Review: Get ready to fall in love with the title character of ‘Vera, or Faith’

Times like these demand great comic novels and thank God we have Gary Shteyngart to provide. His shortest, sweetest and most perfectly constructed novel ever, “Vera, or Faith” is here to save the day. Or at least the day that you read it.

Vera Bradford-Shmulkin is a 10-year-old girl, living in New York City with her family in the near future. They have a self-driving car named Stella and an AI chessboard named Kaspie. Vera lives with her dad Igor, a Russian immigrant magazine editor, her stepmother Anne Mom, and her little half-brother Dylan.

Her biological mother, Mom Mom, is AWOL — Vera has not been told much about her, except that she is Korean American and she met Daddy at the College of Fading Repute “in the great state of Ohio.” The narration of the novel is very close third-person to Vera, and the many words and phrases in quotation marks represent entries in Vera’s “Things I Still Need to Know Diary.”

Each of the short chapters is titled with an entry from the never-ending to-do list in Vera’s head: “She had to hold the family together.” “She had to survive recess.” “She had to fall asleep.” “She had to submerge the big secret deep inside her to get through the day.” “She had to be cool in front of Yumi.”

In other words, this is probably the most endearing book about anxiety ever written. We are all Vera.

One of the big things Vera has on her plate is an upcoming debate at school over a constitutional amendment known as Five-Three, which will give an enhanced vote, five-thirds of a regular vote, to those whose ancestors “landed on the shores of our continent before or during the Revolution­ary War but were exceptional enough not to arrive in chains.”

Anne Mom and Dylan are Five-Three, while Vera and Daddy are not. But Vera’s teacher has cleverly made Vera the lead of the pro-Five-Three team, and Moncler Stephen, a Five-Three so nicknamed for his high-end, Moncler-brand jacket, the lead of the opposition. Of course, “She Had to Win the Debate with Stephen” (that’s a chapter title, too).

You will almost certainly be laughing out loud at the sentence uttered by a cop, “Complainant may be a car.” And at the end of the day, the book is about realizing you may not actually have to do everything you think you have to do, because you are already loved.

Shteyngart, whose recent books include “Our Country Friends‚” has noted in interviews that having a child in 2013 has “softened” him. Readers who have been following him since “The Russian Debutante’s Handbook” and “Super Sad True Love Story” will agree. More heart, but as funny as ever. Works for me.

Marion Winik is a Baltimore-based writer and teacher.

Vera, or Faith

By: Gary Shteyngart.