THE PASSAGE by Justin Cronin

I have read a number of post-apocalyptic novels, and this one does not break any new ground.  It borrows from The Stand (mental telepathy and derelict machinery), The Dog Stars (tracking radio signals), and The Road (storehouses of expired canned goods), plus a dash of The Handmaid’s Tale and Game of Thrones.  Yes, there’s a wall to keep out the vampires in this case, rather than zombies, and a team of Watchers to guard the wall.  Also, this book is painfully long, and I didn’t find it compelling at all until about page 500.  The early pages seem to be just setting the stage for the journeys, adventures, and battles to come.  A manmade virus intended for making people heal more easily and live longer falls into the hands of the military, who envision an invincible army.  Death row criminals are used as guinea pigs, and, of course, things go horribly wrong, resulting in a growing population of vampires and a diminishing supply of humans and animals for them to prey on.  One group of humans has formed a colony that is surviving but running out of battery power to keep the lights on at night and therefore the vampires at bay.  A girl named Amy seems to have the ability to fend them off to some degree and joins a small expedition that leaves the colony in search of other survivors.  This is where the real adventure begins.  This author is not as bold as George R. R. Martin about killing off important characters, but a few do get taken to the dark side, and one that I kept expecting to reappear never does.  Perhaps the author is saving him for a later book in the trilogy.  The whole thing is basically preposterous, but I didn’t expect realism from this book.  The writing is good enough, but I don’t know if I’ll make it through the series.

FORCE OF NATURE by Jane Harper

A company team-building trek into the Australian bush goes horribly wrong, and only four of the original five women make it out.  The fifth woman, Alice, apparently struck out on her own after the party got lost and quarreled about what to do next.  A search party is launched into the wilderness, and the likelihood of Alice’s survival dwindles with each passing day.  Meanwhile, Federal Police Agent Aaron Falk and his partner, Carmen Cooper, have joined the effort, as they were depending on Alice to obtain incriminating documents from the company.  Two of the women in the group are sisters, Beth and Bree, and two of the women, Alice and Lauren, have troubled teenage daughters.  Jill, the fifth woman, is a member of the family who owns the company and may be implicated in the company’s transgressions.  I thought the subplot involving the daughters was an unnecessary distraction.  I would have preferred that the author had delved a little more deeply into the relationships between the women, particularly Lauren and Alice, who have known each other many years and are completely opposite in nature.  One thing I really liked about this book was the structure.  The narrative alternates between what is happening after the hike and an account of what happens to the women during the hike.  It’s very nifty, so that as the search for Alice is progressing, we are also discovering how the women got off course and how they reacted to their dilemma.  As for Agent Falk, one of the more telling scenes is one in which he explains to Carmen why he has an empty magazine rack.  She must be pretty good at her investigative job, because it takes her no time at all to deduce, from looking at Falk’s furniture arrangement, that he once had a live-in girlfriend.  Sometimes you can figure out more from what’s missing than from what is present.

NETHERLAND by Joseph O'Neill

Hans, our narrator, is a Dutchman who marries an Englishwoman, Rachel.  They leave London for her new job in New York and then move to the Chelsea Hotel with their young son Jake after 9/11 renders their apartment uninhabitable.  Much to Hans’s surprise, Rachel returns to London with Jake to live temporarily with her parents as a very long-distance trial separation.  Hans’s job as a market analyst affords him the financial means to visit them every other weekend, but his alternate weekends are lonely and depressing, until he discovers a group of immigrants who play cricket on Staten Island.  He becomes friends with cricket umpire Chuck Ramkissoon from Trinidad, who takes Hans under his wing but also uses him for some possibly shady activities, under the guise of getting him ready for his driving test.  Nonetheless, Chuck keeps Hans from wallowing in misery and introduces him to areas of the city that Hans would never have experienced otherwise.  At one point, Hans mentions that he and Chuck have nothing in common except cricket, but that seems to be enough, as one of Chuck’s many projects is to build a cricket venue that will attract TV coverage in India and the Caribbean.  We learn early on that Chuck’s body eventually will be found in a canal, probably due to foul play, but while he’s alive, he is vibrant and ambitious, in contrast with Hans’s buttoned-up persona. This novel is beautifully written and very introspective, bringing into focus Hans’s melancholy, solitary, and stoic existence in a foreign country.

