A recent television programme saw comedians competing not to see who was funniest, but who could keep a straight face the longest while fending off witty remarks.
A similar challenge for readers of novels that feature jacket quotes like, “I barked with laughter,” might see contestants go for weeks without even cracking a smile. Gary Shteyngart’s latest book, Vera, or Faith, garlanded with such tributes, is a perfect example of this.
The eponymous 10-year-old heroine, suffering from intense anxiety, is trying to become more popular at school, a social elevation that isn’t helped by her use of words like “electable” and “exquisite”.
Her father, the editor of a left-wing magazine, hopes to sell it to a billionaire to make capital, as opposed to the “cultural capital” upon which he’s been trading for years. Her stepmother, Anne, is exhausted from “trad wife” duties, while younger brother Dylan routinely greets visitors to their apartment by inviting them to inspect his genitals.
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Vera is half Korean and her birth mother vanished many years earlier. However, when an overheard conversation leaves her convinced that the woman she refers to as Mom is dying of cancer, she decides to play amateur sleuth to discover the truth about her absence.
I reached the end with a sense of time wasted
Like many young people in contemporary fiction, Vera loves a good list and draws up several, each designed to make us chuckle at her precocity, but the problem is they’re just not funny and the concept has been done so often that it has grown tired.
Shteyngart has been described as a satirical writer, and he takes a few shots at capitalist American culture from the point of view of an outsider – he’s a Russian immigrant – but none bite so fiercely that they’ll see his phone being examined by the TSA when next he enters Trump’s United States.
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Vera’s attempts to ingratiate herself with a classmate, Yumi, will be relatable to anyone who went through school as a bit of a loner, but I reached the end with a sense of time wasted and the impression that the author is nowhere near as amusing as he thinks he is.
Why don’t comic novels make us laugh out loud any more? They used to.
