Exactly what bonafides credential me to write the occasional book review for Style, or preview a local literary reading, as opposed to my typical music beat? The best answer I can offer is that, despite all odds, I can read and still do, even after much difficulty learning how in elementary school. My parents — both librarians, now retired — weren’t going to let that one slide, even after my first grade teacher gave up.

The Russia-born, Queens, NY-raised author, Gary Shteyngart, was the first contemporary novelist I picked up when just out of college. I didn’t find him through school, but rather as a recommendation on the now extinct social networking site, Friendster, to risk dating myself (ps. I’m now happily married). It’s been a whirlwind ride ever since.

Shteyngart will be in conversation on Tuesday, Oct. 14 with Richmond-based journalist, author and co-host of NPR’s “Planet Money,” Mary Childs. She’s a friend of his and helped with research for his 2018 novel “Lake Success.” Childs lent her professional experience in finance to inform the novel’s narrator, a moneyed Wall Street hedge fund manager staring down the 2016 presidential election; as well as her intimate knowledge of Richmond, where a portion of the novel is set and namechecked (rest in peace, Chop Suey and what could very well be Saison.)

“Gary’s observations about finance are characteristically astute,” Childs says. “He sees with such clarity and fulsome context. Having spent my career reporting on financial markets and people, it was staggering to ride along next to him as he toured basically where I lived. Things I had grown so accustomed to were suddenly in a much harsher light.”

For the last 20 years or so, Shteyngart has been a literary Nostradamus of the next big thing. His fiction is less speculative than it is a step ahead of the present moment. Likewise, his nonfiction can seem fantastic because of the sheer wonder he finds amongst us meat bodies masquerading as some semblance of a civilization. Whether he’s writing about our lives with screens and civil obedience in “Super Sad True Love Story” (2010), finance bros’ reign of terror from increasingly dangerous seats of power in “Lake Success” (2018), or all things 2020 — which we’re still grappling with today — in “Our Country Friends” (2021), Shteyngart has an unmatched record for punching up while connecting with readers. His writing is always hilarious and tragic by degrees. His latest novel, “Vera, or Faith,” is no exception. In its pages, Shteyngart tackles the blights of our day from AI to authoritarianism, along with the remaining alphabet, no doubt. It may be his most approachable novel for its 10-year-old namesake Vera, or Faith, depending.

Below is a portion of my Zoom conversation with Shteyngart and Childs in anticipation of their discussion on Oct. 14 during the third installment of Author RVA series at the Institute for Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University. The following Q&A was edited for length, clarity and Associated Press Style, which doesn’t like italics.

Style Weekly: Congrats on the new book. I really enjoyed it. 

Mary Childs: Me too.

Gary Shteyngart: Thank you so much.

You’re the first contemporary author I started reading 20 years ago.

Shteyngart: Really?

Yes, I found “Absurdistan” on Friendster — profiles included favorite books back then. I don’t know if you remember Friendster? It went the way of the buffalo. 

Shteyngart: I think I do. I thrived in that era. I was really good. I was Friendster-ing and Myspace-ing.

That may have been the beginning and end of discovering books for me on social media.

Shteyngart: Yeah, that’s true. Books are over. So we’re living in the afterlife.

Childs: It’s a shame.

“Vera, or Faith” is your sixth novel, and the first told from a child’s perspective. Yet the younger characters in your last three novels were fascinating. Was it only a matter of time?

Shteyngart: I have a child and a dachshund, so I’m really living this very domestic life now. Which I never thought I would. I thought, ‘The writer out in the world, wielding their pen and always traveling.’ Which I still kind of do, I travel a lot. But at the same time this whole domestic thing is nice, too. It’s prickly. It’s got all my favorite things, which is like the private versus public thing that I’ve always used. How do you raise a child in a country that’s going haywire? Where do you draw the line between caring for a child and then maybe even getting the child out to encounter the world that’s rapidly dissolving.

Obviously, I’m not telling you anything new. Mary has a bunch of children and so she’s really gotta think about that. But all these things are really high on my mind and very much in my wheelhouse, given that I grew up in a completely messed up, gigantic superpower type scenario. My parents got me out and that was good.

Childs: That was good. I’ll just say, Tim, we attended the same 2016 election party.

