Alison Stewart: This is All Of It. I'm Alison Stewart live from the WNYC Studios in SoHo. Thank you for spending part of your day with us. I am grateful you are here. A quick notice: as you've been hearing, public media is being defunded by the federal government. For New York Public Radio, this means a loss of nearly $6 million over the next two years. We need listeners like you to fill this funding gap. Join us at wnyc.org/donate.

Coming up on today's show, we'll celebrate the life and work of Malcolm-Jamal Warner. We'll speak with Robert Sietsema and Melissa McCart about where to find the best burgers in this city. And we want to hear about the summer jobs you had when you were a teenager.

That's our plan, so let's get this started with Gary Shteyngart's new novel Vera, or Faith.

[music]

A precocious 10-year-old girl named Vera attempts to make sense of the world around her in Gary Shteyngart's new novel Vera, or Faith. It's quite a world set in American not-the-too-distant future where there are self-driving cars and AI has a bit of an attitude and the government tracks your location and even women's periods. There's a political movement brewing to grant Americans whose descendants arrived before or during the Revolutionary War with something called an enhanced vote.

Vera is very smart. The book is told from her point of view. She's close to her dad, sort of a potty-mouthed man who owns a magazine he's desperately trying to make profitable. Her blue-blooded Bostonian stepmother is busy being, well, busy, and her little brother Dylan is both annoying and entitled. She wonders about her birth mom. She knows she's from Korea and Vera wants to find her. The Washington Post said in its review, "Shteyngart's new novel tastes at first like a cherry-flavored gumdrop, but it'll burn a hole in your tongue." Vera, or Faith is on shelves now and Gary Shteyngart joins us in studio. Gary, it's nice to see you.

Gary Shteyngart: Oh, so great to be back. Thank you, Alison.

Alison Stewart: I have to ask you, coming off your last-- this big hit novel, it was our Get Lit with All Of It Book Club pick, our country friends. It took you a couple of tries [laughter] to get this novel started. What happened?

Gary Shteyngart: Actually, it took me a couple of tries tries to get the last three novels started. My new sort of MO is I write 200 pages of a novel. Then I meet with my wonderful editor at Random House, and he says, "Gary, what do you think this novel's about?" Which is his way of saying, "This is not working out." So I always have a plan B because I know that he's appropriately critical of some attempts.

So I wanted to write a novel. I was on a plane for 14 hours from Tokyo and I was watching Kramer vs. Kramer, that old Dustin Hoffman versus Meryl Streep, and I thought, "Huh, families falling apart are interesting." This kid, I think Bobby or Billy - I can't even remember his name, but something with a B - what's his point of view as Dustin Hoffman and Meryl Streep battle it out?

I was also thinking of What Maisie Knew, the Henry James novel, so there's a couple of small attempts at writing from children's point of view in problematic families, and here it's a problematic family, but also a problematic country, the United States, a few years, very few years, in the future. So Vera has a lot of things to get through in this very short novel.

Alison Stewart: When you're pivoting from one story idea to the other, do you just put it in a drawer and start anew, or do you take pieces of the previous story you were working on?

Gary Shteyngart: Well, interestingly enough, there was a-- the novel I was writing was this multi-generational saga. Sorry, I'm yawning as I'm saying it. It was so boring, just the thought of it. Multi-generational saga, but with a Russian spy. I've been very much into what my former homeland is doing to the rest of the world. There is a spy motif, not to give too much away, but there is a spy motif in Vera, or Faith as well. So not everything dies when your editor says no. You can go back and use some of it for different purposes.

Alison Stewart: What do you do when something just-- it just won't work out? You want it to work out, but it won't.

Gary Shteyngart: Well, thank God for psychiatry.

Alison Stewart: [laughs]

Gary Shteyngart: There are people who help us get through. Look, I teach creative writing at Columbia, and I always tell my students who are writing their first novel, "You may be writing three more novels before the one you really want to be writing hits," and I know that that's not something people want to hear. Now, this is my seventh book, so by now you'd think I'd be better at getting it right from the first attempt, but it took me 51 days to write the first draft of this novel, which is the fastest I've--

Alison Stewart: It's really fast.

