AUDITION by Katie Kitamura

I really liked A Separation, and I loved Intimacies, but this book I just didn’t get.  It’s a head-scratcher, for sure.  The novel has two distinct and somewhat contradictory halves, just like the play that the narrator is starring in.  Both halves involve three characters—the narrator, her husband Tomas, and a young man named Xavier whose looks and mannerisms are very similar to the narrator’s.  The first half ends with sort of a cliffhanger, in which Tomas texts the narrator that they need to talk.  Then the second half begins, and it is completely inconsistent with what we understood from the first half.  What do we have here?  A highly unreliable narrator, for sure, but is she also delusional?  While the first half is taut and fraught with unanswered questions, the second half eventually gets crazily out of hand when a fourth character, a young woman named Hana, joins the cast.  She is the catalyst to a bizarre family dynamic.  The title also has me baffled, although I did wonder at times if the two halves were supposed to be different versions of the same play.  The saving grace here is Kitamura’s fabulous writing, but I just wish she had tied up the loose ends of the first storyline instead of abruptly starting a second one that weirdly intersects the first but then veers off in a completely different direction.

THE PEACOCK AND THE SPARROW by I.S. Berry

Shane Collins drinks too much, smokes too much, and has affairs with married women.  He is an American spy in Bahrain during the Arab Spring of 2011.  His career is winding down, not just because of his bad habits, but also because he is in his fifties and is mediocre at his job.  He has recruited Rashid as an informant for the Opposition to the monarchy in power, but Collins is supposed to remain neutral and just report his findings.  However, as things start to heat up, Collins becomes increasingly inclined to take sides, as he is forced to choose whether to be loyal to Rashid or to his superiors.  To further complicate matters, he falls in love with a local artist who is half his age.  Collins is principled with regard to the safety of his informant but not so principled in his love life.  He may be a flawed protagonist, but somehow his flaws just make him that much more human.  Sometimes he is a despicable person, and sometimes he is compassionate.  Sometimes he makes big mistakes, and sometimes he is brilliant. The tension in this book is palpable, especially when Collins occasionally goes rogue and proves that he still has some tricks up his sleeve.  I loved everything about this book—the characters, the twisty plot, and the gritty setting.  On reflection, this novel is largely about manipulation, but the challenge is to figure out who is manipulating whom.  Collins is a manipulator but is also being manipulated.  I think that if you know you’re being manipulated, then it doesn’t count, but being caught unawares in a scheme where you misunderstood your role is a good indication that you are the puppet rather than the puppeteer.

THE FETISHIST by Katherine Min

Kyoko, a singer in a punk rock band, wants to avenge the death of her mother, Emi, whose suicide stemmed from being rejected by a fellow violinist named Daniel.  Kyoko’s attempt at murdering Daniel comically fails, but she and her boyfriend do succeed in kidnapping Daniel while, ironically, he is in the midst of committing his own suicide.  Another of Daniel’s former Asian lovers, Alma, has had to give up her musical career due to MS, and she decides to kill herself on the same day as Daniel’s abduction.  A friend finds her in a coma, and her memories while comatose fill a number of pages in the book.  The title character, apparently, is Daniel, as he seems to follow Alma’s adage, “Once Asian, never again Caucasian,” meaning that all of his lovers after Alma will also be Asian.  For the record, though, his short-lived marriage is to a Caucasian woman.  In any case, Daniel is a cad who reflects on his many transgressions toward women while he is locked in Kyoko’s basement and enduring a steady diet of bologna on white bread, which could be a metaphor, but I’m not sure about that.  My favorite character is Kornell, Kyoko’s boyfriend and drummer in her band, who is literally her partner in crime.  His commitment to Kyoko’s plans for Daniel seems solid, but this is not his fight, and I kept wondering when or if he was going to save Kyoko from herself.  Basically, almost everyone in this book is a musician, and there are dozens of references to classical music pieces here.  I would love to see a list of what composition was played when, where, and by whom.

