Gary Shteyngart is the observational standup of American letters, a puckish, playful Russian-born author who views the US through the eyes of an inquisitive tourist. The immigrant melting pot of New York is his stage; the intricate English language his prop. Shteyngart’s characters, typically lightly veiled alter egos, are always getting lost, tripping up and mangling basic social interactions. It’s the missed connections and short circuits that give his fictions their spark.
Shteyngart’s sixth novel is a lively, skittish Bildungsroman, shading towards darkness as it tracks the journey – literal, educational, emotional – of 10-year-old Vera Bradford-Shmulkin, an overanxious, over-watchful academic high achiever whose run of straight As has just been blighted by a B. “Being smart is one of the few things I have to be proud of,” laments Vera, who diligently maintains a “Things I Still Need to Know Diary” in which she makes note of difficult words and intriguing figures of speech. The girl is articulate and precocious, bent on self-improvement, and never mind the fact that she confuses “facile” with “futile” and “hollowed” with “hallowed” and is wont to wax lyrical about the “she-she” districts of Manhattan. Her vocabulary is almost – but crucially not quite – sufficient to give us the whole story and explain what it means.