Gary Shteyngart: It's really fast, but I've wasted-- not wasted, sorry. Let me correct myself. I spent two years cultivating the failed novel and then guiding myself into this.

Alison Stewart: Are you someone who revisits what you write, or do you put it away, come back, write more, put it away, come back, write more, or do you sort of revisit along the way?

Gary Shteyngart: I treat this very much like a job, so every day I have to write three pages. Rain or shine, three pages have to be produced. Whether they're good or not I don't know, [laughs] but they're going to be there.

Alison Stewart: Is that for just practice in a way, so it's a time issue?

Gary Shteyngart: Yes. I don't think once you have an idea, I don't think it makes any sense to sort of dawdle with it. Now, maybe I'm wrong. By the way, a large part of what I do, I write about two hours a day to get those three pages, but I also spend about two, three hours walking around, whether in the city or upstate New York in the countryside, and taking copious notes of what I'm going to write about.

So the process of actually writing is shorter than the process of thinking about what I'm going to write and also coming up with-- so when I'm writing Vera, I'm thinking, okay, she's a 10-year-old girl. My son at the time was 10 years old and he had friends who were that age, so what do they sound like? What are their problems? What are bits of dialogue that make sense? So you're sort of cultivating what going to happen on the page the next day.

Alison Stewart: That's hard for writers because you can go for a two-hour walk and people don't think you're doing anything.

Gary Shteyngart: [chuckles]

Alison Stewart: You're like, "No, I'm thinking. I'm thinking about a character. I'm observing what's going on around me."

Gary Shteyngart: Yes, it's so funny. I sometimes think of walking as my job. Walking while thinking is my job. I started listening to a lot of podcasts and I know they're wonderful, but I realized that, at least in New York, when I put on my earbuds all the time, I'm missing out on some of the greatest conversation in the world because New Yorkers are so hilarious. Yesterday I took off my earbuds and I walked through Washington Square Park and there were like five amazing fights going on between couples. I'm like,"Thank you. I know what to write next now."

Alison Stewart: My guest is New York Times bestselling author Gary Shteyngart. His new novel is called Vera, or Faith. Vera has a 10-year-old as our protagonist. What was interesting for you to write from a 10-year-old's point of view?

Gary Shteyngart: It's funny, I've always written very, very adult novels where adults usually hang around and have relationships and all kinds of problems surface, but I've had a child. I never really thought I would have a child. I thought I'd be one of those artists who commit themselves to art to such an extent, but then the child started speaking, and I thought, "Whoa, he's pretty interesting." [laughs] I thought he's a lot more interesting than many of my peers, whom I love, but I could pretty much predict what's going to happen when we all sit down to our martinis and steaks and whatnot. With a child, you never really know what's going to happen. Their way of forming ideas is so fascinating.

Now, I grew up in the Soviet Union, so this was a authoritarian system, and watching my kid grow up in the current political environment was interesting in the same sense that when I was a kid, I knew the members of the Politburo because I was living in such a society where you had to know everything political, and it was everywhere. Everywhere you turned, this question.

The same thing I notice with my son and his smaller friends, they would reference Trump all the time, so there's a kind of thing when you happen when you're living in a very polarized environment where politics isn't just something-- because, I don't know, should a 10-year-old know this much about politics? Maybe. I don't know, but they should also be having fun on a different level, but they feel-- and it's not just politics, it's the environment, it's all the inequities of life in America today. Kids know about all this stuff and they feel it very, very closely.

That reminded me of growing up in the Soviet Union, so I thought a 10-year-old child growing up in a slightly even worse-off America than today would be an interesting-- and with way worse parents than my kid hopefully has. I think we're pretty okay, but not his parents though.

Alison Stewart: How would you describe the Bradford-Shmulkin family?

