Funny and heartbreaking, “Vera, or Faith,” continues author Gary Shtenyngart’s streak of reflecting our present into an unsettling near future.
Set in New York not too far down the line, this book centers on the precocious 10-year-old in the title. Vera is smart but struggling with social cues and a high-stress home life.
Her dad, Igor (a sort-of Shtenyngart stand-in) is immature, drinks too much and is fixated on selling the magazine he runs to a “Rhodesian billionaire.” Igor’s marriage with Vera’s step-mom, Anne, is rocky. A “trad wife,” as Igor claims, Anne is struggling trying to keep the household running: she has to care for Vera, a son with Igor, and her husband too. She comes off as well-meaning but perpetually frazzled as she tries to keep Igor in line and encourage Vera to recognize status and social cues.
On top of her family drama, Vera is tasked with a big debate project at school, and she’s also preoccupied with intimations that her real mom, who she doesn’t know, might be sick. Society seems sick too, and it’s here that Shteyngart is so skillful with the near-dystopian details.
There are protests in the streets. Women traveling through red states are subject to pregnancy tracking at “Cycle Through” stations. Much of the political debate, though, centers on a proposed “five-thirds” amendment, which aims to give five-thirds of a vote to (white) Americans who can trace their ancestry to the Revolutionary War era. It’s a world of oligarchs and bad-faith political debate and a familiar sense of everything falling apart in the stupidest way possible.
Through it all, Vera is our anchor. Smart, energetic and unfiltered, she’s poised beyond her years but is still just a kid, even given the seismic issues at home and in the world beyond. It would be easy to render her a phony little super genius, but Shteyngart’s take is compulsively readable.
“Vera, or Faith” is a brief, brisk book, full of reversals and twists. AI devices play a big role, but the book steps away from tropes here too, establishing the technology as ubiquitous and flawed, just another dumb thing we all have to learn how to live with. His characters are the same, following their own interior logic as the book builds to an impeccable ending, one that makes a clear statement on who, exactly, qualifies as American.
A tale of love and binges and bounty hunters, “The Heart in Winter” is like a Cormac McCarthy novel delivered by the poet the next barstool over.
Set in Montana mining territory in 1891, Kevin Barry’s book introduces us to Tom and Polly, two Irish immigrants who can’t say no to trouble, or each other. Seeing that Polly is a newlywed mail-order bride for a lieutenant in the mining company, this soon sees the pair on the run in the Montana wilderness, setting off with a half-assed plan to make it to California.
This journey blends humor and peril as the lovers amble on their way, mostly oblivious to the danger coming after them. Tom and Polly are likeable but also given to taking the day as it comes, without much foresight. And so they trade songs with French furriers and indulge themselves with magic mushrooms and well-stocked trapper’s cabins. You want to shout at them to hurry, to be serious, but that’s not in their nature…until circumstances oblige them to be.
While Tom and Polly are good for a line and a laugh, they’re obviously shaped by the traumas of famine-era Ireland, old wounds that Barry mostly leaves hinted at. They’re memorable characters, and it’s wrenching to worry whether their fool’s luck can hold up.
A note if you’re starting the book and finding yourself turned off by the stream-of-consciousness binge in the first chapter: things pick up once Polly appears, so I’d give it a little more time if you’re considering quitting.
Quotes
“The deathhauntedness of the Irish brethren was frequently a complication in the working life of Sheriff Stephen Devane. Soaked in an ambience of death from the cradle, they believed themselves generally to be on the way out, and sooner rather than later, and thus could be inclined to put aside the niceties of the living realm.”
***
“Was this Jed character interferin with you, Polly?”
“So what? So now you’re jealous-minded on an old Scotch that’s dead and gone the best part of twenty years?”
“It’s the way my head turns. I’m sorry about it. It’s a sickness that I have.”
“Okay.”
“I mean try livin this bullshit from the inside out, Poll.”
***
“She lay in the darkness and sermonised against herself. If you are of the kind that throws yourself to the fates of the earth then you better watch out. If you are of the kind that takes notions in a life then you just got to accept all of that life’s capricious outcomes. If you are of the kind that throws all cares to the wind don’t go complainin when suddenly you are off your goddamn feet and spinning out forever in the crazy fucking wind. Now I have no longer the agency of my own affairs, Jesus, and that is a goddamn fact.”
Very excited to have a short story, “Are You Feeling Brave?,” published in the latest issue of Cleaver Magazine. It’s about a broke kid trying to tough his way through a situation that’s bigger than he should have to deal with.
The story’s an excerpt from my first novel, “Classmates.” That book’s not perfect, but I still think it has a worthwhile perspective on trying to hurdle the gap between free lunch and a stable career, whatever that means these days.
Beautiful and deeply realized, Yaa Gyasi’s “Transcendent Kingdom” captures the experience of growing up shaped by trauma–including the shame of trying to hide your own pain.