WORLD GONE BY by Dennis Lehane

Joe Coughlin is a conflicted gangster in the 1940s.  He’s killed a lot of people, broken a lot of laws, and spent time in prison, but, despite all that, he has a moral compass of sorts.  He also has a nine-year-old son, Tomas, whom he will protect at any cost.  The boy’s mother is dead, and keeping Tomas out of harm’s way is a challenge for a father whose “thing” is mob-like, especially when Joe learns that someone has ordered a hit on him.  No one in Joe’s circle of baddies can imagine why anyone would do this, much less who would want him dead.  This novel is very violent, but it has a soul in its own way, but I was disappointed in the ending.  Also, Joe has taken to seeing a ghost of his childhood self, and I did not understand that at all.  Is the ghost supposed to represent his innocence before he got caught up in the underworld?  Certainly Joe does not reminisce about his childhood, which was far less happy than his precarious and exciting adulthood.  I get that Joe is honorable in his own way and remorseful about some of the things he’s done in the past for the sake of his corrupt empire.  He makes some difficult decisions that have devastating ramifications, and his rationalizations make a distorted kind of sense.  He has to weigh his loyalties to longtime friends and associates against what is most important to him—Tomas.  The plot held my attention, but this novel is just too dark and depressing for me.  I like Lehane’s PI duo, Patrick and Angela, much better.

A DRINK BEFORE THE WAR by Dennis Lehane

I’ve finally read Dennis Lehane’s first novel after having been a fan for some time.  Despite the inherent violence in this novel, the dialog between private investigators Patrick Kenzie and Angie Gennaro is sometimes witty, sort of like Nelson DeMille. However, the plot is gritty, taking place in some not-so-savory Boston neighborhoods, where a gang war is going on.  A couple of state senators have hired our PI duo to recover some pilfered documents, but their quest leads them into some dark and dirty places.  Angie has a husband who routinely beats her, and her professional life is even more dangerous.  Kenzie provides the comic relief and has a bunch of well-placed friends who will go to bat for him when the going gets tough.  Together they are a very winning combination.  I read Gone Baby Gone years ago, but now I’m going to be on a mission to see if all of the books in this series are as good as this one.  Sometimes I think authors get a little lazy after enjoying some success, or they abandon the type of novel that earned them success in the first place.  That may be the case with Lehane, as this book was so much fresher and more engrossing than some of his more ponderous later stuff.  Or maybe writers just become bored with the same old characters and same old formula.  Or maybe they don’t want to be pigeonholed.  In any case, I’m glad there are several more Kenzie/Gennaro books for me to relish in the not-too-distant future.

MOONGLOW by Michael Chabon

I wish I knew which parts of this novel were fact and which were fiction.  Chabon tells his grandfather’s life story as a novel, and if it were all true, his grandfather led quite a life, as did the grandmother, who hosted a late night horror TV show, made up similarly to Elvira.  First of all, Chabon’s grandfather is not a blood relative, as his grandfather was not Chabon’s mother’s biological father.  Chabon’s grandmother escaped from France during WWII along with her young daughter—Chabon’s mother.  She then married the man we come to know as Chabon’s grandfather.  She probably suffered some sort of PTSD and probably had a mental illness, as she spent quite a bit of time in a mental institution.  The grandfather served over a year in prison for assaulting his boss, and the timeframe for these two separations from society coincided, so that Chabon’s mother had to be farmed out to Uncle Ray—a pool shark and former rabbi.  The grandfather definitely lived a fascinating life, including two oddball quests—one to capture German rocket scientist Wernher Von Braun and one to capture a python.  I have to say that the backstory on Von Braun was disturbing and left me feeling conflicted about the space program in general.  A good book does that, though.  It makes the reader reevaluate beliefs by seeing things from a different perspective or, as in this case, by learning that one’s beliefs are not necessarily based on fact.  And, yes, you can glean some little-known facts from a work of fiction.

AUTUMN by Ali Smith

Elisabeth is a child when she meets her elderly neighbor Daniel Gluck.  He has written myriad song lyrics and introduces Elisabeth to art by describing paintings.  They become close friends, despite their age difference.  Fast forward 25 or so years, and Daniel is almost comatose in a hospital bed.  Elisabeth reads at his side and reflects on her childhood with Daniel as sort of a life guide.  This is a strange book, and it did not appeal to me. There is no plot whatsoever, and Daniel is the only character who is really developed, and even his portrait has major gaps.  He admires a little known artist named Pauline Boty, and I did not follow her story at all.  This book is largely about art, and it’s just way too artsy for me.  There are lots of references to trees and leaves, and they must have some connection to the title, but that connection escapes me.  At 102 years old, Daniel is well past the autumn of his life, so that metaphor doesn’t work, either.  One humorous and/or frustrating incident, or actually a series of incidents, is Elisabeth’s effort to get her expired passport renewed.  The clerks at the post office are hell-bent on finding something wrong with her photo each time she attempts to apply.  This recurring problem, plus the inordinate wait time involved, is funny, while at the same time a little too familiar in its bureaucratic nonsense.  The fact that she manages to circumvent this obstacle is cause for celebration, but it’s not enough to carry this novel.