Gary Shteyngart: The mom, Anne Bradford, is a Boston blue blood and she takes care of these two kids. Her husband keeps asking her to please get a job because he's barely making it, but she's committed to these kids and the husband is-- I don't know, [laughs] he's working, he has a magazine which is always failing. He's always trying to make it into The New Yorker and it's always not happening. He's trying to sell it to a Musk-like billionaire character, which is also not happening throughout the book.

So most of the book is him ignoring his kids or being very absent with them while lying on the couch, doing social media in his underwear and constantly reminding everyone that social media is what pays the bills around here, which I don't think it does, but in any case, so you know.

But in this, Vera also has-- because she doesn't look like her brother, she is half-Korean, so her birth mom is somewhere else, and a big chunk of the book is her trying to find her mom, which results in, spoiler alert, a long journey outside of New York. Let me add one last thing, because I think the most important part of this book for me is this is also the story of a 10-year-old child who's precocious in some ways, emotionally, maybe not so, but also dying to make a first friend.

Alison Stewart: Yes, she is.

Gary Shteyngart: Which I was at age 10, and I still am at age 53. Any day now. But she really is trying to make a friend, and yes, spoiler alert, she does make a friend, and when I was writing those scenes, that is about as emotional as I've ever gotten writing my own work because I've had characters who fall in love and it's unrequited love and things like that, but there's nothing as sensitive in a way as a 10-year-old child putting herself on the line trying to make a friend. So much more is at stake there than I think what happens when you're much older and you've already made many decisions socially and emotionally.

Alison Stewart: The novel has sort of a specific rhythm to it. Vera speaks in quotations, and I mean quotations like quotations-- people can't see me on the radio. [laughs] Could you explain why you have her speak in these sentences that she kind of has overheard before?

Gary Shteyngart: I find it interesting the way kids pick up language. It's absolutely fascinating. I know my son has always been a vacuum cleaner when it comes to languages, but so was I when I was a kid. My issue was more that I came to America when I was seven years old, so for me it was picking up English in general, and the whole family was doing it. We were all writing on these IBM punch cards of the 1970s and '80s. We would write on one side the English and on the other side the Russian, so we'd have heart attack and then the Russian word, stroke, mortgage, diabetes, all the things that kill Russians by age 30 usually, and I was constantly absorbing all these words.

Vera, even though obviously she's an American born, is also trying to make sense of what her parents are talking about, because when they fight, it's at a very high level, so she's trying to figure out what they're saying, and she's also trying to figure out what the political climate is. The problem is she's such a sponge for language that then she brings it into school and then she starts using these words, and the kids around her are like, "What is wrong with you?" They start calling her Facts Girl, because she seems like to be so-- and that was exactly what was happening to me.

I've done a couple of readings around the country, and so many, especially women who were also kind of very anxious children-- I think a lot of readers were anxious children because I think that's almost a requirement for becoming a reader, and a lot of them were saying, "Wow, I really feel seen, because that was exactly me at 10 years old. I was absolutely in love with language, and then when I played with my peers, they're like, 'What are you talking about?'"

Alison Stewart: Did you have that sort of same idea with language, or was yours colloquial? Because I remember going to college with a man who is now like a world-famous oncologist, but he learned to speak English watching cartoons, and at 18, everything was like, "Hi, buddy."

Gary Shteyngart: [laughs]

Alison Stewart: He doesn't speak like that now, but initially he spoke like a cartoon when he came into college.

Gary Shteyngart: Oh my God, that is very funny. That would be a very funny show. Let's see, when I was learning English, I think it was-- [laughs] God, it was funny because I just did a reading in Dallas. It was the show Dallas. So for a while I had this very stupid, very fake Larry Hagman accent, and I'd be like, "Hi, darlin'." [laughter] I was growing up in Queens. It was like, "What is wrong with this man-- this boy?" Sorry. I was like 9 years old. So it'd be kind of like half Russian, half Texan. "Hi, darling." This is why I didn't make friends until very much later.

But yes, I agree, and so what she's sort of ribbing off is very high-level stuff that-- throughout the book, the question is, "How are we raising our children?" It's a very interesting question, especially a place like New York, Palo Alto, where kids are supposed to be super successful or death, they have to succeed and we cram so much into them.

