceptional Americans” who can trace their roots to the Revolutionary War to get five-thirds of a vote. Vera becomes immersed in the five-thirds controversy when her teacher assigns her to argue in a debate in favor of the amendment, while Anne Mom prepares to host fundraiser against it. Vera also realizes she wouldn’t be considered exceptional because her father was born in Russia, and her birth mother is Korean. What sort of process led you in toward these concepts?
GS: I’m pretty good at covering all the ways our world/country are going to hell in a proverbial hand basket. Vera is just my latest attempt after Super Sad, which posited that social media was going to destroy our democracy which, um, kinda happened. Like Anne Mom says “I am the Nostradamus of two weeks from now.”
JC: What are you working on now/next?
GS: A children’s book about capybaras, naturally!
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vera, or faith
Vera, or Faith by Gary Shteyngart is available from Random House, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Photo credit: Brigitte Lacombe
Gary Shteyngart on Vera, or Faith, and American Authoritarians
In Conversation with Whitney Terrell and V.V. Ganeshananthan on Fiction/Non/Fiction
Fiction Non Fiction
July 24, 2025
Acclaimed novelist Gary Shteyngart joins co-hosts Whitney Terrell and V.V. Ganeshananthan to discuss his new novel, Vera, or Faith, which explores American identity, politics, and immigrant experiences in the near future through the eyes of the eponymous 10-year-old protagonist. Shteyngart talks about the novel’s speculative “Five-Three” amendment, a proposal to give those who can trace their ancestry back to the American Revolution five-thirds of a vote, as long as their ancestors “were exceptional enough not to arrive in chains.” He reflects on how this echoes current rhetoric surrounding nationalism and exclusion. Shteyngart unpacks a scene in his novel featuring a “March of the Hated,” in which the Five-Three amendment, like the Trump administration, attracts both the privileged and those who will suffer under the policy. Shteyngart and the hosts examine the role of elite education, AI, and childhood in shaping Vera’s understanding of the world. He reads from Vera, or Faith.
To hear the full episode, subscribe through iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app (include the forward slashes when searching). You can also listen by streaming from the player below. Check out video versions of our interviews on the Fiction/Non/Fiction Instagram account, the Fiction/Non/Fiction YouTube Channel, and our show website: https://www.fnfpodcast.net/
This podcast is produced by V.V. Ganeshananthan, Whitney Terrell, Hunter Murray, Janet Reed, and Moss Terrell.
Gary Shteyngart
Vera, or Faith • Our Country Friends • Lake Success • Little Failure: A Memoir • Super Sad True Love Story • Absurdistan • The Russian Debutante’s Handbook
Others:
“Tech billionaire Trump adviser Marc Andreessen says universities will ‘pay the price’ for DEI” | The Washington Post • Choice by Neel Mukherjee • “The Little Man At Chehaw Station” by Ralph Ellison
EXCERPT FROM A CONVERSATION WITH GARY SHTEYNGART
V.V. Ganeshananthan: These political issues are experienced through Vera’s lens. She’s in fifth grade, she’s ten, and one of the most striking features of the novel is that we see all of the politics filtered through her particular consciousness. And the politics do affect her, the social dynamics that she’s experiencing too, it’s going on at school, but it’s not necessarily the most important thing happening to her, at least in her own opinion. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about Vera. I love her character so much. Can you talk about that narrative choice?
Gary Shteyngart: Look, the book is about all the things we’ve been talking about for the past 20 minutes, but also books—Super Sad True Love Story is a good example of this—they’re always about public and private things, and the way the two intersect. This happened in part because I grew up in the Soviet Union, where everything obviously was very politicized, and I came to Reagan’s America, where things were also very politicized. Now I’m living in Trump’s America, and I also have a 10-year-old child who’s living in Trump’s America. So, these things are always in the corner of your eye.
But for Vera, there are three things that are very important. She wants to make a friend, and, God help her, this is very hard for her. She is very socially awkward, always says the wrong things—I didn’t want to make her super precocious-sounding, but she does talk a lot in a way that her peers don’t understand. So there’s that. Then, she wants to keep her parents together. Her parents are not great people, and they’re always fighting. And the third thing is, she has a birth mom and she doesn’t know who she is, and so Vera spends a lot of the book, especially the last part of the book, searching for this woman. It’s a lot of identity issues for a child of her age to deal with.
Then, as we were saying, obviously there’s also this thing where she’s about to be made three-fifths of an exceptional citizen. What makes things even more bizarre is that in school, she has to argue for Five-Three because when you’re on debate, you’re given a topic and a position, so she has to argue in favor of her own disenfranchisement, which I think is the saddest thing that can happen to a 10-year-old.
Whitney Terrell: The debate prep made me think about how important education is in shaping the way that everything happens. The ideas in this book—which seem to me, anyway, impossibly wrong, although we’re talking about how they’re already moving into the culture—but the way that you move ideas like that into the culture is in fifth grade, for 10-year-olds, right? To say, hey, let’s have a debate about this, as if it’s a thing that should be debated, which immediately lends credibility to the issue. I feel like, in the book, you’re also talking about education and the way kids learn.
GS: There’s a couple of things to think about here. I think one is, obviously the Republican Party is very interested in having less education, in defunding universities, in making sure that they don’t teach things, that they don’t concentrate on things like slavery which, how do you talk about American history without spending a lot of time dealing not just with slavery, but with Jim Crow and then the aftereffects of that? I mean, what the heck? So obviously, that’s the idea.
But Vera has a different perspective. She goes to one of these New York gifted and talented schools. I went to Stuyvesant, which is one of those high schools, and my son goes to one of those G-and-T-type schools. They’re very interesting because a lot of the kids are immigrants, many of them are from certain backgrounds. So for example, often these schools have kids from East or South Asia—and Vera, obviously, is half that—but also a lot of Jewish kids from the Upper West Side. But they’re heavily underrepresented in terms of Black and Latino students. This is a real, real issue. But in any case, these schools are very interesting, because what they do is really pit students against each other. I remember this from Stuyvesant. I was a terrible student because it was a math and science high school. They were like, “Balance an equation.” I’m like, “You balance it.” But Vera, of course, is very smart, and everyone keeps saying she has to grow up to be a woman in STEM. It’s the kind of school where at one point she gets a B+ and it’s a major tragedy. Her mom has to go into school and beg for the grade to be lifted to an A-, which is the sort of thing that happens in these schools. I remember, because my mom used to go in except it wasn’t a B+, it was a D+, and my mom was trying to get it to a C- or something. So all this feels very relevant to me.
All these schools are very different, of course, but it’s a question of, what are you educating for? It’s all competition, it’s all memorizing and remembering things, it’s all figuring out who the next elite in finance and tech is going to be. The reason I think that happens is because the pie is getting smaller and smaller, and people are more and more freaked out—the master’s degree is now the new bachelor’s degree. Especially with AI and other things, people are more and more freaked out. The importance of education, not as something that you learn so that you can become a better citizen, a better human being, but—we’re learning a value structure. In fact, the value structure is inverted, because you learn how to make more and more money, and that’s the only thing that matters. And then as you make more and more money, your priorities become Marc Andreessen priorities, right?
VVG: There are so many moments in the book when Vera is at school where I had this terrible feeling of recognition and sympathy. There’s a moment where she got the right answer to a math problem, and then she calls it out. I think my heart just shattered in my chest, because she’s right, and the teacher’s like, “Not only do we not call out, but we don’t call out wrong answers.” Brutal.
GS: For many of us who have been through this dog-eat-dog type of education, I think this really rings a bell. It’s interesting, this book also reminds me, who are readers of literary fiction? There’s not a lot of them left, but there’s some of them left, and it’s almost a given that they were super anxious as children. You don’t become a major reader without being anxious and sensitive as a child, right? I’ve already been giving readings where some people have read the book, and many of them are women, and I say to them, “Does Vera remind you of you when you were ten?” and they say yes, so I feel like they’re seen when they read this book. Because all of us who were readers then, and still are readers, grew up feeling very anxious. In books we found a home amid characters that reminded us of ourselves and also of the many struggles that we face, being a little different or a lot different, in my case, being weird, often not knowing the language. In the case of immigrants all that stacks together.
VVG: This is maybe the second time recently where I felt a sharp recognition of my own anxiety in a novel, the other one being the first part of Choice by my friend Neil Mukherjee. I was like, “Oh, my God, my anxiety is on the page in a way that I can hardly cope with.” Then Vera is preparing for this debate, and she doesn’t want to be competitive, and she doesn’t find much sympathy for that, either.
The Trump administration is clearly trying to rearrange the ways that Americans think about what it means to be American. There are so many great American thinkers. This podcast started because Whitney and I are connected through our mutual former Professor Jim McPherson. We talk a lot about Ralph Ellison on the show. The mixing and melding of cultures is something that is a hallmark of these kinds of thinkers, these definitions of what it means to be American. You immigrated to the U.S. like my parents did. What was your understanding of what it meant to be American when you came here? How has that changed? Because seeing that refracted through Vera is so interesting.
GS: I came during a time when—Russia, the Soviet Union, it’s always a mess, and it’s always not a great society, but this was the Ronald Reagan evil empire era of the early ’80s and I spoke with an accent, I had a giant fur hat from Russia, so things were not cool. Also, I went to a school where most of the kids were upper-middle class, and we were very clearly not. My grandmother would get food stamps and government cheese, which I actually really liked back in the day. Anyway, it was this very strange homecoming.
I really didn’t feel American until I went to Stuyvesant, where at least half the kids were of immigrant status. Now, I think it’s more like 80 percent but, huge amount of immigrants. Even though I sucked at the academic part of it, I felt like, “Oh, this was my cohort because they’re all bringing weird, smelly lunches, eating buckwheat kasha and kimbap.” That felt much more at home to me. My last book, Our Country Friends, was a gathering of five or six immigrants of my generation, from India, Korea, Russia, someplace else. That felt like it was an important book because we were all that generation. Now we’re in our 40s and 50s, and some of us have children too, so it’s interesting to see. Vera is almost—it’s not a sequel to that, but it’s the next generation.
Transcribed by Otter.ai. Condensed and edited by Rebecca Kilroy. Photograph of Gary Shteyngart by Tim Davis.
Gary Shteyngart: ‘We’re entering a time of permanent crisis’
This article is more than 3 years old
Anthony Cummins
The US satirist on why he had to find a UK publisher for his latest novel, his son’s Korean lessons, and the appeal of Zadie Smith’s White Teeth
Sat 29 Jan 2022 13.00 EST
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Gary Shteyngart, 49, is the author of six books, including a memoir, Little Failure, and the satirical dystopia Super Sad True Love Story, which won the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse prize for comic fiction. His latest novel, Our Country Friends, opens in March 2020 and follows a group of middle-aged friends sheltering from Covid at a country house in upstate New York, where the author himself spent the early part of the pandemic. Shteyngart, who was born in Leningrad and emigrated to the US in 1979, spoke to me from New York City, where he teaches creative writing at Columbia University.
You’ve had to find a new publisher in the UK for this book.
In America, it seems to have done very well but my usual British publisher, Hamish Hamilton, didn’t want it: they said it was too pandemicky. Even my friends were like: “Who’s gonna read this when it’s published? Covid will be a distant memory.” But when I started writing in late March, early April 2020, I had a feeling that Covid wouldn’t be over in a year as was predicted. I wrote the novel in six or seven months, the fastest I ever wrote. I just think we’re entering a time of permanent crisis. We’re going to be constantly writing about this stuff. Not just pandemic-ravaged New York or whatever; it’s going to be flooded New York, flooded London, burnt-down Sydney and burnt-down Los Angeles. The pandemic is the amuse-bouche to the endless meal of crap we’re going to be getting without any respite. I’m really not selling this book, am I? Now Allen & Unwin’s going to dump me too.
It’s a very funny novel.
I do funny, I don’t do not funny, but actually to me this is probably the least funny book I’ve ever written. I write about tragic things: the collapse of the Soviet Union, now the collapse of America. If you think of an intercontinental ballistic missile, like the sort we and Russia may soon launch at each other, the missile is the humour, but the nuclear payload is the tragedy, right? The humour’s just a way to get that payload across to a reader who doesn’t want to sit down with 330 pages of tragedy. But by the end of my books there usually is some kind of tragedy, as there is in this one. The humour is my way of saying: “Just come along for the ride, I’m not gonna hurt you…” Then blam!