SAINTS FOR ALL OCCASIONS by J. Courtney Sullivan

This is one of those books which leaves a lot of questions unanswered.  That didn’t bother me too much, because it is certainly more about the journey than the destination.  The journey is a sweeping family saga of two Irish sisters, Nora and Theresa.  Nora is engaged to Charlie, who moves to the U.S. when his brother inherits the family farm.  Nora and Theresa follow, as Nora, the dutiful older sister, is engaged to Charlie, whom she does not love.  Theresa is more adventurous and somewhat frivolous but eventually becomes a cloistered nun in Vermont.  Nora and Charlie raise four children, and the book opens with the death of Patrick, the oldest.  I liked this novel with all the family interactions and especially the mountain of family secrets, but, other than Theresa’s sudden decision to become a nun, not too much happens.  In fact, some of the secrets remain secrets—some to the reader and some to the family members.  What’s the point of a secret if we don’t get to witness the shock value when they’re revealed?  After much backtracking, the family finally gathers for Patrick’s funeral near the end of the novel.  For me, this is where things finally started to get interesting.  I have to ask, though, if almost all men of Irish descent have a drinking problem.  So it would appear from much of the fiction about Irish immigrants.  I mostly enjoyed this novel, but I don’t think it broke any new ground.

THE ENGAGEMENTS by J. Courtney Sullivan

Frances Gerety, working as a copywriter for the Ayers ad agency in the 1940s, came up with the grammatically incorrect slogan “A Diamond Is Forever” and helped initiate the perception that every bride must have a diamond ring.  Gerety, however, was a career woman who never married and found it challenging just to join a country club without a husband.  In this novel she is a pioneer and a procrastinator who does her best work under pressure, and her story is interwoven with the stories of several fictional brides in different time slices.  Evelyn is mournfully preparing lunch for her 40-something son who has abandoned his wife and children.  Delphine has left her husband in France for an American violin virtuoso.  James is a paramedic, working on Christmas Eve and struggling to make ends meet.  Kate and her partner Dan have never married, but their daughter will be serving as flower girl for her cousin’s gay marriage.  All of the stories are nice but certainly not gripping.  They do have a thread that links them together loosely, and most of them also involve parental disapproval of a child’s chosen spouse.  The biggest source of anxiety in any of them, though, is Kate’s misplacement of one of the groom’s rings.  This novel really just doesn’t have a plot.  Cohesive it is not.  Yes, the characters are believable and sympathetic but not particularly compelling.  Also, it is not exactly a ringing (pun intended) endorsement of marriage or of having children who may ultimately break your heart.

MAINE by J. Courtney Sullivan

Alice Kelleher is the elderly matriarch of the Kelleher family and owns a beach house in Maine.  She has made arrangements to donate the property to the local Catholic church in an effort to assuage guilt that has basically dominated her entire adult life.  Maggie, Alice’s granddaughter, is scheduled to come to the beach house with her boyfriend Gabe for the month of June.  However, Maggie and Gabe have had another of their frequent fights and seem to have broken up for good.  Maggie is pregnant with Gabe’s child but hasn’t told him or anyone else.  Maggie’s mother Kathleen now lives in California and raises worms to produce fertilizer.  Alice’s son’s wife Ann Marie appears to be sort of a goodie-two-shoes homemaker, but she sheds that image soon enough.  These four women all converge on the beach house at the same time, and the barbs start to fly.  Where there’s a dysfunctional family, there’s usually some trait or event that feeds the dysfunction, and in this case it’s alcoholism.  Kathleen is now sober, but Alice has decided to go off the wagon now that her husband has passed away.  Maggie is mysteriously abstaining because of her secret pregnancy, and Ann Marie makes an embarrassing and potentially damaging mistake while under the influence, although she does not have a history of alcoholism.  All of these women do have their faults.  Ann Marie likes to have people in her debt.  Alice is unforgiving, even to herself.  Kathleen seems to have her act together but she can be downright mean, especially to Ann Marie.  And Maggie, a writer, who seems to be the central character, is just too vanilla and has horrible taste in men.  I view this author as the antithesis of Philip Roth, who writes exclusively about men.  In this book, the noteworthy characters are all women, and they all have very distinct personalities.  And just when you think you have them all figured out, particularly Kathleen and Ann Marie, they do something completely unexpected.