I'm very familiar with these gifted and talented programs. That obviously is a very controversial part of New York education, but I went to Stuyvesant myself. My kid goes to one of these schools. I love them on some level, but I also wonder, is it the fact that the pie keeps getting smaller and smaller that we need our kids to be so, so super successful? And Vera always talks about-- her parents always tell her grades don't matter, and yet they are also like telling her, "If you don't get into Swarthmore, we're in big, big trouble."

Alison Stewart: I'm going to ask you to read the first page of Vera, or Faith so people can get a little grip of what we're talking about. This is Gary Shteyngart reading from his book.

Gary Shteyngart: So the first chapter is called, "She Had to Hold the Family Together."

School started and it was awful. "Predictably awful," as Anne Mom would say. "A self-fulfilling prophecy" she might add of Vera's disdain for school. Anne Mom was always predicting things in the near future. "I'm the Nostradamus of two weeks from now," she told Vera over and over again, and Vera knew the correct social response was to laugh because Anne Mom was trying to be as witty as Daddy, though when Vera became a teenager in three years, she could roll her eyes, because she had seen it done on television and sometimes on the devices Anne Mom didn't allow her.

She added Nostradamus to her Things I Still Need to Know Diary.

The hallways of the school were a faded red and pink and orange, and there were motivational posters and funny sayings from the Peanuts gang and dusty green floors and mesh over the windows looking onto the rump of another sad uptown building. Daddy compared the color scheme to "an ice cream shop in hell" and Anne Mom had yelled at him not to use that language. "You know she's going to imitate you. She worships you," she said, or to talk the school down.

The school was a point of pride for Daddy because you had to take a test when you were only four years old to get in and you needed to score in the 99th percentile, although Vera had overheard that Dylan had been admitted because they wanted to keep siblings together, and she thought the contrast between their intelligence to be "exquisite" and "delectable," two words Anne Mom wanted her to drop if she were to make any friends at her school.

Alison Stewart: That's Gary Shteyngart reading from his book Vera, or Faith. We'll have more after a quick break. This is All Of It.

[music]

Alison Stewart: You are listening to All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. In studio with me is author Gary Shteyngart. His new novel is called Vera, or Faith. It's about a family that's trying to stay together as the nation falls apart. In the novel, there's a push for this new amendment that would give enhanced voting rights to Americans who landed on the shores of our continent before or during the Revolutionary War. How did we get here?

Gary Shteyngart: [laughs] It's interesting. The book came out July 8th, and July 9th, J.D. Vance said that people who can trace their heritage back to the Revolutionary War were exceptional. He did not say that, as in Vera, or Faith, that they would be granted 5/3 of a vote, the 5/3 compromise, that would allow them this enhanced vote, but if that were to happen, would I be incredibly surprised? No, I wouldn't be.

So much of the past 12 years has been about talking about ways to sort of separate different tranches of Americans with some Americans having more rights than others. Obviously, that's always been the case in this country, but now it's been a very, very explicit push. Trump has been talking recently about denaturalizing citizens. Now, I am an immigrant. If I am to keep saying things about this administration, writing books like Vera, or Faith, is there a chance that down the line I will be asked to return to my country of origin, Russia, which would be kind of a jail sentence for me, given what I've written about Putin myself? So it's an interesting idea of what this kind of system does in terms of making people feel like they really don't belong here, that there are Americans and there's real Americans. In this family, in Vera's family, Vera, because she's half Korean, is not a real American. Her brother, who can trace his heritage back to the Revolutionary War through his blue-blood Boston mom, is so in the future--

Alison Stewart: He's kind of a dolt.

Gary Shteyngart: He's a little bit of a dolt, as brothers can be, younger brothers, but the sort of sad thing that begins to happen is that Vera is on a kind of debate team at her class, and she has to debate pro this 5/3 Amendment. She ends up in this position where she is advocating for her own disenfranchisement, but because she's been taught to be so competitive in these very competitive schools, she's dying to win, even though what she's talking about is making herself 3/5 of a person.