This is probably the least funny book I have ever written
You say you wrote fast, but it’s less hectic than your other novels.
This was the sloooowest period of our lives, especially around the pandemic’s first iteration, as they’d call it in Silicon Valley. Things were super, super slow. There was so much time and endless silence that I could almost hear the turtles crossing the road, scraping across the gravel. But if you were a writer in a safe place, it was also an opportunity to slow the pace of your thinking, the pace of your sentences and paragraphs, which for this book was very helpful. And here’s the other thing: I was able to be more functional because there weren’t these evenings with other writers where you consume five drinks at a clip and then wake up in the morning, you know, urgh, now I’ve gotta write my three pages. I was like, I’m gonna write six pages, I’m completely sober! So that was really super-helpful to the process.
The pandemic prompts the novel’s migrant cast to reflect on what their adopted country has become.
A lot of the characters are Asian-American and one of their concerns – which is a concern of people in America and maybe in the UK as well – is that their parents gave up their culture and moved here because they thought they might find a sense of safety. Some of that safety feels very much like a mirage now. My wife is Korean-American and we’re having this conversation about, you know, if Trump wins in 2024, where do we go? She says maybe we can move to Seoul – she can probably reclaim her citizenship – and our son is already taking Korean lessons. You know, our parents brought us here because they wanted us to have a better chance and now we’re thinking of where to escape. The rightwing establishments talking about “China flu” and “the China virus” aren’t gonna tell that my wife’s Korean, not Chinese, it’s all the same to them. The book reflects that danger we felt; it’s funny, yeah, but under the surface are real fears.
What were you reading while you wrote?
I reread all my Chekhov, not just the plays but the short stories, in Russian and in English. There’s a very good new translation, Fifty-Two Stories, by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. I had a great time rereading him, because in all Chekhov’s books, people are in the countryside turning a certain age talking about their regrets, which was perfect for this novel. I also watched the Japanese reality show Terrace House, which is highly recommended. Everyone just sits around, makes soba noodles and has these low-stakes conversations that actually aren’t really low stakes. There’s 500 episodes and we’d watch three or four a night.
What books do you assign your writing students?
I’m about to start teaching a course about comic fiction, so I’ve been rereading a lot of very contemporary humorous fiction. Andrew Sean Greer’s Less is in there, so is Raven Leilani and Fleishman Is in Trouble. Going back further we have Nabokov, Philip Roth and Zadie Smith’s White Teeth, which is a very funny novel still and holds up well I think. I started writing around the same time as Zadie and we’ve known each other since about that time. It’s interesting to read it now because that book so much ushered in the idea of multicultural fiction, at least in the UK. There’s almost a kind of optimism about this new kind of society being born and now it’s like, oh shit, it didn’t work out the way we expected it to work out. To me, it’s a really strong story about these two families and the children they have, their origins and the after-effects of colonialism and how British society fails and sometimes works.
Our Country Friends by Gary Shteyngart is published by Allen & Unwin (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
How Gary Shteyngart's pandemic pod inspired a novel about friendship
November 2, 20211:56 PM ET
Heard on Fresh Air
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Dave Davies
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Gary Shteyngart's previous books include Super Sad True Love Story, Little Failure and Lake Success.
Brigitte Lacombe/Penguin Random House
Some people got into baking bread during the pandemic. Gary Shteyngart wrote a novel instead. Our Country Friends is about eight friends riding out the COVID pandemic in the country home of a Russian-born American writer.
"This was sort of my pandemic project," Shteyngart says. "I wanted to write a book about friendship."
The novel mirrors Shteyngart's own pandemic experience, in which he hunkered down in upstate New York with his wife, his child and two close friends.
New York's Hudson Valley holds a particular significance to Shteyngart. Growing up as the child of Soviet immigrants in Queens, N.Y., he struggled to learn the language and was bullied relentlessly. Occasionally his family would leave the city to visit a bungalow community of other Russian immigrants upstate, and he'd feel at home.
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"For me, upstate and small upstate cabins are a kind of holy grail," Shteyngart says. "It's when I close my eyes and think of something that's beautiful and safe."
Gary Shteyngart: Finding 'Love' In A Dismal Future
Author Interviews
Gary Shteyngart: Finding 'Love' In A Dismal Future
In the novel, the friends taking refuge together during the pandemic are mired in drama. There are trysts, betrayals and a social media campaign trashing a famous member of the group. In real life, Shteyngart's experience in a pandemic pod was powerful for other reasons.
"I almost felt like this is why I came to America in a way was to make groups of friends like these," he says. "I didn't belong as a child, but as an adult, or as a young adult, [I found] the groups that would make me feel like I belong here, like I am an American."
Interview highlights
Our Country Friends, by Gary Shteyngart
Penguin Random House
On how the pandemic and political crisis reminded him of growing up in the Soviet Union
I would say that in some ways, the pandemic felt like normality to me because I've been so hardwired to expect the worst that when both the pandemic and the political crisis that overtook America around that time, when both of those things converged, I thought, "Oh, I'm home, I'm back!" ...
Before I was writing Our Country Friends, which is set during the pandemic, I was working on a funny, dystopian novel about a future in which half of Manhattan has been overtaken by New York University, NYU, and is now run as this kind of gigantic city-state of its own. It was funny, but once the pandemic and the political crisis began to converge, I began to think, Oh my God, there's this far worse tragedy than this NYU-dominated future, and I began to think about what it meant to live during the pandemic, which, as I was saying, did feel very familiar to me.
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On the changes people made during the pandemic
I think we were trying to shield ourselves from the pandemic, but we were also trying to discover who we were, both as individuals and as groups.
Gary Shteyngart
I think that this pandemic has made people reconsider their lives. I know so many people who have changed careers, who have changed their conception of themselves and sometimes their conception of themselves in relation to their friends. I see this and hear about this all the time. I think we were trying to shield ourselves from the pandemic, but we were also trying to discover who we were, both as individuals and as groups.
On why many of the book's characters are immigrants
This is a very much "write what you know" scenario. My wife is the daughter of immigrants. My mentor, the Korean American writer Chang-Rae Lee, was born in Seoul. And I would say at least way more than half of my friends are also of immigrant backgrounds, roughly the same kind of people that populate this book — Korean Americans, Gujarati Americans, other folks from the subcontinent. So six out of eight characters were not born in the United States, and I think that kind of mirrors the life that I live in. And I think it's a kind of new kind of novel for people who don't live in communities that are predominantly native born, white American.
On how the pain he suffered as the result of a botched circumcision he had at age 7 affected the tone of his novel
The surgery was botched from the beginning. I suffered a month of infection. It hurt to urinate for years, and quite a bit later last year in the middle of the pandemic, toward August/September, without getting too graphic about it, the surgery's mistakes reasserted themselves and I ended up having a second surgery in which a nerve in that very sensitive region was cut. ... But what happened was that I went through unbelievable amounts of pain for about half a year, if not more, and I saw maybe 20 different doctors, including urologists, of course, but hypnotists as well and psychiatrists and plastic surgeons. But throughout all this pain, I was starting to lose my mind because some of the drugs that were prescribed created hallucinations, a mental disequilibrium. And in the meantime, I was trying to finish my book. I was going to finish Our Country Friends. ...
'You Can't Be This Furry' And Other Life Lessons From Gary Shteyngart
Author Interviews
'You Can't Be This Furry' And Other Life Lessons From Gary Shteyngart
There's going to be no botched circumcisions in this novel, I can guarantee that right now, but in the middle of all that, the tone of the book, I think, began to change a little bit. The humor hopefully stays through the rest of the whole book, but about a quarter toward the end, I think the pain and the feelings of mental collapse, verging on on suicidal feelings, because the pain was so great and I've never felt anything like that before in my life, all of that began to infect the book and I think influenced its outcome a little bit as well.
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On how fake news in America reminds him of the Soviet Union
The point of the media and the Soviet Union was to make you believe what was clearly false before your very eyes, and Orwell wrote about that beautifully in 1984 and in other books. And I think when you turn on certain channels in the United States, it is clear both to the persons pronouncing the lie that he or she is lying, and then it's just a question of training the audience to believe that lie as well. So for me, I always thought that in the end, after 1991, after communism collapsed in the Soviet Union, that Russia would become more and more like America, develop a democracy, the rule of law. But ... America became more and more like Russia, I think, in the last four or five years, [it became] a country where you can't really believe what you hear and what you see.
Sam Briger and Kayla Lattimore produced and edited the audio of this interview. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Petra Mayer adapted it for the Web.
'There Are Incredible Reservoirs of Anger Sloshing Around Our Country': An Interview with Gary Shteyngart
By Eric Farwell
The author of Lake Success on Republicanism, capitalism in the age of Trump and the strange ways we differentiate serious fiction and humour.
Interview
September 4, 2018
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Eric Farwell
Eric Farwell teaches English at Monmouth University, Brookdale Community College, and Ocean County College in New Jersey. His writing has appeared or...
Author photo credit: Brigitte Lacombe
Gary Shteyngart’s fourth novel, Lake Success, is a meditation on what it means to be middle-aged, and how the intrinsic values of love, responsibility, parenthood, and family shift accordingly. Shteyngart’s past work has great interest in what it means to be an immigrant and first generation American in a capitalist society, but Lake Success concerns itself with more insular themes. Rather than have Barry, a hedge-fund manager, engage with an outwardly capitalist society, the pretensions and casual racism that the wealthy carry are embodied within him, and he does his best to navigate growing away from those biases. His wife, Seema, a brilliant first-generation Indian-American, tries to navigate her identity and its meaning after Barry abruptly takes off, leaving her to reflect on her life while trying to care for their autistic son.
Eric Farwell: I wanted to start by asking you whether or not you find that as your body of work grows larger, you're imbuing your protagonists with less of your own sensibilities?
Gary Shteyngart: Yeah...I mean, there’s only so many times I can write the Russian-American novel, and even though Little Failure
Books
Little Failure
A Memoir
Gary Shteyngart
was written as a way to get rid of the all the material I had stored up, and, you know, try something new and a bit scarier in a way. Relying on the Russian-American background was always an easy way for me to differentiate my work, but I wanted to write an American novel without the Russian part.
Did you have anything in particular that you were looking to do with this new novel that was different in terms of approach?
Well, in some ways the novel is a lot less satirical than the other three novels, especially a novel like Absurdistan.
Books
Absurdistan
A Novel
Gary Shteyngart
It’s also the closest I’ve come to a social-realist novel. I hope it’s still funny, obviously, but the idea was to definitely capture what it’s like to live in very uncertain times, and there’s two ways to tackle that. You can try to find the humor in it, in the way of, you know, Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator, and I do use humor in this novel, but in some ways it’s also the portrait of a family.
What I think has changed to a certain extent there is the fact that I now have a family, which makes a pretty massive difference in terms of the way I write. For me, so many of my books are written from a child’s perspective, and this is the first time I’m also writing from a parent’s perspective. These parents have a kid with a disability, and how they deal with that is, I think...I want to be kinder to all my characters as they navigate the challenges of their lives. Some people will say, “How can you be kind to a hedge-fund guy,” and that was sort of a challenge I set for myself. By the end of the book, can I make people, not agree with Barry, but in some way see the glimmer of humanity that’s lost in these stacks of money, and the ill-gotten ways in which this money was earned?
That’s one of the interesting things about your work, especially the last two works. Your most recent two novels both deal with finance and the sort of value judgments we make about others in different income brackets. What attracts you to writing about the competitively wealthy in America?
I did a piece for The New Yorker where I profiled a hedge-fund guy, and the appeal to me is that I kind of come from this background of the ultra-competitive because I went to this math and science school called Stuyvesant in New York, which is now very much in the news. There’s a kind of cultural war being waged because the school is predominantly Asian and white, and doesn’t really reflect demographics in the city. Immersing myself in the hedge-fund world, which I did for many years, meant going back to that Stuyvesant mentality. Stuyvesant was a place where so many of us were cheating on their exams, trying to get ahead in any way possible. The kind of distance Stuyvesant kids often feel from the rest of New York’s school population is similar to the kind of feeling I noticed bankers and hedge-fund guys exuding, this kind of, “Well, I worked so hard so I deserve all this,” without taking note of what they were doing to the world at large. If you earn that much money, I do think you’re contributing to the kind of inequality we see around the world that has lead to the most awful political outcome in the history of our nation.