Shteyngart: Oh my God. That was the worst. I left because I knew what was happening and I just wanted to go home and cry with my wife.

Childs: You left really early.

Shteyngart: Quite depressing. I didn’t even go to an election party this time around. I kind of felt like the end was near because Vera was written before the election.

When you’re writing about such topical material, do you zhuzh it up until the last minute?

Shteyngart: In 2010, I wrote a novel “Super Sad True Love Story” which was about social media destroying democracy. As soon as I had MySpace and Friendster, I knew that this was not gonna be good, that it was only going to further atomize us and create less of a sense of community, despite this whole idea that it’s a [online] community. Although do follow me on Instagram and Twitter!

In terms of technology developing so quickly, how do you stay ahead of it?

Shteyngart: Yeah, this one has AI because I really do think AI is already — it’s not just coming for us. If you have a kid in school, it’s there. It’s a dachshund sniffing around, getting into our lives with its virality. In the book, Stella keeps flattering everyone, that’s sort of what AI is already. And I wrote that before this whole AI flattery thing became a thing because I thought, of course it’s gonna do that. It wants more of us.

It just gets more and more relevant and intensifies at such a fast clip.

Shteyngart: Look, people said, ‘Oh my God, the trains are gonna destroy society.’ Well, they didn’t, but at the same time, they used them in Auschwitz. So it’s all about: Can we catch up to our technology? Right now the answer is clearly, ‘NO!’ with a capital N and a capital O and an exclamation mark and an emoji. It’s not good.

It feels like it’s only gotten darker. In “Super Sad True Love Story,”  the technology was kind of fun and sexy, in terms of your skewering dating apps. 

Shteyngart: There’s a funny article in The New Yorker about the enshittification of social media. When it first started, there was at least a hint of, ‘Okay, we’re all gonna go on Tinder, Grinder, whatever — we’re all gonna get laid now.’ But weirdly enough, that didn’t happen that much either. There was a frisson of, ‘Oh, this is gonna be fascinating’ — But it didn’t really happen. Maybe it happened for some people, but this is the least sexy version of our society I’ve ever seen. And I grew up during AIDS and that was way sexier. Not the AIDS part. Just the sex. I say this as somebody who’s slightly itching to touch my phone right now and kind of stroke it a little, you know. It’s not good, I’m compromised. I am destroyed. I just got a new one. It sucks …

Childs: I know! I can’t type my pin anymore.

Shteyngart: Yeah! There’s a lot of things wrong with it.

Childs: I want my old one back.

Shteyngart: That’s why I collect watches, because they tick.

Darting back to Vera, the 10-year-old protagonist in your latest novel – have younger readers been able to approach “Vera, or Faith”?

Shteyngart: When I do my readings, I get a lot of women my age, maybe slightly younger, say 40s, 50s, 60s, just women in general will raise their hand and say, ‘I like this book because I was Vera as an 11 year old, or a 10 year old.’ And I think that is interesting because you have to be somewhat of an anxious child trying to make sense of the world through language to be a reader later on. We know men — except for you, Tim — don’t really read. But for women, language is much more of a primary mode of communication for them. And I mean that is the biggest compliment I can give.

Childs: Thank you!

Shteyngart: Well, so, I think it’s fascinating that many of them identify with Vera now. People say, “Can my 11-year-old daughter read this? Or 10-year-old daughter?” I don’t know. I don’t know what my kid is reading. He’s in 7th grade, he’s 11. He’s reading, I don’t know, “To Kill a Mockingbird”? Are there a lot of f-bombs in that? I don’t even remember. I was so stoned when I read that in high school. There are mature subjects in this book.

Let’s talk about your 2018 book “Lake Success” which is set in Richmond. I understand Mary was a big resource in your research for that novel, both in regard to Richmond and the world of finance, but I didn’t realize just how much.

Shteyngart: That was for me, the hardest research I’ve ever done. I did a lot of tech research for “Super, Sad, True Love Story.” I even had a whole intern just for that purpose because I didn’t know how anything worked. And frankly, I still don’t know how any of it works. But finance was harder and easier at the same time. Harder because there’s a lot of moving parts, but easier because it’s basically people trying to scam money out of other people. If you’re smart, you have a Vanguard ETF (Ed. Exchange-Traded Funds) that just adds money. I know hedge funds — hedge and diversify, but there’s really no great reason to do this. These people are so good at making others feel like, ‘I’m so smart, you join me, you’re smart by association.’ That’s what a friend of ours said to me once about it. And that line made it directly into “Lake Success.” It’s a really high-end, super-smart scam, you know?