SOMETIMES I LIE by Alice Feeney

With a title like this, we at least know to expect the narrator to be unreliable, especially since she is in a coma for most of the novel.  Amber Reynolds can hear everything that is happening in her hospital room but cannot respond.  She hears her husband Paul, her sister Claire, her parents, and the assorted medical staff.  She also flashes back to a few days before her accident, and her ruminations are interspersed with childhood diary entries.  The closer we get to the ending, the more convoluted and confusing the story becomes, especially with regard to who did what.  The author cunningly leads us down the wrong path, although I have to say that it’s a path that a wary reader could have avoided.  All I can say is that if you take everything at face value, you will be deceived, but having been duped just made the twist that much more delicious for me.  Is Amber as naughty as she appears to be?  If so, why does her husband seem to be trying to protect her?  Some aspects of what really happens are hard to wrap your mind around, after having been led so far astray, but these twists are what make the book special.  Certainly the plot is outrageous and unbelievable, but this book is tops in the mindless psychological thriller department.  Actually, it’s not all that mindless, as some reviewers have complained that they didn’t understand what happened.  I will say that an artifact inexplicably turns up at the very end, and I didn’t get that at all, but I think the author was just trying to throw us one last curve.  A re-reading may be in order. 

BEAUTIFUL BOY by David Sheff

David Sheff writes this memoir from the perspective of a father going through hell.  His smart and charismatic son Nic becomes addicted to meth, but both father and son are in denial about the seriousness of Nic’s drug habit. Bouncing from rehab to relapse over and over again, ad infinitum, Nic’s problems become his father David’s problems, and David’s obsession with Nic’s life has a profoundly detrimental effect on the rest of the family, including Nic’s much younger half-siblings.  At one point, thanks to a comment from another Al-Anon member, David realizes that if Nic were in jail, at least David would know where he is.  David’s life is basically an endless rollercoaster that parallels Nic’s progress and regression.  At some point he has to accept the fact that Nic’s recovery is in Nic’s hands. This book may be recommended reading for parents and family members of addicts, but I am neither, and I still found it to be riveting.  I also liked the fact this book is not a tearjerker at all, and I am someone who cries over rom-coms.  It is told in a clear-eyed fashion with many musings on what happened to Nic to cause him to become an addict and what David and his family could have done differently.  The bottom line is that no one really knows the cause or the solution.  I found it interesting that bootcamp-type rehab facilities are among the least effective.  The AA philosophies seem to be the most effective, but no addict is ever cured, so that the possibility of relapse looms threateningly for the rest of his or her life.  As hopeless as all this sounds, I found this to be a beautiful book.

THE ALICE NETWORK by Kate Quinn

This novel bounces between WWI and the aftermath of WWII, with a young female protagonist in both time periods.  Eve Gardner is prominent in both, but particularly in the WWI sections, in which she works as a spy against the Germans.  She reappears in the later sections as an old, jaded, alcoholic who reawakens when young Charlie (short for Charlotte) enters her life, looking for a long lost cousin, Rose.  The two women, plus Eve’s dashing driver Finn, embark on a quest to find Rose and to put Eve’s demons to rest.  Their travels through France lead them to the diabolical René, who employed Eve as a waitress and unknowingly gave her the opportunity to eavesdrop on his German patrons.  This book may not be great, because there are a few too many convenient coincidences.  There are some brutal sections as well, and some tragedies that are told so matter-of-factly that I wasn’t sure whether to believe them or not.  In fact, the author leads us to believe there will be more fairy-tale endings than there actually are.  Not that I have a problem with that, but I kept getting my hopes up, only to have them dashed.  Perhaps the best thing about this novel is that some of it is true.  In fact, after reading the author’s notes at the end, I was very impressed with the amount of research she did for this novel and the way she blended fact with fiction.  Some of the facts are truly heartbreaking, but I so admired the women in this novel who actually were part of this network in the early 1900s and whose cover was largely based on the fact that they were women.  I was stunned to find out that, in at least one case, significant bloodshed could have been avoided if only the generals had believed the information the women provided.  Some things never change.