I think that connects with your writing about being a sort of reformed Republican. As someone who used to be a serious Republican and has crafted a book about one, do you feel that capturing that thinking is going to become more difficult with the rise of things like the Alt-Right and these fringe pockets of the party seemingly dominating the identity of the party in the modern age?
When we were Republicans growing up, what motivated the Republicanism in Queens, apart from being immigrants ourselves, was a kind of innate racism. Republicanism and racism were really indistinguishable to me. We were cheering on South Africa’s white regime at that point. To me, white supremacy and Republicanism went together. When I was a kid, Republicanism was almost a kind of religion. It was this idea that, well, you’re not successful yourself, you’re an immigrant, you don’t speak the language, but there are a lot of people you can look down at just because of the color of their skin. I think that’s one reason why this kind of last-ditch effort against multiculturalism on the part of a very small community seems to be so effective these days. So, growing up Republican was a huge asset to me in understanding what’s happening today. I mean, even in writing a book like Super Sad True Love Story,
Books
Super Sad True Love Story
A Novel
Gary Shteyngart
my main character, Lenny Abramov, isn’t Republican anymore, but his parents still are. Understanding that is a kind of weird blessing for me. As a writer, it’s important to see as many views as you can, even if you find some of them to be personally repugnant.
In your memoir Little Failure, you characterize your father as a very complex, looming presence in your own life. How do you think your work has changed since you made peace with that?
Yeah, the memoir was partly written because I was going to have a kid, and I wanted to settle some accounts before he was born. I wanted to sort through my life to make sure that the good stuff stays, and the bad stuff could be mitigated. We all end up being our parents to some extent. I don’t believe that literature should be therapeutic in nature. I think you write for the art, not the therapy, but in this case I think the memoir happened because I was going to have a kid. I was writing the book at thirty-nine, which is early to be writing a memoir. Usually writing a memoir is kind of like settling a sort of last bar tab, if you will—for me, the great sense of anxiety I always felt was toward my parents, and whether or not I would please them. I remember going to Stuyvesant as a place with a lot of kids who were terrified of failing their parents. While that’s something all of my characters sort of bring to the table, when you have a kid, there’s this secondary anxiety, which is that now you’re anxious for the kid. The cycle continues. You’re trying not to make the same mistakes as your parents, and looking at your kid, wondering whether or not he has the same fundamental flaws. It expands your vocabulary, your understanding about the human condition, which is always good for a writer.
It seems also like you're now interested not so much in capturing the power immigrant parents have over their children, but in what exactly it means to be an immigrant artist, or a person of certain cultural heritage, in an authentic way. What made you want to make the shift toward raising questions of authenticity, rather than questions of lineage?
My parents grew up in a superpower, and the one thing they did that was certainly correct was to leave and take me with them. Now, there’s a weird sense of almost having history repeating itself, where my son is growing up in a dysfunctional superpower. If this keeps going the way it’s going, when is a good time to leave?
Is that something you think about?
Not yet, but let’s see how this plays out. When I was writing Super Sad during Obama, the country seemed to be going in a basically decent direction. But I always had this feeling that underneath the goodwill of those times, there were some incredible reservoirs of anger still sloshing around our country. Maybe that’s because I grew up as a Republican. I knew the kind of darkness that fueled our hatred. I knew what we were capable of when we found the right demagogue.
Does that anger connect with how you portrayed Luis in the new work? The question of how authentically Guatemalan Luis is comes up over and over, seemingly only because he's a successful novelist. Do you think that immigrants often have their authenticity or immigrant-ness questioned when they achieve things in America?
I think you sometimes get it from both sides, with native-born Americans asking if you’re familiar enough to write about this country, and immigrants asking whether or not you’re immigrant enough to be speaking to the culture of your parents, and what it’s like to be displaced from that. I think, for me, I don’t believe in these questions of authenticity. I think if you’re a 1.5 generation immigrant, then you write about that life. If you’re third-generation, then you speak to that experience. In my earlier books, I would return to Russia, to understand the country, but more so my parents, and that was the thrust of going to Russia as many times as I did. What’s interesting is that I always thought that after 1991, Russia would become more like America, and in some ways the opposite has happened. I did an article for The New York Times where I watched Russian television for a week, and the racism, sexism, and homophobia that permeates the airwaves there is now something that permeates the airwaves here. So, there’s a real connection there. I think the writer Luis in Lake Success is the other side of the equation. As cold and calculating as some of the hedge-fund people are, he also has his own way of making his way in the world. His whole schtick is representing himself as something that he’s really not.
But what would you say that is? Is it authenticity, or is it that he’s pretending to be a serious novelist when he’s really not?
Well, we never read Luis’s novel The Pathetic Butcher, but I think the title alone gives you the idea that he’s writing with a calculated way to prey on the affections and heartstrings of someone like Seema, Barry’s wife, who is herself an immigrant that’s trying to figure out her relationship with her parents. I guess, in some ways, I believe that there’s this kind of immigrant literature of, “We came, we saw, we conquered,” and that just strikes me as a little bit off, and is why I prefer a satirical approach. To me, being an immigrant is sad and funny in some ways, but it also has this element of being a satire of cultures, that you came from the culture you’re in, and so you see America in a way that more native Americans don’t, the unending silliness of this particular society.
This strangeness is kind of refracted in a unique way in Lake Success, because it’s built on the belief that being a good parent can make one a good person, or wash away their sins. It also portends that children either destroy or keep marriages afloat, not necessarily love. I was hoping you could discuss this a little bit.
I don’t know that having a kid can redeem you, but it can either bring out your best or worst impulses. Throughout the book for Barry it’s the worst, but something changes in him toward the end of the novel. Look, we live in tough times. If you talk to people, they talk about trying to communicate to their kids that the president is a bully and a racist. This reminds me of growing up in Russia, where my parents also had this very difficult duty. We lived in an authoritarian society where you could only say so much. They wanted me to know that things weren’t so good, and it was very hard to do so. It was only when we left Russia that they were fully able to unburden themselves about how they felt about the regime. Of course, we are still a society where you can say whatever you want, but at what point will there be issues with that? At what point does a parent telling her child the truth become an “enemy of the people” like the non-Fox media already is in Trump’s view? I think being a parent in an authoritarian system—and that’s half the parents in the world—is a balancing act of its own.
Getting back to this point about how one is raised, and what one sees in their own culture, you mentioned earlier that you always saw Republicanism as this sort of party of racism. On occasion, you've received criticism for crafting male characters that are culturally unaware, to the point where it can begin to border on racist. I'm curious how you feel about this, since so much of what you write about in your memoir illuminates some of the casual racism of immigrant parents, and you could argue that these moments in your fiction are capturing the authentic experience of first-generation Americans.
That’s how I think of it. I know it’ll put some people off, and I know some readers will say, “Well, this is almost a trigger for me. I can’t handle somebody like this.” A lot of what I write has a very journalistic flavor. Absurdistan was written after spending time in countries that resembled Absurdistan. A lot of it was what actually happened in those countries. Lake Success was written after a bus trip across the country, where many of the things that happened to Barry happened to me. I think for me...the dream of every writer is that you’re read six hundred years from now. I’m not saying that’ll happen for me, but that’s the hope. So, the idea for me is always, you know, fifty years from now, six-hundred years from now, if somebody picks up the book, they should be able to understand why people like Barry existed, and how they fit into their societies. That really is the goal. I think sometimes people don’t quite understand just how racist, or, not even racist, but just casually unaware and hateful so much of our population really is. To soften the edges, I think, would be a disservice to the truth. These are the people who are in charge of our country, those people who go, “I’m socially liberal but fiscally conservative.” It has such an impact on the way Barry interacts with people, and those who are different from him. Often, he’s somewhat racist, but more than anything he’s patronizing, and I think that has to be part of the equation. Otherwise, you’re skimping on the truth. You’re doing a Luis and giving the reader what they want, something nice and pretty. That’s not the literature I loved growing up, and it’s not what I want to write.
That whole idea of being fiscally conservative and socially liberal was parodied recently on Reductress, which is this humor site that runs feminist parodies of the sort of sexist self-improvement articles that women’s magazines often run. I think the crux is that a woman is on a date with a guy, and he’s proud to identify as that, like it makes him heroic.
They are very proud of themselves. I’ll tell you, in hanging out in the hedge-fund world, there was a lot of alt-right sentiment even before Trump was elected. So, all those people who are socially liberal but fiscally conservative wore that as a badge of honor. It’s their version of being woke. It’s like, “Wow, I like black people, I deserve a medal! I don’t know any, but in theory, I think they’re great!” People get angry at comedians for making fun of Trump supporters. I think humor is very important here, and I think we have to keep doing it. I think it trickles down. There’s an understanding that people get, and humor’s a very important weapon. We can’t not write about the Barrys of the world. I mean, compared to Stephen Miller, Barry’s a marshmallow! Even so, he’s a part of the problem, and he has to be written as such.
Speaking of the value of humor, I wanted to shift and a bit and talk about the categorization of your work. Your work, along with Lorrie Moore's, Ottessa Moshfegh's, Paul Beatty's, Sam Lipsyte's, and Donald Antrim's, gets a lot of attention for being literary and funny, yet, unlike a humorist's work, it's never considered seriously as a work of comedy. I wanted to know if those boundaries we put up between genres ever bother you, even if your work is more serious than not?
It’s a real pain in the ass. You don’t really get this in the UK, this separation between “funny” and “literary,” but frankly I’d rather be the former than the latter. This gets at another issue for me, which is that literary fiction, the way Luis practices it anyway, is supposed to be serious with a capital “S.” It’s supposed to diverge from storytelling, and create some kind of hybrid thing, which is fine, but for me, I tell stories, and the humor is there. I want to sit down and tell you something that I won’t guarantee will change your life, but hopefully for three hundred pages you’ll feel okay and be somewhat entertained, which is still important to me. You know, we kind of ceded the ability to tell a funny story that can be taken seriously to television. Literature has always pushed out the comic novel, or created a very small space for it. In some ways, I think it’s coming back. You mentioned all of these wonderful writers, who I think are now being taken more seriously. I don’t really care what the literary community thinks of me, it’s connecting with readers that’s very important to me. I’ve been very blessed to have great readers who get the work, who come out when I do my tours, who give me their asthma inhalers to sign. I also think that with each book, there’s a slight sort of...you know, people are used to certain kind of work from me, and there’s this feeling of, “Oh my God, he’s done something a bit different.” Absurdistan was straight up satire. Super Sad had more of a tender side. Then I did a memoir, which from some of my readers was like, “What the hell is this?” Now I have a novel that I’m hoping is still pretty funny, but has more of a realistic edge, a less satirical edge. I can’t keep writing the same book. I have to change. Evelyn Waugh was a straight up satirist for most of his life, and then came out with Brideshead Revisited,
Books
Brideshead Revisited
The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder
Evelyn Waugh
which I still think is his best work. I may disagree with him in many ways, but I think there’s something to be said for constantly evolving your writing and looking for something new.
Speaking of that, I know that Super Sad True Love Story was optioned by Showtime a few years back.
Yeah...there’s stuff happening with it, but not that particular deal. I mean, the thing with Super Sad is that in order to adapt it, it would require major recalibration after Trump, since so much of what happened in that book has happened in real life. Frankly, worse things have happened. The book has moments of outright authoritarianism in it, but I’m not sure I would have put children being torn out of the arms of their parents at the US-Mexico border into it. I would’ve said, “That’s maybe taking it a bit too far.” There are concentration camps sort of upstate, but at least you get to keep your kids in that version. Whereas in reality, we’re a little more heartless than the kind dictators in Super Sad.
Well, to go back to my categorization question, if the show comes out, I imagine it would be billed as a comedy.
Probably, but I’m fine with that. Look, I watch a lot of television, and what I love about it is the way comedy is infused in so much of these great works. Breaking Bad was darkly funny. Better Call Saul is hilarious, but also quite serious. SMILF has a dark humor to it. It just goes on and on. These shows have a wonderful and natural relationship with humor, so I’d have no problem with that.
I wanted to end by asking about the evolution of relationships in your work. In Little Failure and Super Sad True Love Story, you characterize love as positive affirmations being bestowed upon the lowly male by an impossibly attractive woman. In other words, there's maybe a superficiality or neediness that births it, which makes what you deal with in earlier works more infatuation than love. In Lake Success, the protagonists, Barry and Seema, are trying to find their way to love, not with each other, but with people they believe are less superficial, or at least more capable of being less superficial. Can you articulate the shifts that occurred in your own understanding of love that led to this richer examination of coupling?