Alison Stewart: Also, the subtext that is kids dying to win, kids constantly being tested at 4 to get into schools. I just have to say that out loud, something I got in the book.

Gary Shteyngart: I remember when my kid tested into one of these schools and my wife took him to the test and she was in a bathroom and there was-- this was at age 4 and there was a mom screaming at a 4-year-old kid for not doing well enough, and the kid was crying and I thought, "Wow." I can't think of another society throughout history - sure, maybe it existed in the Paleolithic or Bronze Age - where we put kids through this much stress for I don't know for what.

Alison Stewart: Vera even feels it. She corrects a teacher and she ends up getting a B- because of that.

Gary Shteyngart: [laughs] One of the plot lines of this is that-- I think she actually gets a B+.

Alison Stewart: B+.

Gary Shteyngart: It's not even that bad. It's not even that bad, but her mom has to go into school and negotiate the grade to an A-.

Alison Stewart: Unbelievable.

Gary Shteyngart: It's really funny.

Alison Stewart: In the novel, Vera and her family sometimes witness protests called the March of the Hated, or the MOTHs. Where does this come from?

Gary Shteyngart: The people in the MOTHs are usually white people. Some have privilege, but some are kind of cosplaying and dressing in mechanics' overalls and stuff, and they're just shouting about how hated they are and how we got to get rid of all this anti-white hatred even as they're about to get this 5/3 of a vote.

I think it's part of the interesting-- I mean, we've seen this in other societies as well where there's a dominant group, and the dominant group, whenever it feels threatened in any way, needs to put on this air of actually being marginalized even while there are entire groups that are being actually marginalized economically, socially, and in this case politically. I thought it'd be fun to get all these people together and have them march down Third Avenue complaining about all the good stuff they have.

Alison Stewart: Here, as I was doing research to interview you, I found your piece in The Guardian reflecting on your parents' decision to come to the United States from Soviet Union when you were seven years old, I believe it was.

Gary Shteyngart: Seven years.

Alison Stewart: How much of that time were you able to recall, and did you touch on that time when you were writing this book?

Gary Shteyngart: Yes, I actually was, surprisingly enough, able to recall quite a bit of it. I had parents who were very intellectually engaged. My mother was teaching me piano even when I was a kid. My dad was taking long walks with me and explaining history and explaining politics, but up to a point, because you could only say so much in the Soviet Union because you were worried your kid would sort of tattle on you. So even that was an interesting thing, the fact that he had to watch what he was saying, and I wonder at what point I'll have to watch if our society keeps going in the direction it's going, at what point I have to watch what I'm saying, both here at WNYC and in taking the very long walks I enjoy with my son.

The question is that I posed in that Guardian article is, when does one say, "Well, maybe it's time to move somewhere else"? Because that was the best decision my parents ever made, and they gave up so much in terms of jobs, culture, language. Obviously, they had to learn English, but it was the best thing they could've done for me. Now, we're not here yet in the States, despite it all, I think, but especially for those of us who have kids, it's something to consider, while of course the other part of it is to stay and to try to change the system as much as we can.

Alison Stewart: Try to fight.

Gary Shteyngart: Try to fight, which is another theme of this book, who stays and who fights.

Alison Stewart: When you're imagining a dystopia in fiction, what aspects or what descent into fascism do you think about showing people, and on what level? Do you want it to be a subtle level? Do you want it to be a strong level? Because later in the book-- I won't give it away, but I was like, "Whoa." It hits you hard, but then you realize it's really been there the whole time.

Gary Shteyngart: I'm so glad that you phrased it that way, because that's exactly what it is. Because this is set from the point of view of a 10-year-old, you have to think of what the priorities for her are. Now, of course, the political system is everywhere she looks, those marches we just talked about, the way this constitutional convention is being used in school as a kind of teaching moment of what might happen to the country, it's all there, but making a friend and keeping her family together are the most important things in her life. They take up 70-80% of her life.