THE FEMALE PERSUASION by Meg Wolitzer

This novel may be about feminism in the 21^st century or about mentors, but I got something else out of it.  For me, it’s about good people doing good work but still making very serious mistakes with major consequences for their relationships.  Greer, a college freshman, meets Faith Frank, the renowned publisher of the feminist magazine Bloomer, at the urging of her lesbian friend, Zee.  After Bloomer’s demise, Greer goes to work for Faith in another feminist venture called Loci, which has venture capital backing that may tilt the company away from its original premise.  In the meantime, Greer’s longtime boyfriend, Cory, who is really a more admirable character in the novel than any of the women, experiences the worst family tragedy imaginable.  His only fault, that I can see, is his inability to include Greer as part of his healing process.  Greer commits one very egregious sin, but Faith, larger than life throughout the book, shows that she is capable of inflicting pain in the interest of vengeance.  Faith also realizes that compromise may be required in order to champion her cause of equality for women.  In other words, I think she feels that the end justifies the means, even if she loses a few supporters along the way.  I thought the conflicts in this book were thought-provoking, particularly the life-changing decision that Cory has to make.  However, I think shaving 100 pages would make this a better novel.  On the plus side, the author does an excellent job of presenting the perspectives of Greer, Zee, Faith, and Cory, without making the novel choppy or hard to follow.  Ultimately, each character has a story worth telling, and each of them faces a life-defining crossroads.

THE WIFE by Meg Wolitzer

What a disappointment.   Joe Castleman and his wife Joan are on their way to Helsinki so that Joe can accept a literary prize that is a notch or so below the Nobel.   Joan is not exactly basking in the glow of her husband’s success and decides on the flight over that she is finally ready to divorce him.  He has cheated on her more times than she can count, and I have to ask, “What has taken her so long?”  She abandoned her life as a coed at Smith College to be with Joe, her married English professor who recognized that she had talent as a writer.  Unfortunately, Wolitzer telegraphs the wife’s long-held “secret” way too often and too obviously.  The “revelation” at the end is not a surprise at all and basically robs Joan of all respect from this reader.  I just have a problem with a smart woman subjugating herself to her husband as she did.  I get it that in the 1950s a woman’s career options were more limited than they are today, but still, for me, Joan is totally lacking in gumption.  Every time she has a chance to spill the beans, she chickens out, erasing any shred of credibility she ever had with her children and everyone else, except Joe’s devoted fans.  Wolitzer is an excellent writer, but in this case I found the storyline to be excruciatingly painful and frustrating. 

THE FLIGHT ATTENDANT by Chris Bohjalian

Lately it seems that all novels have a drunken female protagonist.  In this book, Cassie’s drinking is the reason that she’s unsure if she’s responsible for a murder.  She wakes up in a hotel room in Dubai with a corpse whose throat has been slashed.  She does remember most of the previous evening, including a meeting the man had with a woman named Miranda.  Rather than risk being arrested in a foreign country, she flees without notifying anyone about the death and heads back to the States.  She’s smarter than her drinking habits might indicate, though, and retains a good lawyer to help her navigate the FBI investigation that follows.  This novel may be a departure for Bohjalian, but I thoroughly enjoyed it.  I can’t resist a thriller in the hands of an excellent writer, and he even throws in a nice twist at the end.  I did keep hoping that Cassie would curb her drinking, so that she wouldn’t become the dangerous alcoholic that her father was and so that she would stop making really huge errors of judgment.  As in many novels in which characters want to exonerate themselves of crimes, she does some of her own sleuthing, with an ineptitude that endangers both her safety and her legal case.  I will undoubtedly look at my flight attendants a little differently the next time I board a plane, especially to see if they appear to be hungover.

BEFORE YOU KNOW KINDNESS by Chris Bohjalian

Spencer, an animal rights activist, is accidentally shot by his own daughter, Charlotte, using his brother-in-law's hunting rifle.  The irony of this incident overwhelms both families.  Spencer’s wife Catherine had been seriously contemplating divorce before the accident and now is stuck helping Spencer with everyday tasks like buttoning his shirt.  This novel is certainly not a mystery, but it is suspenseful in its own way, as the press conference announcing a lawsuit against the gun manufacturer looms, making everyone but Spencer nervous about how the publicity is going to shame Charlotte and John, his brother-in-law, even more.  I love the way Bohjalian has woven the guilt into this family drama, along with the controversy over whether hunting is a good thing, from a population control standpoint, or a bad thing.  He presents both sides of the argument, and I was curious as to how he would ultimately resolve this issue that divides the family.  His neutrality may be the most exasperating aspect of the novel, but I think it’s vital to keeping the family conflict balanced.  Some readers may think he leans too far one way or the other, but I think he does a good job of not alienating anyone.   Others may think his sitting on the fence is cowardly, but I think it’s just smart.