I think that when you’re married, you can either continue to make the superficial mistakes you made before, or you try to fix it. I think Barry and Seema are both trying to fix things. They’re desperate to fix things. Without giving too much away for the reader, they both come to different conclusions about how to do that by the end of the book. If middle-age is the constant repetition of the mistakes of youth, then you have to stop living like you’re still twenty-seven. This is my first middle-aged novel. Remember, in Super Sad, Lenny was in love with a younger woman, but also looking for immortality. In a sense, he’s trying to repeat and enjoy his mistakes over and over. Barry, in spite of himself, knows that life is going to end. He has a kid who he doesn’t know how to take care of. He has a wife that he believes doesn’t love him. He hates himself as well. He has a father who never quite understood how to take care of him, and a mother who died when he was very young. So he’s trying to have a mature relationship, he’s trying to go beyond mere infatuation. That’s the dream for Barry, and the reader can determine whether or not he succeeds.
Drinking With Novelist Gary Shteyngart
The author of Super Sad True Love Story on the beauty of the Breakfast Martini, traditional Russian toasting and how to drink with hedge fund managers.
September 4, 2018 story: Helena Fitzgerald photo: Eric Medsker
Gary Shteyngart
It’s a disgustingly humid day outside of Russ & Daughters Cafe, the sit-down restaurant that opened on the 100th anniversary of the famous Lower East Side Jewish appetizing spot of the same name. But inside, it’s as smoothly comforting as the set of a 1950s prestige television show, all gleaming white counters and sage-green leather booths.
From the moment we sit down, it’s clear that Gary Shteyngart is much better at drinking than I am. It’s just past 2 p.m. and Shteyngart, the acclaimed author of Super Sad True Love Story, Absurdistan and The Russian Debutante’s Handbook, suggests we order both the Breakfast Martini, a favorite of his, and the Smoked Martini, which pairs gin, Belvedere, Lillet, Cocchi Americano and a Laphroaig rinse. We follow that up with just about all of the herring on the menu, including one item that comes with yet more booze.
The Schmaltz & a Shot—herring, onion and potato with a shot of vodka, or, in this case, two—arrives first. “Should we do this the traditional Russian way?” Shteyngart asks. I gamely reply in the affirmative without knowing what that actually entails. “OK,” he points at the potato, onion and silver and pink chunk of fish, “so this is the thing you follow it with.” He picks up the shot glass. “Theoretically you’re supposed to drink the whole shot at one go, but we can pace ourselves.” Making a toast is part of doing this the traditional way, he explains, so he offers one in Russian, then translates, “That’s a simple toast, to herring!”
Shteyngart, who was born in St. Petersburg and immigrated with his parents to the United States when he was seven, has made a name for himself writing about people from his home country. The Russian Debutante’s Handbook is a biting satire of novels based in the immigrant experience; Absurdistan delves into the world of Russian oligarchs; and Super Sad True Love Story, while set in a dystopian New York, follows the son of a Russian immigrant. All three novels incorporate openly autobiographical aspects of Shteyngart’s own life and relationship to the country he left. For the moment, however, he’s done with writing about Russia. “I’m tired of it,” he says, “I’ve done so much Russian stuff, Jesus.”
Lake Success, his newest novel, centers instead on the hedge fund world in New York and involved five years of research in which Shteyngart embedded himself with a cadre of all-too-familiar finance guys. It ended up taking a toll on him, and despite the fact that it’s a quarter after 2 p.m. and we’re already two shots deep, he insists he’s been trying to drink less. “I can drink, but I’d come home at three or four in the morning just wasted,” he says of the many nights he spent trying to keep up with his subjects. “There was one instance where I couldn’t unbutton my shirt and my wife had to help me. I was really pathetic.”
The book, which follows a failing hedge fund manager named Barry Cohen on a cross-country Greyhound trip, is full of drinking. And much of it based on first-hand experience: While writing the book, Shteyngart took the same trip, making his way west to El Paso, Texas, where two of his favorite bars are located. One is Tap Bar, a dive which has, he says, “all the ambience that bars always try to get artificially.” The other is Kentucky Club, just over the border in Juarez. “A lot of the businessmen, the intelligentsia come there… [and] there’s a trough—it’s now dry, thankfully, but back in the old days, men would unzip after drinking themselves stupid and just pee into the trough. The dry ghosts of patriarchy past.”
The other two drinks have arrived while we’ve been talking, and we stop for a moment to try them. “This is my favorite,” Shteyngart says of the Breakfast Martini, “because it makes me feel like I’m not an alcoholic—I’m just having breakfast. You get egg whites, lots of protein, some juice.” We move on to the Smoked Martini. “Oh, that’s good, too!” He exclaims. He asks what’s in it and confirms one of the ingredients is Laphroaig. “Oh, that brings us back around, that one’s a hedge fund drink.”
As though on cue, latkes arrive. The kitchen very kindly sent them over, perhaps sensing something heavier than fish was needed to soak up all the booze. As we dig in, I ask about the many real-life New York City bars in Lake Success. One in particular, Clandestino—a small, low-key, tin-ceilinged bar on Canal Street—has been his local since it opened. It is still his favorite bar in New York City.
“It was the one bar where everybody was cool,” he says, recalling when he first walked in there the week he moved to the neighborhood, now almost 10 years ago. “The owner’s wonderful, she’s this French woman. And there’s Jeffrey the bartender… If something terrible ever happened to me, he’d be the first to know; I’d go down there and have a double or quadruple and tell him about whatever it was.”
During his research for the book, he introduced “some of the nicer hedge fund guys” to Clandestino, and they loved it. “The funny thing is, a lot of the lives these guys lead are lives you would never want in a million years, for anybody,” he says, almost wistfully. He describes them as raucous and indulgent, full of expensive whiskey and fine dining, but—just as in the case of Lake Success’ protagonist Barry—ultimately hollow, a bunch of people trapped by their self-image and obligations. In fact, the main takeaway from his research into the hedge fund world is how little joy it really offers, and how it makes the less gilded, accessible pleasures—a bar like Clandestino or the herring at Russ & Daughters, for instance—feel more precious.
“All the great places in New York are not that expensive—I mean, relatively speaking—and this is one of them,” he says. “I think when you insulate yourself with wealth to such an extent, life is miserable.”
Shteyngart picks up his drink, nearly empty by now, and takes one last sip, looking around the room before setting it on the table. He gestures at the mess of food and drink we’ve accumulated, as though to drive the point home. “In the end… you don’t need that much: a good bar and some decent herring, and you’re kind of set.”
Lake Success
Gary Shteyngart. Random House, $28 (352p) ISBN 978-0-8129-9741-5
A wealthy, self-deluded New York hedge funder sees America by the grim light of a Greyhound bus in Shteyngart's funny yet resoundingly mournful latest (after the memoir Little Failure). When a very drunk Barry Cohen stumbles into New York's Port Authority bus station, he convinces himself he's embarking on a Kerouac-esque journey to find himself. In reality, he's fleeing a failing marriage, the responsibilities of being the father to a severely autistic three-year-old son, and a potential SEC investigation. As Barry rattles around the country--he buys crack in Baltimore, shacks up with an ex-girlfriend in El Paso, Tex., hits rock bottom in Phoenix--his wife, Seema, the overachieving daughter of Indian immigrants, moves on romantically and does her best to ensure her son, Shiva, gets proper care while trying to keep his diagnosis a secret from friends and family. Barry is pathologically eager to please, full of good intentions that he rarely manages to follow through on, and the pity he elicits in the reader is genuine. Seema, though, is a bit of a puzzler, and readers will have trouble reconciling her driven, bristly personality with some of the decisions she makes. Shteyngart does slapstick as well as ever, but he stakes out new terrain in the expert way he develops his characters' pathos--particularly in depictions of Barry's and Seema's relationships with Shiva. There are some rough edges--secondary characters tend to feel like types or props, and many of the couple's problems are the kind that money (which they have plenty of) can either fix or greatly reduce--but this is nevertheless a stylish, big-hearted novel. Shteyngart made his name as a sharp satirist, and he'll undoubtedly widen his appeal with this effort. (Sept.)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
"Lake Success." Publishers Weekly, vol. 265, no. 12, 19 Mar. 2018, p. 46. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A531977310/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=f5ffcb71. Accessed 29 Nov. 2025.
Shteyngart, Gary LAKE SUCCESS Random House (Adult Fiction) $28.00 9, 4 ISBN: 978-0-8129-9741-5
A hedge fund manager on the skids takes a cross-country Greyhound bus trip to reconnect with his college girlfriend, leaving his wife to deal with their autistic 3-year-old.
"Barry Cohen, a man with 2.4 billion dollars of assets under management, staggered into the Port Authority Bus Terminal. He was visibly drunk and bleeding. There was a clean slice above his left brow where the nanny's fingernail had gouged him and, from his wife, a teardrop scratch below his eye." Shteyngart (Little Failure, 2014, etc.) gleefully sends Barry, on the run from troubles at work as well as his inability to face up to his son's recent diagnosis, on an odyssey that the author himself made on a Greyhound bus during the lead-up to the 2016 election, thus joining Salman Rushdie, Olivia Laing, Curtis Sittenfeld, and others with recent works set in the dawn of the Trump era. Barry is, in some ways, a bit of a Trump himself: He's from Queens, has a serious inferiority/superiority complex, has achieved his success through means other than actual financial genius. Barry, however, is a likable naif whose first stop is Baltimore, where he uses the "friend moves" he developed in middle school to bond with a crack dealer named Javon. He leaves Baltimore with a rock in his pocket and the dream of establishing an Urban Watch Fund, where he would share with underprivileged kids his obsession with Rolexes and Patek Phillipes as a means to self-betterment. In fact, Barry has left New York with not a single change of clothes, only a carry-on suitcase full of absurdly valuable watches. And now there's that crack rock. Off he goes to Richmond, Atlanta, Jackson, El Paso, Ciudad Juarez, Phoenix, and La Jolla, the home of an ex he's been out of touch with for years. Alternating chapters visit his wife, Seema, the daughter of Indian immigrants, who's back in New York with their silent son, Shiva, and his nanny, conducting an affair with a downstairs neighbor, a successful Guatemalan writer named Luis Goodman (whose biographical overlap with the real writer Francisco Goldman has all the markings of an inside joke).
As good as anything we've seen from this author: smart, relevant, fundamentally warm-hearted, hilarious of course, and it has a great ending.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
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"Shteyngart, Gary: LAKE SUCCESS." Kirkus Reviews, 1 July 2018. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A544638124/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=fb77f0b3. Accessed 29 Nov. 2025.
Tender is the night
Lake Success. By Gary Shteyngart. Random House; 352 pages. Hamish Hamilton.
BARRY COHEN'S hedge fund, This Side of Capital, takes its name from F. Scott Fitzgerald's first novel, "This Side of Paradise". Like Amory Blaine, Fitzgerald's hero, Barry went to Princeton, where he studied writing while preparing to build his fortune. Unlike Blaine, Barry is a son of working-class Queens; his father scraped a living maintaining the swimming pools of the wealthy. Barry has since become a master of the universe, "with 2.4 billion dollars of assets under management", as the first line of "Lake Success", Gary Shteyngart's new novel, declares. Yet the reader meets him as he staggers into the grime of Manhattan's Port Authority Bus Terminal, drunk and bleeding at twenty past three in the morning. What went wrong?
Mr Shteyngart is a hilarious chronicler of the vicissitudes of the American Dream. Born in what was then still Leningrad, he emigrated to America as a boy, and his observations have an outsider's acuity. In "Lake Success" Barry is a striver, a titan of finance grimly determined to make it to the very top. He is always aware of where he stands in the hierarchy of fantastic wealth. He and his wife Seema may own a swanky apartment in Midtown, but Barry is perpetually conscious that Rupert Murdoch owns the whole top three floors of the building.
Not all is as it seems, however. Barry's three-year-old son, Shiva, has just been diagnosed with autism; and something is deeply fishy about Valupro, a pharmaceutical firm with which This Side of Capital is enmeshed. The strain these pressures put on his marriage leads him to Port Authority in the small hours, determined to live out a hedge-funder version of "On The Road". Half of this novel belongs to him, its other half to Seema, who was born plain-old middle class in Ohio to immigrants from Bombay. In Barry's absence she cares for Shiva (with the help of a nanny, a chef and a huge team of therapists) and embarks on an affair with a neighbour, an ostensibly glamorous Guatemalan novelist.