Then the story-- I hope we're not lulled into the sense that this is just a young-- it's not a YA book, of course, but it's interesting. Readers have said that they've given this to their 12-year-old kids to read and that it went over fine. There's some language, but I guess that that might work for some families, for some children, but for me, that descent, it's only in the last 20-30 pages, especially as she begins to leave the confines of New York, that you begin to see what the rest of this picture looks like, and it's a much, much scarier picture.

But her Anne Mom, that is her stepmom, keeps saying that we never thought what was happening there would come to our doorstep, and that's exactly what this book is about, how all these things, you don't think they'll happen, you don't think they'll happen, they happen, and then you say, "Okay, but this other thing's not going to happen," and then that other thing happens. I think we've seen that in so many societies around the world, from Argentina to Brazil to Hungary to Israel to Turkey, to Russia, obviously, the list goes on and on and on. This won't happen, it happens, and then what?

Alison Stewart: I don't know if you've heard, but we've been defunded by the government. [laughs]

Gary Shteyngart: Exactly. "No, NPR won't be defunded by the government. Oh, wait. It's been defunded by the government, and shows like this may not exist at some point." So what happens? Do we move to Australia where I think public radio and television is being very well funded? I don't know. Also, we're privileged enough that some of us have the chance to just pick up stakes and move in wonderful, lovely Melbourne, which I love dearly, but is that wrong to leave a place that is being so assaulted by powerful people? Is liquidating your own power for your own sake, and of course, for the sake of your children, is that worthwhile? I don't know. These are very heady questions.

I assure readers this is a funny book because I know we're getting super depressing. It's funny, but at the same time, beneath all that humor, I'm a Soviet Ashkenazi Pessimist, a SAP, and I think the glass isn't even half full. It's like there is no glass. At the same time, everything that's happening makes me believe in that half-full glass, because here I am. Whatever little power I have, I do want to use it, because I've seen what happens when you don't.

Alison Stewart: We'll end on a happy note.

Gary Shteyngart: Thank you.

Alison Stewart: The New York Times recently released piece calling you a men's style icon. [laughter] I waited till you took a drink.

Gary Shteyngart: I spit out that water. Oh, my God. Oh, my good God.

Alison Stewart: It talks about how you enjoy accessories, especially watches.

Gary Shteyngart: Oh, Jesus. Oh, boy.

Alison Stewart: Is this true?

Gary Shteyngart: Well, yes. I really apologize for all of this. I always dressed like the schlubbiest person ever. I remember in my yearbook picture in high school, I wore a jacket that later caught on fire. It was made out of some polyester.

Alison Stewart: [laughs] So much polyester.

Gary Shteyngart: So much polyester. I think I was just walking down the street. I think the sun-

Alison Stewart: Boof.

Gary Shteyngart: -the sun set it on fire, and I was like, "God, I got to go to my graduation, but I'm aflame. I don't know," so I actually didn't make it to graduation because of that fire. But lately, is this a midlife crisis perhaps? Because actually it was in 2016 when certain things began to happen that I began to fall in love, first with watches, a terrifying middle-age hobby, and then with dressing in this-- there's a store in New York called the Armory. They have two branches where all these bizarre but beautifully dressed male dresswear nerds show up. It's really something to see. Not all of them are super wealthy or work in finance. This is what they love, and they dress so beautifully in this kind of mid-century outfits.

And oh my God, when I enter that place, I just feel so at home. If you asked me that three years ago, I would've said, "You're crazy. I care about the life of the mind," but that life is getting smaller and smaller. [laughs]

Alison Stewart: Okay, we have a question about, what watch are you wearing?

Gary Shteyngart: I am wearing-- this is called a Ming. This is a very strange watch. Some of these watches are now literally made by like one person in a particular country. I know, it's gotten that crazy. And Ming Thien, he's in Malaysia. Some of these components are made in Switzerland, but he designs the watches in Malaysia, so sometimes you get to travel around the world. I've done articles where you meet the maker of your watch. It's very bespoke. [chuckles] It's crazy.

Alison Stewart: The name of the new novel is Vera, or Faith. My guest has been author Gary Shteyngart. Gary, thanks for coming in.

Gary Shteyngart: Oh, thanks so much.