In ‘Vera’ Gary Shteyngart depicts growing up in a world becoming ever more cruel

In author Gary Shteyngart’s sixth novel Vera, or Faith, 10-year-old Vera Bradford-Shmulkin swoops through a moment-to-moment life lived between parenthesis. She keeps word lists—“statuses,” “special juice,” “pendulous bosom,” Nostradamus,” “sonorous,”—and a Things I Still Need to Know Diary. Her thoughts are obsessive and subject to multiple “have to’s” and “exceptional American” expectations delivered by her parents. She’s a wondrous soul looking for connection.

There are, in her family, a missing Korean birthmother, Mom Mom; her struggling Russian-Jewish father, Daddy; her WASP mother, Anne Mom; and fair-haired Dylan, Vera’s half-brother. Cast by them and other characters into a cesspool of anxiety, she undertakes a wildly entertaining and sometimes tragic search for identity and love t