Like Tom Wolfe's "The Bonfire of the Vanities" or William Thackeray's "Vanity Fair", this is a novel that captures the raucous spirit of its age. Most of the story takes place in the run-up to the election of 2016, the prospect of Donald Trump's presidency like a rumble of distant thunder. Barry's adventures elicit a delicious Schadenfreude as he travels across the country by Greyhound bus, carrying a suitcase full of staggeringly expensive watches. Barry is a watch aficionado, as is Mr Shteyngart, who last year wrote passionately in the New Yorker of the elusive comfort offered by the perfect wristwatch: "If only watches could do what they so slyly promise. To record. To keep track. To bring order."
If a kind of order is found by the novel's end, it is not the kind Barry sought or the reader expects. With his sharp humour and gift for character, Mr Shteyngart makes the implausible seem credible. He migh even make you want to take a Greyhound.
Lake Success.
By Gary Shteyngart.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 Economist Intelligence Unit N.A. Incorporated
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"The other side of paradise; New American fiction." The Economist, vol. 428, no. 9109, 15 Sept. 2018, p. 88(US). Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A554094605/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=f9122324. Accessed 29 Nov. 2025.
Lake Success: A Novel
by Gary Shteyngart
Penguin, 16.99 [pounds sterling], pp. 335
'We lived in a country that rewarded its worst people. We lived in a society where the villains were favoured to win.' So says Seema, the 29-year-old wife of hedge-fund manager Barry Cohen in Gary Shteyngart's fourth novel, Lake Success. The relationship between fiction and the world of high finance has a complicated history. Having largely ignored Wall Street--Tom Wolfe, Bret Easton Ellis and F. Scott Fitzgerald aside--novelists found in the crash of 2008 a galvanic moment. Suddenly bankers were everywhere, from Sebastian Faulks to John Lanchester to Anne Enright, while younger writers such as Adam Haslett and Zia Haider Rahman wrote memorable novels that made (flawed) heroes of the money-men.
Perhaps the most interesting thing about this belated encounter between fiction and finance is the relatively easy ride that bankers have been given in recent novels. Faulks's villainous John Veals in A Week in December aside, authors have sought to present their financiers as imperfect but essentially decent human beings whose mistakes were comprehensible, even forgivable. Partly this is a matter of form: the novel is a sympathy machine. The bond that is forged between reader and protagonist allows us to overlook any number of sins and omissions. It is this tension--between the natural sympathy that builds between the reader and Barry Cohen, 'a man with 2.4 billion dollars of assets under management', and the reader's mounting horror at the crimes that he commits--that animates Shteyngart's novel.
The narrative is shared chapter by chapter between Cohen and his wife, and opens with the 43-year-old hedge-fund manager in the full throes of a mid-life crisis. After a dinner party in which his wife has accused him of lacking imagination and soul, and reeling from a series of bad investments, Cohen sets off to ride a Greyhound bus southwards armed only with his black Amex and a suitcase full of absurdly expensive watches. Part of the reason for his flight from Wall Street is the dream of reconnecting with his university girlfriend, Layla, but there also seems to be a deeper motivation: the wish to see real Americans in the age of Trump, a nostalgie de la boue that Benjamin Markovits wrote about so brilliantly in another novel about hedge-funders, You Don't Have to Live Like This. Cohen has a further reason to escape--his son, Shiva, has been diagnosed with autism and he can't cope with either the practicalities of dealing with 'the vacant boy-king' or the social stigma attached to having a non-neurotypical child.
As Cohen's journey unspools, taking in a postmodern Baltimore in thrall to the version of itself presented in The Wire; a visit to a previous employee, now a creepy incel in Atlanta; a meeting with Layla's parents and then, finally, Layla herself; we are led deeper into Cohen's warped, self-pitying vision of himself. We read of his obsessive and ludicrous collecting of watches, his sense of himself as a novelist manque-- his hedge fund is called This Side of Capital, a nod to Fitzgerald's first book--and his political position as a 'moderate fiscal Republican' who nonetheless quite likes Trump's tax plan.
Having started out portraying Cohen as a nebbish, a likeable klutz who gets lucky and enormously rich, Shteyngart subtly darkens our picture of him until, at the end of the novel, we loathe our hero. This repugnance is intensified by the parallel narrative of Seema, who not only copes after her husband's desertion, but flourishes. It all makes for a book of compelling moral complexity whose bleakly powerful ending feels like just deserts for an industry that so far appears largely to have escaped literary censure for the crimes of the financial crisis.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 The Spectator Ltd. (UK)
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Preston, Alex. "Pay back time." Spectator, vol. 338, no. 9918, 29 Sept. 2018, p. 37. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A557578831/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=12c89347. Accessed 29 Nov. 2025.
Shteyngart, Gary OUR COUNTRY FRIENDS Random House (Fiction None) $28.00 11, 2 ISBN: 978-1-984855-12-1
The Levin-Senderovskys—Sasha, Masha, and little Natasha—wait out the virus at their country estate with four close friends and one movie star.
One of Sasha Senderovsky's fondest memories of his childhood is the bungalow colony catering to Russian immigrant families where he first met his wife, Masha. With the proceeds of his once-successful writing career, he has built a colony of his own, though it's in an area of New York state where a deconstructed swastika is becoming a popular bumper sticker, and he's having trouble scraping together the cash to get the dead tree limbs out of the driveway before the party starts. Karen Cho and Vinod Mehta have been his best friends since high school. She's stratospherically rich after creating an app that makes people fall in love; he's failed at everything except being a very good person and loving Karen ceaselessly from afar. They are joined by Karen's distant cousin, an international dandy named Ed; Senderovsky's beautiful former student Dee, who leverages her Southern drawl and heritage to great effect on and off the page; and someone known only as the Actor, whose fame, charisma, and good looks are almost beyond description. Except Shteyngart, most recently of the fantastic Lake Success (2018) and most famously of Super Sad True Love Story (2010), can describe anything. Russian: "a language built around the exhalation of warmth and pain." Cheeses: "so filled with aromatic herbs they inspired (on Senderovsky's part) memories that had never happened." One could go on. When the curtain rises on the House on the Hill, as the place is known, it's early March 2020; Senderovsky has to ask his guests to refrain from hugging because "Masha's gone all epidemiological." Everyone seems to gather that they'll be staying for a while, but, of course, they have no idea. Uncle Vanya, K-pop, and Japanese reality TV will all play important roles, and just about everyone gets to fall in love.
The Great American Pandemic Novel only Shteyngart could write, full of hyphenated identities, killer prose, and wild vitality.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2021 Kirkus Media LLC
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"Shteyngart, Gary: OUR COUNTRY FRIENDS." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Aug. 2021. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A671783133/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=eda3e5ed. Accessed 29 Nov. 2025.
Our Country Friends
By Gaty Shteyngart
Random House, 336 pp., $28
Three snippets of dialogue from an autumn novel:
So Masha told me to tell everyone, no smoking in the car. In fact, no
smoking on the property either. She says it can make the virus worse if
you get it....Also, she told me that no one should sit in the front
seat. For distancing purposes. "Oh, the hell with that," said Ed,
opening the front passenger door. "People are really going overboard
with this thing."...
He followed his crying wife into the bedroom. "Mashen'ka," he said.
"Don't touch me. You might give it to me."
"But we sleep in the same bed," he said, in Russian.
"I'm not even sure that's a good idea," she answered, in English...
"So," she said, "how many of us have to die for your personal
reenactment of The Big Chill?"
Final Jeopardy question: How do they talk in the first big-budget pandemic novel, courtesy of Gary Shteyngart?
Someone had to do it. As Jonathan Safran Foer pioneered the 9/11 novel, so Shteyngart does for COVID. Our Country Friends arrives as the author's most adulatory nod yet to Chekhov, who pops up regularly in Shteyngart's books. Both overtly and allusively tied to Uncle Vanya, with the spirit of Boccaccio's Decameron piped in, it's the densely plotted tale of an extended pandemic sleepover at the country estate of one successful city-based culture star--Alexander (Sasha) Borisovich Senderovsky (see Chekhov's Alexander Vladimirovich Serebrakoff)--a get-together likely to cause problems for everyone as the plague of 2020 evolves.
Senderovsky, the novelist protagonist of Our Country Friends, invites his best friends to escape "the infected city" and stay for a spell at bungalows on his estate. Karen Cho, a divorced pal since their days at an elite New York City high school, struck it rich by inventing a dating app that triggers love when participants look into each other's eyes. Vinod Mehta, a health-impaired high school friend of both of theirs, has been more of a ne'er-do-well, gravitating between adjunct-professoring and stints as a short-order cook. Ed Kim, Korean American like Karen and scion of a South Korean conglomerate, met Sasha when they were in their 20s. Rounding out the main cast are a world-famous "Actor" (identified only as such) who's working with Sasha on a TV script; Dee Cameron, an alumna of Sasha's "drunken car wreck of a writing workshop," who's published a successful first book of caustic essays, and Masha, Senderovsky's psychiatrist wife.
Like each of Shteyngart's earlier four novels, Our Country Friends draws partly on the author's own life. Senderovsky owns a Hudson Valley country house. Like Shteyngart, he's a drinker and super foodie. Like Shteyngart, he's married with a young child.
But there's also what MFA-land might call "fiction distancing." Masha is a Russian-American Jew, unlike Shteyngart's Korean-American wife. Masha and Sasha's daughter is adopted from China and crazy about the South Korean boy band BTS. Sasha's property is much larger than Shteyngart's. (Hey, what's the fun of being a novelist if you can't upscale yourself as you water down your semi-roman a clef?)
Read simply as a stab at the Great American Pandemic Novel, Our Country Friends takes the gold (at least so far, until more writers enter the contest). It teems with familiar Shteyngart virtues: wry dialogue, self-deprecation, sharp notice of up-to-the-minute American concerns (brain fog, quarantining, intubation), show-offy words and phrases in Russian, Hebrew, Danish and, especially, Korean. Lots of romantic entanglements and sexual subplots follow at the "House on the Hill." (You'll have to buy the book to enjoy them.)
But here's where things get intriguing for Shteyngart's status as the anointed successor to Philip Roth as Jewish-American literature's bigfoot male comic. Short version: He's inching away from burlesque scenarios and toward the wry realism of Saul Bellow, and even the quiet moralism of Bernard Malamud. He's still funny when it befits a pandemic novel, but not slapstick funny. More than any previous Shteyngart novel, Our Country Friends eliminates caricatures and offers real characters who resist simplification.
In his first three novels--The Russian Debutante's Handbook (2002), Absurdistan (2006) and Super Sad True Love Story (2010)--Shteyngart compartmentalized his resentments. He made space to insult Russia, the country he left at age 7. He took time to wail about the tough times faced by immigrants to the United States. And he made time for the Jews, lacerating the Orthodox and mocking Soviet emigres clueless about their own religion. Then Shteyngart confessed to his parents that he'd be working on what became Little Failure (2014), an evocative memoir. "Just don't write like a self-hating Jew," his father warned him.
That book detailed the Shteyngart family's emigration from Leningrad to Queens in 1979, followed by 7-year-old Igor Semonovich's struggle to fathom a triangulated Russian-American-Jewish life. An asthmatic immigrant kid bullied by fellow students at his Jewish day school, "Gary" Shteyngart moved on to prestigious Stuyvesant High, a druggy undergraduate stint at Oberlin, literary aspiration in Manhattan in his 20s and then the big breakthrough when The Russian Debutante's Handbook took off.
Shteyngart did heed his father's wishes--the sarcastic attitude toward religious Judaism in the novels grew less fierce in Little Failure. The star of his fourth novel, Lake Success (2018), hedge-fund manager Barry Cohen, became Shteyngart's first protagonist not to be a Russian Jew.
Now, in Our Country Friends, Shteyngart largely leaves Jewish matters alone. The story, thanks to Karen, Ed and Vinod, features Korean and Indian culture more prominently. Yes, Masha says Lehadlik ner shel Shabbat over her Friday night candles, the conservative Soviet Jews of his parents' generation still live among "the usual schmear of menorahs and provincial lacquer boxes," and Shteyngart can't resist describing a New York City night "passing the rows of Hasidic station wagons, their occupants being pleasured by transgender goddesses." But that's about it, at a house with "the contradictory smells of bacon in the mornings and Sabbath candles on Friday night."