CHEMISTRY by Weike Wang

This is the first novel I’ve read in a while in just one day.  In fact, I read most of it in one sitting, but it’s even shorter than the page count indicates.  The unnamed Chinese-born female narrator in Boston has gone off the rails while working on her PhD chemistry project that she fears she will never be able to finish.  Her adviser recommends that she pursue a different topic, but instead she just abandons school and takes up tutoring.  Her long-suffering, always optimistic, live-in boyfriend Eric is way too patient with her but eventually accepts a job at Oberlin College in Ohio.  The narrator seeks the help of a therapist and pours out all of her resentment against her over-achieving father and unreliable mother, both unaffectionate and constantly fighting, whom she can’t bring herself to tell that she has dropped out of school.  Her best friend, also unnamed, lives in New York with her very successful husband and newborn baby, living the married life that the narrator is not sure that she wants for herself, especially when the husband moves out to live with another woman.  My take on this is that the narrator is trying to find her way in life and isn’t sure that she has what it takes to be a true scientist.  The specter of her parents’ bitter marriage has stood in the way of her commitment to Eric, so that now she is basically committed to nothing.  My favorite thing about this novel is that there are more scientific nuggets of information than I can even remember, but they are all fascinating.  The narrator spends one entire tutoring session talking about color.  In another session, she describes how radium was originally used to paint glow-in-the-dark watches.  The painters would rinse their brushes by putting them in their mouths!  Needless to say, radium is very toxic, even in dead bodies.

THE SISTERS BROTHERS by Patrick deWitt

Eli and Charlie Sisters are hit men for the Commodore during the California Gold Rush.  Eli narrates their adventures in search of their next target, Hermann Warm, but Charlie is the boss and the more lethal of the two brothers.  They basically spare no one on their journey to Warm’s camp, and all this bloodshed seemed a bit gratuitous to me.  Anyway, Eli is ready to quit the business after this last job (where have we heard this before?), and he’s a bit of a softie, considering his line of work.  He passes up the opportunity for a better horse, even though his horse Tub lives up to his name in that he’s not swift of foot.  After Tub’s eye gets bashed in, Eli starts to feel guilty about his treatment of Tub but shows no remorse for the men he and Charlie have murdered.  Charlie rationalizes that those men were all bad anyway, but Warm does not fit the pattern at all.  He’s an inventor with a formula for making gold dust more visible in water, and the Commodore insists that Charlie and Eli obtain the formula before they kill Warm.  Warm and the Commodore’s scout, Henry Morris, have joined forces and found that the formula has grisly, unexpected side effects that change the course of their whole enterprise, not to mention the Sisters brothers plans.  This book is supposed to be darkly comic, but for me it was dark but not comic, especially the crude surgery on poor Tub’s eye.  I guess I felt more sympathy for the horse than the people, too, because the people are mostly despicable, after all.  Still, the story moves at a good pace, and Eli’s deadpan narration is engaging, comic or not.

THE SAVAGE DETECTIVES by Roberto Bolaño

Arturo Belano, a stand-in for the author, and Ulises Lima are two poets who call themselves visceral realists but seem to make a living selling Acapulco Gold.  The original visceral realist was Cesarea Tinajero, who published a poem in the 1920s that was essentially a series of three line drawings.  Lima’s and Belano’s adventures are told through the voices of more narrators than I could possibly count or keep track of.  These narratives are like journal entries that span several decades (from the 1970s to the 1990s), and either Lima or Belano appears in most of them.  Ulises Lima disappears for a while in Managua, Nicaragua, while on a writers’ junket.  Belano, a Chilean, travels the world; we meet him in Barcelona, Tel Aviv, Mexico City, Paris, and Africa.  There’s a duel with swords on a beach in Spain, an ambush in Liberia, an interesting use of the counting of seconds with “one Mississippi,” etc., a murderous pimp, some muggings, weird odors, a magazine named Lee Harvey Oswald, and two narrators who speak from mental health facilities.  Belano and Lima are dismissive of famous Chilean poet Pablo Neruda and especially Mexican poet Octavio Paz, who also puts in an appearance in the book.  The first narrator, who doesn’t show up again until the last chapter, is a young man who stockpiles a bit of cash by betting on soccer pools using numbers that come to him in visions.  Given all that happens in this novel, it should not be boring, but it was for me, not to mention too wacky and disjointed.