I look out my window at these super-expensive apartments, some of which nobody even lives in. And I’m like, ‘I’m living in this.’ That’s why I started writing “Lake Success,” because everyone I knew had left New York. All the people I loved couldn’t afford it, and I was like, ‘Okay, since I’m a New Yorker, I’ll write about the schmucks that are left.’ And that’s how Mary was instrumental; I met a few nice people who don’t have any grandiose ideas about what they do, and who are super honest and can drink me under the table, which is saying a lot.

Childs: Terrifying! Yeah, I think getting to help Gary — obviously, Gary had so many entrees into that world on his own. All of those people are obsessed with you, anyway. But getting to introduce you to some of the people that I knew was so enlightening because many of them acted so differently in front of you. And some of them, I was like, ‘No, no, no. Be your charming, funny self.’ Watching people change under your eye was really interesting.

Shteyngart: Well, let me give you a positive theory here. I started becoming friends with these people — remember I did like three, four years of research — they began to see me as a confidant in a way that they couldn’t with a lot of their friends. And I think part of it was that they didn’t compete with me. As a quasi-journalist, I’m trained to have a sympathetic ear, you know? I’m used to listening. So they would just stay up with me talking, telling me stuff that clearly they wouldn’t tell anyone else.

My understanding is that part of your research for “Lake Success” included a cross-country Greyhound trip much like the one Barry embarks on in the novel.

Shteyngart: I recently wrote this piece for The Atlantic when I went on a cruise, and I hated every minute of it. And it was this whatever, the world’s biggest ship — I had my own suite. I hated every fucking minute of it. But the Greyhound was excellent. It was so fascinating. The book is more journalism than anything. Jayvon in Baltimore: ‘If you ain’t buying rocket, the fuck off my block.’ I didn’t make any of this up. So it really was almost a Tom Wolf-ish — without the dickish-ness — kind of exploration of America. And it took me to the South.

It was unmistakable [while] reading that you were there and here, in Richmond. Are you going to take the bus down for your event here next week?

Shteyngart: Oh yeah, that’s all Mary said. Just Greyhound.

Childs: I booked a Greyhound for him.

Shteyngart: And then I’m staying at the bus station.

Childs: I offered him the bed in my basement and he was like, ‘No, no, no. I feel more at home in the station.’

Shteyngart: I’m gonna bring my two capybaras. I’m a big fan [of Richmond], you know, I live half the year now in upstate New York and I gotta say, I’m really sick of New York. I’m just so sick of this place.

The big city or upstate?

Shteyngart: The big city — upstate is great. The city has gotten stupid. It’s just rich people and the people that love them. It’s not great. Richmond, I think it’s still underappreciated for what it is. Everyone loves Asheville because you got the mountains in the background, but apparently it floods quite a bit. But Richmond has all that and more. Why didn’t I buy a townhouse in Jackson Ward when the going was good. It’s probably tripled.

Childs: It’s not too late, Gary.

Shteyngart: Oh my God. I got a new walking stick, so walking through Richmond with my stick.

Childs: We can go on a little real estate tour and go to some open houses when you’re here.

Shteyngart: Oh my God, I love it.

“Author RVA” [series] is a great and welcome addition to the city. It does seem that there’s an uptick in literary arts here.

Shteyngart: That’s great. I do find that literature’s in bad shape, but there’s little pockets of incredible sunlight. My tour’s like 30 cities and that alone will tell you that. I’m just going from place to place and seeing a hundred people show up and they’re all incredible. It could be a place like Toledo and I’m like, ‘That’s really great. We’re still alive.’

We’re this dying breed of readers of serious fiction, but we’re still there.

RSVP here to attend Author RVA at the ICA at VCU on Tuesday, Oct. 14. Shteyngart and Childs will be in conversation from 5 to 6 p.m. followed by a Q&A and a reception co-hosted by Lit Hub Senior Editor and novelist Jessie Gaynor and ICA Director of Community Media Chioke I’Anson.