Perhaps the clue to Our Country Friends' new Jewish-lite style, to Shteyngart feeling more self-erasing than self-hating these days, is the bitter piece he published in The New Yorker just weeks before Our Country Friends appeared, titled "A Botched Circumcision and Its Aftermath." It chronicled in blunt detail his procedure at the very late age of 7, one demanded of his newly arrived immigrant father by Lubavitcher rabbis. The article, in solemn un-Shteyngart-like prose, described the extreme pain and horrible complications it recently caused him in middle age: 12 doctors, failed corrective procedures and more. But while some authors foreshadow an oncoming book with an op-ed, Our Country Friends ignores the trauma Shteyngart suffered while writing the book, aside from one inside joke--Masha notes that the TV script worked on by the Actor and Sasha involves "an oligarch's son with a bad circumcision" and cracks, "Who on earth would watch that?"
In the New Yorker article, Shteyngart refers to "the faith in which I was brought up," as if it were a neighborhood. His wife tells him that for the first time in the 15 years she's known him, "your humor is gone." Shteyngart informs the reader, "I doubt I will ever be completely right again." Life chastens novelists as it does everyone else.
Shteyngart at 49 is neither self-hating nor completely self-erasing. Rather, he's elegiac. Much like Bellow when he wrote The Adventures of Augie March, Shteyngart appears to be announcing in Our Country Friends that he's now, inevitable tinctures of Russianness aside, an American novelist more than a writer of Jewish-American fiction. That's no joke.
Carlin Romano, Moment's critic-at-large, teaches media theory and philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2021 Moment Magazine
http://www.momentmag.com/
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Romano, Carlin. "THE FIRST COVID COMEDY." Moment, vol. 46, no. 6, Nov.-Dec. 2021, pp. 68+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A686656867/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=8e91fec4. Accessed 29 Nov. 2025.
OUR COUNTRY FRIENDSBy Gary Shteyngart
Not long after 9/11, Don DeLillo wrote: ''Language is inseparable from the world that provokes it.'' To write now is to write in the wake of 2020, whether one engages it or not. Some readers may want to escape the present, but there are those of us who want to see a writer find the language for what is unfolding, to give us the slanted, intimate clarity that can't be achieved in other ways. After months of epidemiology Twitter, after the reportage about the dying and the dead, I turned to writers: Zadie Smith's lyrical writing about the moral implications of the privileged stay-at-home class, Patricia Lockwood's hilarious piece about getting Covid, and Lorrie Moore's unstinting story ''Face Time,'' in which the description of isolation from a father as he died made me feel less isolated in my own grief. Gary Shteyngart brings his version of the above to his reflective, earthy, humane new novel, ''Our Country Friends,'' which is rife with the problem of privilege, the profoundly leveling experience of the virus, and an ever-present sense of absurdity and humor.
''Our Country Friends'' takes place in 2020 at the Hudson Valley estate of Sasha Senderovsky, a once very successful writer of ''stupid comic novels'' that sound a lot like an unflattering version of Shteyngart's own oeuvre. Naturally Shteyngart makes him the butt of most of the farcical humor here, as Sasha spends the novel flapping around in a ridiculous dressing gown and drinking ungodly amounts of alcohol.
He and his wife, Masha, a psychiatrist, both emigrated from Russia as children. It was Sasha's dream to have a house surrounded by little cottages, a colony like the one he remembers from his childhood summers, and he has spent far beyond his means to maintain his ''dacha.'' They have a daughter adopted from China, Nat, who is 8 and has anxiety, an obsession with the K-pop group BTS and a precocity that sometimes unnerves adults. Sasha has invited his closest pals to ride out the lockdown in his cottages: Karen, a Korean American who designed an app (Tröö Emotions) that makes people fall in love and has made her very rich; Vinod, an Indian immigrant and an unpublished, brilliant writer who has lost part of a lung to cancer and lost his adjunct professor gig; Ed, an heir to a wealthy Korean family and a snobby sophisticate; and Dee, a white former student of Sasha's who's very attractive and has written a provocative book of essays about her poor background. Also invited (partly to lure the others and partly to seal a TV deal Sasha is working on) is a famous person, ''the Actor.'' He's ridiculously good-looking (after he arrives each of the women masturbates about him in her own super-specific way); he talks about his time in ''New Haven'' rather than saying Yale; and he compares himself to Odysseus before anyone has even had coffee. In short, he's a perfect monster, half Tom Berenger in ''The Big Chill'' and half Terence Stamp in ''Teorema.''
There are many mentions of Russian literature, from Lermontov to Tolstoy to Chekhov, and toward the end, the characters actually perform ''Uncle Vanya.'' In some respects, ''Our Country Friends'' does feel like a Russian novel. The narration is not the close third person of Shteyngart's previous book, ''Lake Success,'' or the hyper-modern, hilarious alternating unmediated voices of his best-selling 2010 novel, ''Super Sad True Love Story.'' Here Shteyngart uses a 19th-century-style omniscience, moving from mind to mind within a scene (and, like Tolstoy, even occasionally inhabiting the minds of animals) while drawing back and commenting to the reader from a perspective that none of the characters are privy to. This choice seems suited to the subject: We were all thrust into a vast calamity that we didn't understand and over which we had no control. The world feels relentlessly godless. Our all-knowing narrator steps in to give us the big picture in inimitable Shteyngartian style, such as this unexpected but apt simile extended to an absurd punchline: ''Every diner ... had learned something new about another, and the secrets were as piquant as the habanero-laced tonnato they were now shoveling down without regard for the country plumbing.'' Or to give us asides: ''He had missed his own pun.'' This narration also allows the novel to adopt a tone of wry self-reflexivity, as in this slap at the very idea of writing a pandemic novel: ''Stranded social novelists up and down the river ... beseeching their higher power to help me make something out of all this stillness.''
In forced proximity, affairs are had, old and new betrayals come to light. For much of this, Shteyngart backs away from his customary frenetic, high-satire register. Often time moves slowly (like a Russian novel or like ''Terrace House,'' the Japanese reality show the characters binge-watch). There are wonderfully vivid descriptions of food and weather and sex. Some aspects are somber. There's no internet in the cottages, so the characters are isolated from what is happening down in the city. One of them thinks about ''a series of refrigerated trucks parked behind his local hospital in Queens, collecting the forklifted bodies of the dead.'' He writes emails to those left behind but then he goes back to looking at butterflies, reading, eating glorious meals. He feels guilt. ''But he stayed. They all did.'' Shteyngart's engagement with the complexities of privilege, a subject made so stark in 2020, most compelled me.
Yes, they are protected because of their access to this property and to money -- even the ones who aren't rich have cultural capital and connections. Yet many of them have suffered racism and xenophobia and damaged parents humbled by the hard terms of their new country.
In the second half of the novel, it grows harder to ignore the world outside the bubble. They see the video of George Floyd's murder, hear about the protests and note Blue Lives Matter signs popping up among the locals. Sasha admits to himself that he is complicit, that all these years he ''saw, but he also did not see, or pretended not to see. (Or refused to see.) ... He distanced his gaze from the country he inhabited.'' As an immigrant, he began as an outsider but then did what he could to make his way. ''By which point, you were just a scab sent in to reinforce the established order. ... All of us are useful and expendable in turn.'' A mysterious black pickup truck seems to menace them for being outsiders or nonwhite people. The locals -- the peasants, to follow this Russian theme -- are hired by Sasha and paid only sometimes. Some are racist Trump supporters, some have cryptic white supremacist tattoos and bumper stickers. Others are perhaps benign. But this isn't their story, after all.
Despite the estate's isolation, the virus does indeed make its way there. There are no real bubbles, not forever. First social media virality hits, as one character gets a well-deserved callout that cascades into a relentless pile-on. Then the coronavirus slips in, invisible, searching out the vulnerable, culminating in a harrowing depiction of Covid delirium and tribulation.
In this dense, ambitious novel, some elements fall flat. The speculative tech of the Tröö Emotions app seems to belong in a different book (although those umlauts are funny), and the more the characters tried to explain it, the less sense it made to me. And I didn't need Sasha's ongoing betrayal of one of his closest friends. I appreciate that Shteyngart wants to be unflinching about Sasha's failings, but it struck me as too cruel for his character.
The novel's strengths abound. It upends clichés, pieties and commonplaces while also noticing salient details of the lockdown. One character can't help obsessing over intubation, feeling for the tube in his throat and imagining the sound ventilators make. And how many writers could pull off a sex scene that climaxes with a request to put on a surgical mask for the transgressive kink of it, and also describe with exquisite precision how strange the beauty of the natural world felt during that hellscape spring and summer?
Two romantic connections, and another unconventional maternal one, make an argument for love being a consolation: of the lockdown, yes, but of humanity, always. It works because the author is aware of his characters' hypocrisies and vanities. Shteyngart doesn't let them off the hook, but he does allow them (and us) some respite.
Dana Spiotta's fifth novel, ''Wayward,'' was published in July. OUR COUNTRY FRIENDS By Gary Shteyngart 307 pp. Random House. $28.
CAPTION(S):
PHOTO: Gary Shteyngart (PHOTOGRAPH BY BRIGITTE LACOMBE) (BR41)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2021 The New York Times Company
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Spiotta, Dana. "Locked Down With Friends, Lovers and Rivals, in Gary Shteyngart's New Novel." The New York Times Book Review, 14 Nov. 2021, p. 1(L). Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A682339076/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=a88480e6. Accessed 29 Nov. 2025.
OUR COUNTRY FRIENDS
A novel
GARY SHTEYNGART
336pp. Allen & Unwin. 14.99 [pounds sterling].
In chapter five of Vladimir Nabokov's Pnin, the hero, a Russian academic living in the United States, drives out to spend the weekend with a compatriot at the latter's country house, known as Cook's Castle--an Americanization of the man's surname, Kukolnikov. Every other summer, "Cook" gathers his fellow Russians to sip tea with jam on the veranda, sleep in hammocks, swim in ponds, play croquet and argue about the relativity of time in novels. Sometimes, these emigres bring along their American kids, who flicker in and out of the general consciousness with a kind of "intergenerational shimmer". "What a lot we give them!", Pnin reflects, referring to "the benighted American people".
Gary Shteyngart's new novel, Our Country Friends, opens with a similar premiss. Sasha Senderovsky, an ageing novelist trying to make a break into television, has invited a handful of old friends to hunker down with him on his country estate--where he has built a series of themed bungalows around the original house--during part of the Covid-19 pandemic. Sasha is a very Pninian figure, though he is more self-conscious about playing the Russian clown--something he has been doing to make a space for himself in contemporary America, with diminishing returns. Like Pnin, he is a terrible, easily distracted driver (his wife won't let him take their adopted daughter in the car). Of course, Senderovsky is also a send-up, of Shteyngart himself. He, too, has published a memoir describing his difficult adjustment to American life as a child, though in Sasha's version he ends up thanking his parents "for doing one right thing in their lives, for subjecting themselves to refugee humiliation in order to bring him here to this clime and soil, away from the oppression of their disintegrating homeland".
Sasha's wife is another Russian, Masha Levin-Senderovsky, a psychiatrist who specializes in treating the anxieties of America's ultra-right, a demographic that includes her own parents. Emigration of all kinds is what binds this group of guests. Sasha's two best friends from their New York high school are Karen Cho and Vinod Mehta; another pal, whom he met at the party for his first book launch, is Ed Kim, a Swiss-Canadian Brit, whose money comes from a Korean business empire. Even the famous "Actor" (who doesn't get a name until the end of the book), whom Senderovsky has invited along to work with him on a pilot, and whose arrival supercharges the country-weekend atmosphere, turns out to have a Turkish grandmother. "All of us, Senderovsky thought, are in service to an order that has long predated us. All of us have come to feast on this land of bondage. And all of us are useful and expendable in turn." Only Dee Cameron, Senderovsky's beautiful former student, is a "real" American. She comes from the kind of poor white country stock the Senderovskys have built their estates among.
