Twenty-four years ago, a novel with the charmingly off-kilter title The Russian Debutante’s Handbook appeared in bookstores, announcing the arrival of what reviewers like to call a “bold new talent”: Gary Shteyngart, born Igor Semyonovich, who came to the U.S. from the Soviet Union at the age of 7. That ambitious, funny, intelligent debut, which featured a 20-something immigrant protagonist very much like the author, earned Shteyngart his first starred review from Kirkus.

At 53, Gary Shteyngart has just received his sixth star in seven books, this time for his shortest novel ever and his first with a child protagonist: Vera, or Faith (Random House, July 8). Vera is set in a dystopian near future, focusing on the trials of Vera Bradford-Shmulkin, a 10-year-old New Yorker with a lot on her plate as she tries to keep her Russian-born father and American stepmother together, learn what happened to her Korean-born mom, make her first real friend, prepare for a debate at school, and much more. The topic of the debate: a new anti-immigrant law decreasing the voting power of any American with a non-WASP background.

Our critic writes, “As the political situation in the United States evolves, Shteyngart’s particular flavor of black humor—Russian wry?—reconnects with its roots in sorrow and resistance and becomes essential and lifesaving.”

On a recent Zoom call, we asked Shteyngart to reflect on his career so far, and give us a hint of what’s to come.

As Shteyngart sees it, he began with two themes. “One is all the immigrant stuff,” he explains. “I was the first of my generation of Russian Americans to start getting published, and I wanted to get that experience down in the most interesting and entertaining way possible.” He continued this project in the novels that followed: 2006’s Absurdistan (“my funniest book,” he suggests) and 2010’s Super Sad True Love Story (“my biggest book”), in which the second theme, a fascination with speculative fiction and dystopias, fully emerged.

“Let me show you something,” he says, disappearing for a moment, then returning with a fanned-out stack of vintage Asimov’s Science Fiction magazines. “By the time I was Vera’s age, I was already in love with Nineteen Eighty-Four, Brave New World, and The Handmaid’s Tale, which was just coming out around then.” The future that he imagined in Super Sad, an authoritarian corporate regime driven by equal parts evil and stupidity, is a close relative of the world he gave Vera, “who is the same age as I was when I started reading Asimov’s.”

Shteyngart’s fourth book, the memoir Little Failure (2014), he sees as a watershed, the endpoint and “fire sale” of his Russian American immigrant experience: “Everything must go!” The sadder and more painful aspects of this adjustment, which he met with caustic humor in the novels, he faced directly and dead on.

The three books since occupy what his editor, David Ebershoff, half-jokingly calls his “middle period.” While the early novels have the feel of what Shteyngart calls “an angry young person waving at the sky,” these books possess a gentler soul, one he relates to becoming a father. (Shteyngart and his wife, Esther Won, welcomed a son in 2013.) “Having a kid, being responsible for another human being, softened me,” he says.

Lake Success (2018) is set during the lead-up to Trump’s first electoral victory. It follows hedge fund manager Barry Cohen on a cross-country Greyhound bus trip, fleeing, among other things, his conflicted feelings about fatherhood. Our Country Friends (2021), Shteyngart’s pandemic novel, is all about family, both biological and chosen.

And then comes Vera, featuring a “sensitive, intelligent kid, suffused by anxiety,” not unlike the author at that age. By now it was clear that the “middle period” was marked not only by a change in tone but a change in process as well. Before Little Failure, says Shteyngart, “I had an idea, I wrote it. I took my time, and I got there. But each of the last three books was preceded by a 200-page draft of some other book that completely failed.”

He continues, “Before Vera, it was a spy novel. I did tons of research into the three different spy agencies in Moscow; my protagonist was a Russian spy planted in New York. I gave my editor the first 200 pages and he told me, ‘This is terrible.’” By now, Shteyngart knew the drill and had a backup idea at the ready.

“On a long flight home from Tokyo, I rewatched Kramer vs. Kramer. I knew I wanted to do a divorce thing, but from the perspective of the child, like Henry James’ What Maisie Knew.” Shteyngart’s Vera is desperately trying to keep her warring parents together, delivering lists titled “Ten Great Things About Daddy and Why You Should Stay Together with Him,” and “Six Great Things About Mom.” 

“I just started typing away—lately I seem to do all my best work on planes—and it came out really fast,” he says. “By the time I landed, I had finished the first chapter and started the second. In the first chapter you’re just trying to capture the voice, and it either works or it doesn’t. If you don’t capture the voice, then it’s back to square one. This time, there weren’t even many edits. I had it.”

Fifty-one days later, the draft was done—with a vestige of the original spy novel buried inside it, though stripped of all the research. “My usual process involves quite a bit of meandering,” he says, “but with Vera, I worked harder than I’ve ever worked in my life—so hard I began to get dizzy and went to the doctor to see if I’d developed some kind of vertigo. But when I finished the book, it immediately went away.”

There was just one problem. The completed draft was more than 100 pages shorter than any book he’d written before. “I was shocked, to the point where I felt super guilty,” he recalls. “Was this even a novel? I literally Googled, How long does a novel have to be? According to E.M. Forster, it’s 50,000 words minimum. My Word document was 50,022.”

Hard work and long flights have fueled two other works in progress. Coming next year is a collection of his much-loved essays from the New Yorker, the Atlantic, and elsewhere—his hilarious week on the world’s largest cruise ship; his encounters with capybaras the world over; his love letters to martinis, watches, and perfectly tailored suits.

“What’s most important to me is to live a good life, to find things I enjoy,” he says. “Of course it doesn’t always go well, and I write about that, too. The circumcision piece will be in there. That was the worst year of my life. As my wife put it, ‘I never thought that you would lose your sense of humor. But you have.’”

That much-discussed 2021 essay, about the botched procedure performed on him as a 7-year-old and a series of more recent treatments, inspires a downcast look from the writer. But he brightens as he explains that the other project is his first work for children, a chapter book about capybaras.

More about the snub-nosed, barrel-bodied South American rodent? There can never be too many capybaras, he assures me. “In a world of horrific human beings, I want to showcase the sweetest, kindest animal there is.”

Marion Winik is the author of The Big Book of the Dead and hosts the Weekly Reader podcast on NPR.