The novel’s main character is Gifty, the daughter of Ghanian immigrants, raised in Alabama. As the novel begins, Gifty is a Ph.D. student in neuroscience in Stanford–heady stuff. But the news that her mother, mired in a deep depression, is coming to stay with her inspires the type of panic that testifies to a raw relationship, the kind rooted in painful memories and unfinished business.
Gradually, Gifty reveals the walls she’s built up to protect herself from a difficult childhood. Her father abandoned the family when she was young to build a new life back in Ghana. Her loving older brother fell into opiate addiction, with all the chaos and worry that entails, before dying of an overdose. Her mother, harsh at the best of the times, crawled away to bed after her son’s funeral, even attempting suicide. And Gifty, still a child, was stuck trying to deal with it all herself, dealt the loser’s hand of trying to trying to keep everything together when everyone else is falling apart.
Gifty’s family is deeply evangelical, a fact that only intensifies the pressure placed upon her. While she takes some pleasure in the faith of her childhood, she loses it, irredeemably, when her brother dies. But her church remains a community, for her mother in particular, and as Gifty leaves home for bigger opportunities, she also struggles with the worldly classmates who judge her faith…just as she feels they would judge her if they knew everything.
As Gifty juggles her mother’s arrival with the pressure of finishing her Ph.D., she’s really dealing with the larger task of exploring how to stop hiding who she is. Gyasi does an excellent job building a character who’s brilliant and tough and driven but also deeply damaged, with a need to keep others at a distance. It’s a compelling portrait of what it’s like to be an “adult child,” and it uses sure, elegant prose to let us into Gifty’s interior life without stranding us there.
“Transcendent Kingdom” isn’t perfect. There’s a contentious, intimate-verging-unt0-romantice relationship with another student at Harvard that the novel doesn’t seem quite to know what to do with. The book also ends with a jump ahead in time that felt a little too easy for me. Nonetheless, I found it a great read, particularly with anyone who’s seen the impact addiction has on families.
Quotes
“I had never been to therapy myself, and when the time came for me to choose what to study, I didn’t choose psychology. I chose molecular biology. I think when people heard about my brother they assumed that I had gone into neuroscience out of a sense of duty to him, but the truth is I’d started this work not because I wanted to help people but because it seemed like the hardest thing you could do, and I wanted to do the hardest thing. I wanted to flay any mental weakness off my body like fascia from muscle. Throughout high school, I never touched a drop of alcohol because I lived in fear that addiction was like a man in a dark trench coat, waiting for me to get off the well-lit sidewalk and step into an alley. I had seen the alley. I had watched Nana walk into the alley and I had watched my mother go in after him, and I was so angry at them for not being strong enough to stay in the light. And so I did the hard thing.”
***
“I loved Alabama in the evenings, when everything got still and lazy and beautiful, when the sky felt full, fat with bugs.”
***
“She paid for the chips and my sandwich as well, and we headed over to the high-tops at the far end of the shop. It was almost empty save a few undergrads who had made their way over to this graduate student part of campus, probably for the quiet, the decreased chance of recognition. I’d once been like that, so lonely that I craved further loneliness. Even after I’d made a few friends in college, I would still go out of my way to create whatever conditions I needed that might allow me to be alone.”
***
“I didn’t mind that the library was neither cool nor hip. I liked Mrs. Greer with her soda addiction and her dedication to the eighties perm. In fact, if there was anyone at school that year who would have honestly cared about my problems at home, who would have listened to my worries and found a way to help, it would have been Mrs. Greer.
‘I’m fine,’ I told her, and as soon as the lie left my lips I knew that I was going to take care of my mother myself. I was going to nurse her back to health through the sheer force of my eleven-year-old will. I would not lose her.”
I believe Daniel Clowes is always working at another level as a creator. As a reader, though, there are times when I’m not able to meet him there.
“David Boring” is a story about sexual obsession, featuring an achetypal 90s slacker, he of a morose and clinical bent. He lives with a lesbian roommate and keeps a half-pornographic scrapbook in which he tries, Truman Show-style, to chimera together his ideal woman.
David observes his own life with a kind of clinical detachment that seems very sophisticated to people in their early twenties. That vibe, and the book’s largely adolescent attitudes about sex and scoring, were off-putting, even if Clowes isn’t oblivious to the fact. As one of David’s later girlfriends says, “Just because you’re cold and distant doesn’t mean you’re smart.”
Still, “David Boring” has more to offer than just first-time-in-the-big-city longing. Society seems on the verge of collapse; there’s talk of terrorists and plague. Even if we don’t see that disorder firsthand, it’s enough to drive our characters to an isolated beach house, the very place where David had his first romantic experiences, the very one he’s obsessively trying to return to.
The larger mysteries become intriguing as they broaden to include affairs and murder. It builds to a fascinating read, with memorable moments and characters. Through it all, though, David remains too flat, at least outwardly, to really connect with.
