Vera, or Faith

A light touch in fiction can be the hardest to master. Gary Shteyngart has always been overloaded with talent, especially with a kind of manic clairvoyance that sees about six months ahead of whenever he is writing, as in hilariously unsettling novels like Absurdistan and Super Sad True Love Story, but in Vera, the brainy, striving tween hero of his new novel, he might have found his most fluid and comfortable voice. Watching the adults around her, especially her semi-hapless Russian-emigre intellectual dad and her blue-blood adoptive mother, she tries on words for size—"merely rich," "classic trope"—and tries to make sense of the secrets they seem to hide. It makes for a story at once sweet and sharp and always zippily entertaining, haunted by an AI-enforced white nationalism that has only accelerated here since he wrote this a year ago but also full of what Vera would probably put scare quotes around, like so many of the terms she's learning to use: "heart."