Donald Trump doesn't get a mention, but in other respects the novel is all about the zeitgeist. Karen arrives at the house having just made a fortune from selling her dating app, Troo Emotion, which seems to involve taking enhanced pictures of yourself and your possible lover on a phone in such a way that the "algorithm" functions as a love potion. It's supposed to symbolize how this kind of technology manipulates our brains, but there is a semi-magical vagueness to the description that makes it hard to believe in. Guests video each other doing embarrassing things and get videoed by strangers. Someone is "cancelled" when her affair with the Actor exposes her old social media posts to the scrutiny of angry fans. People sit around discussing police killings. Meanwhile, a mysterious black truck keeps pursuing these out-of-towners on their country walks. "Was there a sticker on the back? The deconstructed remains of a swastika? Slegs blankes?" (meaning "Whites only" in Afrikaans).
Part of what is so moving about Nabokov's novel is the fact that, at the height of the Cold War, Pnin loves America (with its sunlamps and cars and brilliant dentistry), and the best kind of Americans "get" Pnin, even if they make fun of him. Their culture is sophisticated enough to appreciate what is worthwhile about his own. Shteyngart's novel puts this rapprochement in a more cynical light. When the network bosses eventually turn down the pilot, it is because of the "subject matter":
"Oligarchs, hookers, payoffs. A former soviet republic won't seem that different from 2020 America to the viewer."
"Doesn't that make it pertinent?" Senderovsky asked.
"No, it just makes it depressing."
For Pnin, the great disaster of Russian history was the aftermath of the Revolution: "thirty-five years of hopeless injustice following a century of struggling justice and glimmering hope", which explains why he and his compatriots all escaped to America and Cook's Castle. In Our Country Friends, there is a general sense that the gap has narrowed, in the wrong direction. At one point, Masha realizes, "This is what her old Soviet parents ... understood intrinsically: [America] is a killing field. By associating with the killers, they hoped they would be spared".
These themes go some way to explaining the novel's reception in the US, where it has been critically lauded and achieved the status of an "NY Times bestseller". If you raise certain flags, a subsection of the country will salute them. The Washington Post called it "the darkly brilliant comedy we need right now", as we are dragged along "in Covid's ... tragic wake". The first sly reference to the pandemic occurs a few pages in, when the proprietor of Sasha's local liquor store, "a shaggy Anglo with a rosacea nose peeking out from his loosely worn mask", looks pleased at the quantity of Sasha's purchases. The year 2020 wasn't very long ago, and the ground must have been shifting under Shteyngart as he wrote. Masha is the "Stalin in an apron" who insists on social distancing and wipes down everything anybody touches; later, there is a brief reference to the fact that "this form of viral spread was no longer considered likely". In general, Shteyngart decides not to give much historical context here, and I wonder what it will be like to read this book in a hundred years. The attitude towards his reader is: you're living it, you know what I'm talking about.
But the lack of context is a problem even in early 2022. It is never quite clear why any of these people--the former student, the movie star, the international jet-setter--has decided to show up at Senderovsky's dacha, not just for a weekend but for several months. We learn little about the lives they are escaping, and, apart from a few references to the dangers of the city, not much about the state of the pandemic itself. The result is that the set-up feels more like a novelist's conceit and less like a genuine occasion. And, once he has got his characters on site, Shteyngart doesn't really know what to do with them. The plot is an answer to the question, "how can I make things happen to these people?" instead of the question, "what would happen to these people?" This is most likely because, in reality, the answer would be "not much". They'd have a nice, occasionally boring weekend, and then go home, which is more or less what happens in Pnin.
But Shteyngart isn't Nabokov. And these people don't go home. Nobody pays for anything either, even when Senderovsky's money mysteriously runs out (he needs the pilot fee just to fix the plumbing). The Actor is meant to come across as slightly characterless, a vessel, but that also feels like an easy way out of the difficulties of writing him. The night after he shows up for dinner, all the women at the table masturbate. It seems like we're in the middle of a farce, but Shteyngart doesn't play it totally for laughs: "Dee also slipped a hand down the elastic of her underwear. Let's just do this, she thought. She hadn't fallen for him, but didn't a film of his make her cry?" The Actor himself seems weirdly ineffectual for someone whose defining feature is the power of his presence. Karen's Troo Emotion app, which failed to work on Dee, works on him. He begins to obsess about her. This is the standard territory of country-weekend fiction, but the app is another excuse for not having to imagine the stages and intricacies of actual romance.
There is plenty of action along these lines: long-lost buried manuscripts, unexplained gun shots, mysterious rescuers, secret hand jobs, consummated and unconsummated affairs. Vinod has spent his life in love with Karen, but maybe something happened at the party where Sasha met Masha? Ed starts going for walks with Dee, which drives the Actor crazy ... maybe Sasha can use her to his advantage? Yet, for all the drama, the book feels uneventful. There is a comic energy to the prose that doesn't often break out into humour and instead creates a kind of low-gravity zone for the characters to operate in. None of their actions carries real weight. To pass the time between "beats", people point out bits of nature and discuss the food: "Oh these sardines ... They couldn't be more perfectly grilled. It's like I can inhale their essence". This is Masha's voice, but it could have been anybody's. ("It was unusual for her to be so lyrical, Senderovsky thought.") You get the sense that Shteyngart keeps having to make up stuff for his characters to talk about because they don't have enough depth to their lives to keep a conversation going.
Instead of interiority, they have themes. "Should she please that Laotian American student at the expensive Minneapolis liberal arts college or incite her? They walked back toward the house, both in thought." And almost all their thoughts are either explanations of the plot or designed to make it happen: "He wanted nothing in his life but the smell of her cheap floral shampoo". Really? "It was still not too late to be a complete parent to her if he could find the solvent that might decalcify his love." "Had she any of that vitality left? And if so why would the Actor deserve those long-stored-away final dregs of life?" Perspectives change mid-sentence: "She loved them, too, even when what passed for their love felt like a tether round the sun-burned stalk of her neck". Here, we are in the head of an eight-year-old girl, thinking about her adoptive parents--until we reach that sun-burned stalk.
The death, when it comes, has been heavily foreshadowed. Yet, this doesn't save the chain of events that leads up to it from feeling implausible (the app is instrumental again). Perhaps strangest of all about this novel is the way Shteyngart seems to lose interest in his own alter ego. Senderovsky, who initiates the whole retreat, plays less and less of a role as the plot wears on. All of this is first-draft stuff, signs of the haste in which the book was presumably dashed off and then published. Shteyngart can certainly write, and there are many great lines, sharp insights, both funny and serious, which deserve a better book to live in: "People of his class were both too rich and too poor to divorce. Some had even given up fighting just as a precaution". And yet I'm not sure a longer gestation would have made much difference. At one point, the author mentions the envy Senderovsky feels for novelists who take "marriage as their subject", but this approach requires a kind of fidelity Shteyngart doesn't show much interest in himself: the slow build up of family life, the creation of a world in which small things count as an event.
Our Country Friends has a lot to say about the state of America right now. But one of the things its success tells us is that this is the kind of book America currently wants.
Benjamin Markovits's new novel, The Sidekick, will be published in May
Caption: "A Country Residence, Possibly General Moreau's Country House at Morrisville, Pennsylvania" by Pavel Petrovich Svinin, c.1813
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2022 NI Syndication Limited
https://www.the-tls.co.uk/
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Markovits, Benjamin. "In the footsteps of Nabokov: A group of friends hunkers down to weather the Covid storm." TLS. Times Literary Supplement, no. 6199, 21 Jan. 2022, pp. 8+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A691314693/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=1749aac5. Accessed 29 Nov. 2025.
Shteyngart, Gary VERA, OR FAITH Random House (Fiction None) $28.00 7, 8 ISBN: 9780593595091
A brilliant fable about childhood, and so much more, in our broken country.
"It was said by both her pediatrician and her psychologist that Vera, while presenting as a very bright ten-year-old, suffered from intense anxiety." Vera Bradford-Shmulkin really does have a lot on her plate for a kid. Among the 23 chapter titles in this slim and explosively lovely novel: "She had to hold the family together." "She had to survive recess." "She had to expand herThings I Still Need to Know Diary." "She had to figure out if Daddy was a traitor." "She had to fall asleep." The novel is set in a delicately constructed near future, with self-driving cars and smart chessboards and a proposed constitutional amendment that will give an "'enhanced vote' counting for five-thirds of a regular vote to so-called 'exceptional Americans,' those who landed on the shores of our continent before or during the Revolutionary War but were exceptional enough not to arrive in chains." These are the words of Vera's teacher, who is dividing the class into teams to debate the topic. She makes half-Korean, half-Russian Vera the lead for the pro-Five-Three side, while the opposition will be led by an "exceptional American" type her parents call Moncler Stephen because of his jacket. Winning this debate is another thing Vera has to do, along with getting up the nerve to deliver "Ten Great Things About Daddy and Why You Should Stay Together with Him," and its counterpart, "Six Great Things About Mom" to the parents in question, who fight constantly. This mom is the one she calls "Anne mom," her WASP stepmother Anne Bradford; "Mom Mom," her Korean biological mother, has long been out of the picture and she has never known why. ("She had to find out the truth about Mom Mom.") This book is about so many things: the drama of the gifted child, nativism and immigrant culture ("She had to visit Baba Tanya and Grandpa Boris in the suburbs"), technology and oppression, the role of intellectuals, the way we learn language. As the political situation in the United States evolves, Shteyngart's particular flavor of black humor--Russian wry?--reconnects with its roots in sorrow and resistance and becomes essential and lifesaving.
Shteyngart is doing his most important work ever, illuminating the current tragedy with humor, smarts, and heart.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2025 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
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"Shteyngart, Gary: VERA, OR FAITH." Kirkus Reviews, 15 May 2025. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A839213322/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=8433680e. Accessed 29 Nov. 2025.
''Vera, or Faith'' follows a 10-year-old girl navigating family drama and a dystopian America.
VERA, OR FAITH, by Gary Shteyngart
One reason Gary Shteyngart's shtick has worn so well is that he's an insistent self-satirist. A few years after publishing his manic-impressive first novel, ''The Russian Debutante's Handbook'' (2002), he lampooned it in ''Absurdistan,'' his second. The novel, written by ''Jerry Shteynfarb,'' is referred to as ''The Russian Arriviste's Hand Job.'' It's not a subtle joke, but people can become fond of artists who are aware enough to stay two beats ahead of their detractors.
Shteyngart's new novel, ''Vera, or Faith,'' offers us another of his many stand-ins. His name is Igor Shmulkin. He's a writer and magazine editor in Manhattan who might put you in mind of David Remnick -- if Remnick were Russian, grievously depressed, flatulent and rumpled, carried hipster satchels and smoked a lot of pot. He's like Shteyngart in that he's a martini super-enthusiast and an online ''manfluencer'' in the world of expensive pens, the way Shteyngart is for flashy watches.
The best thing about Shmulkin -- for the reader, at any rate -- is that he's a bookshelf spy and a bookshelf fraud. At other people's homes, he orders his kids to surveil the host's copy of Robert Caro's ''The Power Broker'' to see if the spine is broken. Before his own parties, he pays them to rearrange his books so that those by women and people of color are at eye level, to better polish his injustice-righting credentials.
We're not allowed to get too close to Shmulkin, perhaps for good reason. 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.
This story is owned instead by Shmulkin's 10-year-old daughter, Vera. She's a handful -- bright, anxious, lonely, working to keep her splintering family together. One of her closest companions is a chess simulator, Kaspie, named after her hero, the Russian chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov.
She has a poster of Kasparov on her bedroom wall but not much else. (''She knew kids were supposed to have more posters on their walls to show off their inner life, but she liked her inner life to stay inside her.'') Vera is adopted. She refers to her WASPy mother -- whose too on-the-nose name is Anne Bradford -- as ''Anne Mom.'' Her birth mother, whom she has not met but is determined to find, is Korean.
The reader will have noticed that this book's title owes a debt to Vladimir Nabokov's novel ''Ada, or Ardor'' (1969), which is about a lifelong love affair between aristocratic cousins who discover they are siblings. Shteyngart's novel chimes with Nabokov's in several ways, though the similarities are glancing.
In both we clock inappropriate sexual longings and putative parents who are not what they seem. Each has science fiction elements, and involve unlikely methods of communication. Vera wears bow ties, like a character in ''Ada''; it did not pass Nabokov's notice that these resemble his beloved butterflies. And Vera, of course, was the name of Nabokov's wife. A full list of these resemblances will no doubt be compiled by a future graduate student, bent over an A.I. as if it were a Moog synthesizer.