THE WOMAN IN THE WINDOW by A.J. Finn

Anna Fox, a child psychologist, is a PTSD sufferer with agoraphobia, meaning that, in her case, she is terrified of going outside.  She spends her time watching Hitchcock movies, drinking heavily, counseling fellow agoraphobia victims online, and watching her Harlem neighbors through the telephoto lens of her Nikon.  At first, her inventorying of her various neighbors is a little tedious, but then she becomes embroiled in the lives of the Russell family—Alistair, Jane, and their teenage son Ethan.  Jane Russell, in particular, is difficult for Anna to get a handle on, because googling her name just presents a lot of info about the 1950s-era movie actress.  When Anna believes she has witnessed a murder, things start to get really murky.  Did it really happen, or was Anna so wasted that she hallucinated the whole thing?  The trauma that has rendered her a shut-in is revealed little by little, adding even more suspense to the story.  I figured out one aspect of the story, but mostly I was caught off guard by the revelations at the end.  Is the book totally believable?  Absolutely not, but sometimes a little escapism is just the ticket.  I certainly hoped for Anna’s recovery, but the novel is full of people who are kind to her, even as she pursues a neighbor into a coffee shop in the rain, clad in her bath robe.  This woman is so unbalanced that I think I would have avoided her at all costs.

FOREST DARK by Nicole Krauss

This is my least favorite Nicole Krauss novel so far.  Still, it’s certainly not the worst thing I’ve ever read.  The two main characters are both in Israel and undergoing life changes, but other than that, they don’t seem to have anything in common.  Moreover, their stories never converge, so that this is like two novels squashed together.  Their only definite overlap happens to be with a gold-toothed taxi driver who drops one character in the desert and picks up the other character on his way back to Tel Aviv.  This coincidence at least confirms that the stories are taking place concurrently.  Jules Epstein has retired from his New York law practice and has a sudden urge to give everything away.  He would also like to create some sort of memorial to his parents in Israel, even though his childhood was not exactly pleasant.  He crosses paths with a rabbi and his filmmaker daughter, but honestly, Epstein’s story did not grab me, although one of my favorite scenes in the book involves his doorman in New York.  The other character tells her story in first person and refers to herself at least once as Nicole (semi-autobiographical?).  She is a successful novelist but has gotten stuck trying to start her next book and is reexamining the state of her marriage.  She abruptly leaves her family for Tel Aviv after being contacted about a project there with a man named Friedman, who may have been a member of the Mossad.  The project turns out to involve Franz Kafka whose death from tuberculosis at the age of 40 was possibly faked.  She eventually has her own very Kafkaesque experience, which brings on even more self-reflection.  This book just did not resonate with me at all, and I found it hard to follow, especially given the almost dream-like quality of the storyline, or, I should say, storylines.

AN AMERICAN MARRIAGE by Tayari Jones

Roy and Celestial have been married only a year and a half when their world is rocked by a rape accusation against Roy.  Despite his pleas of innocence, he is convicted and sentenced to 12 years, joining the ranks of thousands of incarcerated black men.  He survives in prison largely due to the wisdom of his cellmate, known as the Ghetto Yoda.  Meanwhile, Celestial is starting to make a name for herself as an artist, creating cloth dolls, many of whom look like Roy.  She has to move on with her life, which may or may not include waiting for Roy’s release.  Andre, Celestial’s long-time friend who was best man at their wedding, is more than willing to fill Roy’s shoes at Celestial’s side.  This love triangle is the main conflict in this story and boils down to who will get the girl.  I struggled through this novel until Roy finally gets out of prison, and then all hell breaks loose.  For me, this is when the plot gets quite dramatic, and I really liked the ending.  While he is locked up, Roy has been thinking of nothing but getting back to his wife, and she has left some conflicting signals about where their relationship stands.  I have to side with Celestial on this one, though.  She may be moving on, but she holds off on filing for divorce, because she feels guilty about abandoning Roy, and she’s reluctant to kick a man while he’s down.  She’s certainly in a difficult spot, because Roy didn’t deserve his fate, but their marriage was contentious anyway, and I can’t help feeling that it wouldn’t have survived if Roy had never gone to prison.  Maybe they would have ironed out their differences and maybe not, but when you’re looking at a 12-year hiatus in your very new marriage, I think you have to be realistic and consider other options.

HISTORY OF WOLVES by Emily Fridlund

Fourteen-year-old Linda and her parents are the only remaining vestiges of a hippie commune in an isolated area of backwoods Minnesota.  Her world changes when she meets Patra Gardner, young mother of four-year-old Paul, whose death the author mentions early in the book.  Not until we meet Patra’s astronomer husband Leo do we discover that the couple are Christian Scientists.  Linda is their frequent babysitter, and it’s obvious that Patra desperately seeks the approval of her husband, perhaps at the expense of her son’s well-being.  This is an eerie, haunting book, not just because we know Paul is going to die and we want to know how, but also because the landscape is so cold, natural, and uninhabited.  Linda is an expert at splitting wood and skinning fish, and she’s good with Paul, but she’s not socially mature, although she does attend school and develops a particular rapport with a history teacher who may be a pedophile.  She’s also not convinced that her parents are really her parents, and I shared her skepticism when her tardiness in returning home from the Gardners’ seems to warrant no concerned reaction whatsoever.  In some ways the Gardners are more like family than her own parents, as she becomes more and more of a fixture in their lives.  Linda’s story is poignant, and that’s the same adjective she uses to describe an article about Princess Diana in a purloined People magazine.  She definitely seems drawn to sad people, including a girl from school who lies about contact with the suspicious history teacher.  This is a book that can even make a game of Candyland heartbreaking.

