ROUND pegs in square holes are given voice in this summer’s fiction. In Vera, or Faith by Gary Shteyngart (Atlantic Books, £16.99 (£15.29);978-1-83895-880-0), ten-year-old Vera observes her blended family of Russian Jewish father and “Boston Brahmin” stepmother struggle to stay together in a fragmenting America.
Studious Vera eavesdrops on her parents’ set-piece rows, as her magazine editor Daddy declares: “I’m the one who keeps the lights on round here,” and Anne Mom decries his unapologetic, emotional detachment with “Say the quiet parts out loud, why don’t you.”
Meanwhile, Vera adds new words, and their appropriate context, to her Things I Still Need to Know Diary, in the hope the right language, at the right time, will come to the rescue. Torn between desire for her birth mother to have a final resting place and the probably detrimental, downward effect of gravity on heaven, Vera finally gives herself a break, through the grace of time: “I’m still only ten.”
We never find out the real name of the daughter in The Expansion Project by Ben Pester (Granta Books, £16.99 (£15.29); 978-1-80351-258-7); but her father, Tom, feels the need to “perform gentle parenting” when he takes the nicknamed Hen to the office for Bring Your Daughter to Work Day. But Hen disappears and Tom’s colleagues avoid interacting with him, jumping on video calls while he is at their desk with the greeting: “Sorry I’m late. It’s mad on this floor today.”
Connection to the here-and-now keeps slipping through Tom’s fingers in the Cap Meadow Business Park. And the insertion of an authorial Archivist into the story throws even more doubt on whether anything is unfolding as it appears. The need of Cap Meadows to expand is the only constant, outstripping the psychological and emotional capacity of its workers to keep pace.
Globalism has a human face in the short-story collection Good and Evil and Other Stories by Samanta Schweblin (Picador, £16.99 (£15.29); 978-1-0350-5016-1), in which characters are haunted by the deeds of their past which they have somehow survived. An American suburban mother is admonished by a neighbour for trying to drown herself, and then returning to her daughters, their pet rabbit, and the family home as if nothing had happened.
An architect in Lyon dreads a call from a Buenos Aires friend, because it will mean talking about the night when her son died. A hairdresser in an Argentinian coastal town cares for the hair of a dishevelled local poet, to atone for a childhood summer-holiday accident. Grief and guilt transform into connection and purpose.