THE WREN, THE WREN by Anne Enright

Three generations of an Irish family tell their stories, but there’s not really that much to tell.  Phil, now deceased, was a fairly well-known poet who checked out of his marriage for good when his wife developed breast cancer.  His daughter Carmel, whose chapters are third-person for some reason, claims never to have been in love, but she is a single mother to Nell, a twenty-something travel writer for places she has never actually visited.  I would say that Nell, whose uneventful narrative mostly reads like a diary, does travel to some exotic locales later in the book, and I was never clear on how she had the money to do so.  She never knew her famous grandfather and sees and hears him only via old TV interview footage.  Nell’s passion, though, seems to be birds and not just the ones in her grandfather’s poetry.  Oddly enough, Phil’s first person coverage is shorter than that of either of the women, and he is the narcissistic one. His celebrity gave him the right, in his mind, to go ballistic when he couldn’t find his watch, which he happened to be wearing.  My favorite section of the book is where Nell is watching videos of deaf children’s reactions when they receive cochlear implants.  Now that kind of story might be a good basis for a book plot, but this book really does not have one.

LET US DESCEND by Jesmyn Ward

If slaves were such valuable property and so vital to their owners as farmworkers, why did their owners starve them?  Wouldn’t nutrition make them stronger and more efficient?  More puzzling is a slave trader who drags slaves for weeks and miles to market.  Wouldn’t they bring a higher price if they looked strong and well-fed?  Slave owners treated their livestock better.  Annis is a young slave whose mother is sold and whose owner is her biological father.  Hers is a hopeless and dreadful life, as she endures every nature of hardship.  A spirit, who may be benevolent or may have her own agenda, visits Annis from time to time, and I am not generally a fan of magical realism.  With or without the help of this spirit, Annis struggles to survive, although at times I think she just wants to die, and who can blame her, when living is sheer agony.   She has memories of a better life and envisions a life of freedom that does not involve constant fear of capture by the brutal slave patrols; constant anxiety for a runaway is not really freedom. This country was not the land of the free for slaves.  On the contrary, it was a hellacious place to endure.

THIS OTHER EDEN by Paul Harding

This fictional account of the real displacement of the people living on an island off the coast of Maine could have gotten bogged down in sentimentality.  Instead, it is a clear-eyed view of a very small mostly Black population who live in isolation, and we know from the beginning that all of the residents will eventually be evicted and resettled elsewhere or institutionalized.  The novel opens with a gripping account of a flood, and generations later a murder occurs, and this latter time period is when the rest of the action takes place, although the word “action” may not be appropriate, since the pace is pretty slow.  A white man, Matthew Diamond, starts a school there, and despite his disdain for Black people in general, he finds that several of his students are very bright.  One girl becomes a Latin scholar, and another soon exceeds the teacher’s mathematical ability.  A teenage boy, Ethan, a mixed race artist who can pass for white, has exceptional talent and goes to the mainland so that he can attend art school.  One section of the book is devoted to his experiences away from the island, and except for the auspicious beginning of the novel, this section was the most engrossing.  One of the men involved in removing the island residents describes the situation to his wife in very stark and unsavory terms, giving us some idea of why this displacement was allowed to happen.  However, his observations ignore the fact that these people are a loving family to one another and not just poor and dirty nameless beings.  The intermarrying and incest may have ultimately doomed this tiny population anyway, but booting them out of their homes was cruel and unnecessary.

NIGHT WHEREVER WE GO by Tracey Rose Peyton

Six women slaves of varying backgrounds live on a Texas farm that is struggling to make a profit.  Next to the land itself, these women are the most valuable proper that the Lucys own.  Lucy is not their actual surname, but it is the one assigned by the slave women because they associate their devilish owners with Lucifer.  Lashes may be the most frequent punishment, but that does not compare to the anguish they experience over separation from their loved ones.  One woman is in love with a slave on a neighboring plantation, and one hopes to visit her children on a steamboat trip with Mrs. Lucy.  One has a teenage son, also owned by the Lucys, but the other women expect never to see their families again. In order to expand their workforce, the Lucys bring in a slave whose only job is to impregnate the women, but they go to some lengths to thwart this plan.  The problem with this book is that it doesn’t really seem to go anywhere until we get to the very rushed and not entirely clear ending.  I felt so puzzled, let down, and frustrated that I regretted having ever started reading this book.  Inside the dust jacket the blurb has this headline:  “A gripping, radically intimate debut novel about a group of enslaved women staging a covert rebellion against their owners.”  This description is entirely misleading, as it implies more action than actually takes place.