Another similarity worth mentioning is Vera's passion for language -- also like Ada's. (''I am sentimental,'' Nabokov's Ada said. ''I could dissect a koala but not its baby. I like the words damozel, eglantine, elegant. I love when you kiss my elongated white hand.'') Vera keeps a notebook in which she writes down words and phrases she wants to remember. Many words in both novels appear in scare quotes -- those marks that undermine, like termites, the meaning of a word or phrase. Nabokov thought that the word ''reality'' should always appear in them.
In his biography of John Steinbeck, ''Mad at the World'' (2020), William Souder wrote about one of Steinbeck's sons that ''the great epiphany of his childhood was realizing that his father was an asshole.'' Vera has a similar epiphany about her own father, who turns traitor, or so it seems, toward nearly everything in his life. Her nostrils are attuned to the stench of his lies.
Kids: They're pint-size spies. They're little data processors, soaking things up and spitting them back, until one day they've grokked enough to knock you into the gutter. Vera actively spies on her dad. There are scenes set inside the locked gates of Gramercy Park that might play better on film than they do in this novel.
Before long, Vera is on a road trip to find her lost mother. At the borders of certain states, women are pulled over at checkpoints to check the status of their menses. (Men whoosh past in male-only lanes.) The novel ends with SWAT teams that resemble ICE. Who are they after? Is it possible that a half-sentient, self-driving car has ratted someone out? Here come the men with helicopters and long guns, knocking at your thin door. This overkill action feels expedient.
''Vera, or Faith'' 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.
I would hate to break this butterfly upon a wheel, to use a line that Nabokov borrowed from Pope. 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.
VERA, OR FAITH | By Gary Shteyngart | Random House | 243 pp. | $28
Dwight Garner has been a book critic for The Times since 2008, and before that was an editor at the Book Review for a decade.
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This article appeared in print on page BR10.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2025 The New York Times Company
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Garner, Dwight. "Pint-Size Spy." The New York Times Book Review, 27 July 2025, p. 10. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A849355474/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=0a3e67aa. Accessed 29 Nov. 2025.
Vera, or Faith
by Gary Shteyngart Atlantic Books, [pounds sterling]16.99, pp. 241
It's impossible not to love Vera Bradford-Shmulkin, the whip-smart Jewish-Korean-American child narrator of Vera, or Faith, Gary Shteyngart's sixth novel, which is a masterclass in the author's sardonicism, set in a frighteningly realistic near future.
School is awful and Vera's world is on the brink of imploding because 'Daddy and Anne Mom', her stepmother, aren't getting on, what with Igor's evening 'mar-tiny' habit and crumpling status as a 'leftist intellectual'. The wider American world is in similar turmoil, with an escalating campaign for the Five-Three amendment. This calls for 'exceptional Americans' who can trace their roots to before the Revolutionary War to get added voting weight, heightening tensions.
Vera, whose half-brother Dylan would be an exceptional American, is desperate to trace 'Mom Mom', her mysterious birth mother, who she thinks has cancer. It's no wonder Vera's paediatrician and her psychologist think she suffers from intense anxiety, despite presenting as a very bright ten-year-old. Admittedly, this all makes for a precocious and pretentious protagonist, but Shteyngart knows that readers will relate to Vera because 'many of them were Vera', as he told one interviewer. Her 'Things I Still Need to Know Diary' is full of lists of words and phrases such as 'neoliberal frog-march of the damned'.
The super-sharp child narrator is a trope beloved by authors who want to look at the world sideways. Miriam Toews uses it in her latest novel Fight Night, which sees nine-year-old Swiv try to track down her missing father, as did Henry James many decades ago in What Maisie Knew. Here, sticking to Vera's close third-person perspective emphasises the crazy geopolitics. The one flaw is that children are repetitive, and so are some of Vera's lines, such as how Igor gets her to check people's bookshelves to see if the spine has been cracked on an enormous book called The Power Broker.
The action takes place over a couple of months, mainly in Manhattan, where Vera and Dylan attend a highly selective public school. Given the joy that comes from the girl's unique take on the world, it would be a shame to give too much away in such a slim novel; but Kaspie the AI-powered chess computer and Stella the talking car deserve special mention.
Shteyngart apparently wrote the novel in 51 days, and pays homage throughout to Vladimir Nabokov's 1969 novel Ada, or Ardor. It makes an ideal entry point for anyone new to Shteyngart's world because it's all there, from the stand-in for the author himself to prophecies of where the world is headed. An enjoyable if somewhat alarming read.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2025 The Spectator Ltd. (UK)
http://www.spectator.co.uk
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Mesure, Susie. "A child's eye view." Spectator, vol. 358, no. 10276, 9 Aug. 2025, pp. 38+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A851691347/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=f52ea2dd. Accessed 29 Nov. 2025.
VERA, OR FAITH
GARY SHTEYNGART
256pp. Atlantic. 16.99 [pounds sterling].
The Russian-American writer Gary Shteyngart favours dystopian or lightly counterfactual satire couched in the Nabokovian baroque. Frequently spotted: a hapless, middle-aged, Russian-origin hero; fantastical new technologies; the rueful lampooning of excess and bien-pensant hypocrisy; a closing mood switch to the serious or even sentimental.
Nabokov is perennially present in Shteyngart's distinctive linguistic flamboyance (as with Nabokov, his first language was Russian; English came later, after his immigration to the US aged seven), but each novel has its local literary saints. Aldous Huxley and George Orwell haunt the detailed dystopia of Super Sad True Love Story (2010). F. Scott Fitzgerald comes along for the ride in Shteyngart's Trump-era roadtrip novel Lake Success (2018). Chekhov and Shakespeare scent the air of his charming Covid confection Our Country Friends (2021). The titular heroine of Vera, or Faith is named after Nabokov's wife--but it is Henry James's What Maisie Knew that sets the agenda. Shteyngart, a white male in his early fifties, has chosen to focalize his sixth novel through the eyes of a ten-year-old Russian-Korean-American girl.
Like Maisie, Vera is a sponge, sopping and swollen with partially understood sayings from the grown-up world. Like James, Shteyngart records the adult phrases inside eloquent quotation marks. "Daddy said childhood should 'just happen,' like it had happened to him, and that until you went to grad school 'nothing really mattered,' it was all just a 'neoliberal frog-march of the damned'". In fact, Vera goes one step further than Maisie and records mysterious words ("Nostradamus", "trope") in her Things I Still Need to Know Diary. The credulous ventriloquism provides an ironic perspective on the adults in Vera's life--though, of course, she knows quite a lot too.
"Daddy" is Igor Shmulkin, this novel's hapless middle-aged Russian--a quick-tempered writer/ editor/pundit who is trying to sell "the troubled magazine he edited to the Rhodesian Billionaire who would make them comfortable and unafraid". Vera's Korean American biological mother--"Mom Mom"--is out of the picture; Vera's working theory is that she left "because she didn't love Vera on account of that she had been a 'tough baby' who couldn't go to sleep unless you drove her round the block in a car". Her stepmother, Anne Mom, is a WASPish Brown graduate with a small trust fund to her name. Right-thinking Anne Mom pays Vera to reorganize Igor's alphabetized bookshelves before visitors come round, "in such a way that authors 'of color' and women were 'front and center' at eye level". Together, Anne Mom and Daddy have produced Vera's extremely blond half-brother Dylan, whom Vera envies for the easy affection showered on him by both parents.
Anne Mom and Daddy's relationship is undergoing some turbulence. At first, the novel concerns itself with Vera's anxieties about divorce and her "predictably awful" experience of her school for "superbright" kids. She is top of her class, frequently bored and socially a bit of an outcast. The contrast between her intellectual and emotional intelligence is beautifully observed--enough to keep this reader interested without any speculative, futuristic fireworks. Shteyngart, I think, is at his best when writing straight: about icky social dynamics in the early days of the pandemic, say (see Our Country Friends), or about the complications arising from his childhood genital injury, in his hilarious, painful, unsparing account "A Botched Circumcision and Its Aftermath" (New Yorker, October 4, 2021).
It becomes increasingly clear, however, that the events of Vera are unfolding in either a future or an alternative world. The key differences are political. Shteyngart takes the standard fears about contemporary America and dials them up several notches. Imminent state-level constitutional conventions will decide whether "exceptional Americans" should have an "enhanced vote" counting for five-thirds of a regular vote. "Exceptional Americans" are those who can trace their genetic lineage back to the American Revolution, excluding descendants of enslaved people. Dylan and Anne Mom would be eligible, while Vera and her Russian American father would not. Vera is disturbed by the sinister demonstrations in favour of Five-Three, known as Marches of the Hated (MOTHs), and finds herself feeling "heartbroken" for the bedraggled working-class kids marching under the sign "THEY HAVE TAKEN MY FUTURE AWAY FROM ME". Anne Mom holds fundraisers against Five-Three, while Vera is selected to make the case for the new voting system in an upcoming school debate.
We also learn that some states are "Cycle Through" states, in which women's menstrual cycles are checked on exit and entry to determine whether pregnancy and abortion have taken place while out of state. Other changes are technological and come to facilitate the slightly garbled plot: Vera's chess-playing robot pal, Kaspie, and Stella, the family's driverless car, will prove to play important roles.
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, a contribution to the genre of panic porn increasingly prevalent in fiction? The novel's predictably heartfelt ending includes a paean to diversity, emphasizing the essential American-ness of each object in a chaotically disrupted living room:
There was a broken painting of an American Jesus
tending to a flock of American lambs ... There
were the scattered photographs of a middle-aged
American couple, one Asian, one ginger, with their
three American children . And on the floor next
to American Vera and her American Mommy, there
was an overturned American bowl of American
galbi-jjim.
We're all Americans!, shrieks Shteyngart, tears in his eyes, as the reader backs away.
Adjacent to the Five-Three narrative is some intrigue with Igor's magazine, which may or may not be in the pay of the Russians. There is Vera's preparation for the debate, which brings her closer to a schoolmate called Yumi, as well as to Aunt Cecile, a pretty family friend who gives her acting lessons and who may have something to do with the tension between Anne Mom and Igor. And there is Vera's search for her birth mother, whom she believes to be dying from cancer.
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. When Shteyngart needs to explain the intricacies of Igor's politics in relation to Russia, both Vera and her chess-playing robot become conveniently sophisticated thinkers, discussing, among other things, horseshoe theory. Never mind that this ten-year-old is scribbling in her Things I Still Need to Know Diary while Kaspie spews all the answers. At this point in the narrative, both girl and robot are flimsy devices for the delivery of information.
Elsewhere, Vera is implausibly ignorant. With a stepmother as proudly progressive as Anne Mom, it seems highly unlikely that star student Vera would not be aware of basic female biology. The average age for the onset of puberty in girls is eleven, and it can begin as early as eight. Yet apparently Vera hasn't heard of the menstrual cycle--allowing for some fairly unfunny jokes about those Cycle Through states. "Perhaps they would even check Aunt Cecile's bicycle if she crossed state lines", she thinks, "though it only had one gear."
Vera's cover features an enthusiastic puff from Elif Batuman, whose brilliant novels The Idiot and Either/Or are narrated by the bewildered undergraduate Selin, older than Vera yet still very young, very clever, very naive. Comparison with Batuman does Vera no favours. The cover illustration is a colourful line drawing of a plucky-looking girl with an elongated body curving round in a spiral (Vera's nickname is Doxie: "despite being short, she was shaped lean and tubular like a dachshund"). The drawing is cheerful and fun, and it reminds me of the Jacqueline Wilson novels that I read on repeat as a young girl--The Suitcase Kid, The Mum-Minder. Vera is like 1990s-era Jacqueline Wilson for grown-ups: a frictionless, lively read with a moral to the story, mostly cosy, a little bit edgy, occasionally cloying.
I have no objection to reading Jacqueline Wilson for grown-ups: Vera slipped down very easily. I love that Gary Shteyngart has chosen to inhabit the mind of a ten-year-old girl. But Vera won't stick with me --as Selin does, as Maisie does.
Claire Lowdon's novel Left of the Bang was published in 2015
Caption: Gary Shteyngart, 2014
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2025 NI Syndication Limited
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Lowdon, Claire. "We're all Americans! Is the author's alternative US a Jacqueline Wilson novel for grown-ups?" TLS. Times Literary Supplement, no. 6385, 15 Aug. 2025, p. 17. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A852386097/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=56fb81a5. Accessed 29 Nov. 2025.