QUIET DELL by Jayne Anne Phillips

Don’t let the peaceful-sounding title fool you.  This novel revolves around the real-life serial killer, Herman Drenth, aka Harry Powers, aka Cornelius Pierson, who preyed upon lonely women during the Great Depression.  He was finally caught in West Virginia after murdering Asta Eicher and her three children.  The book opens with the widowed Asta living in her deceased mother-in-law’s home.  She is financially desperate and allows herself to be conned by Drenth via a correspondence in which he promises to marry her.  This first section is a bit slow-moving, but, while Asta is excited about her new life, the reader experiences a sense of dread that is fully realized soon enough.  Enter Emily Thornhill, a fictional reporter for the Chicago Tribune, who becomes very attached to the Eicher children in absentia and provides a welcome breath of fresh air against the gruesome backdrop of the murders.  Like In Cold Blood, to which this novel has been compared, the murders are a fait accompli, and Emily serves as a conduit to the killer’s backstory and the buildup to his trial.  The author may go a little too far in counter-balancing the brutal murders with Emily’s many successes and good fortune, but I found her pluck and perseverance to be refreshing, though certainly no one could mistake her almost fairy-tale life as fact.  The author artfully manages to keep the reader’s eyes glued to the pages, not only with Drenth’s history and the lynch mob that forces his removal to a more secure prison, but with the assorted lovable and good-hearted characters that surround Emily, including her gay photographer, a street urchin that she befriends, and the Eicher’s dog Duty.  Certainly, this blend of good and evil is intentional on the author’s part, and I think it works extremely well.

THE CHILD by Fiona Barton

When an infant’s skeleton is uncovered at a building site, journalist Kate Waters is eager to get the scoop.  The baby may be Alice Irving, who was abducted from her mother’s maternity ward room while her mother, Angela, took a quick shower.  However, the age of the baby’s remains is a big question that the police must address, and the timeline may not align with Alice’s disappearance.  Thank heavens for DNA testing.  Another woman, Emma, who once lived near the excavation site, seems anxious to learn the baby’s identity, but we don’t find out why until later in the book.  Jude, Emma’s sometimes estranged mother, also is faithfully following the story of the building site baby as it unfolds.  Kate is an empathetic and caring woman who hopes to bring Angela some closure, while at the same time bringing a blockbuster story to print.  I enjoyed this book—the writing style, the format, the pace, the characters, and the plot.  However, I guessed what had happened about halfway into the book, so that the denouement was pretty much a non-event for me.  I think the author could have done a much better job of making the mystery more of a mystery and not telegraphing the outcome plainly.  In fact, this has got to be one of the most obvious mysteries I’ve read lately, and the coincidence factor is also extremely high, making the plot somewhat farfetched.  That said, I raced through this novel, partly because it’s a page-turner and partly because I was eager to put it behind me so that I could move on to something without a forgone conclusion.

FAITHFUL by Alice Hoffman

Shelby was driving on an icy road when the car spun out, putting her best friend Helene in a permanent coma.  Shelby is emotionally dead herself with guilt and spends some time in a mental facility where an orderly routinely rapes her.  The rapes may seem quite unnecessary to the plot, but they serve as an impetus to get her out of there when she is nowhere near healed.  When she returns home, she shaves her head and spends a lot of time with Ben, her pot supplier.  Anonymous postcards start arriving that urge her to Do Something, See Something, Believe Something, etc.  She and Ben eventually move in together, and he adores her, but she is restless and cheats on him with a handsome veterinarian.  I thought the affair was a little out of character, but basically I guess she’s looking for approval and perhaps even proving to herself that she’s not worthy of Ben’s affection.  In penance for what she did to Helene, she rescues every abused dog that she sees and becomes somewhat of an all-around good Samaritan.  Except for the unwise affair, she’s a very appealing character and even proves that she has the knack for parenting when she babysits a co-worker’s children.  I cheered her on throughout the book, and I think this is my favorite Alice Hoffman novel, even though it’s pretty much your standard redemption novel.  I am not a fan of her historical fiction, but this one does not fall into that category, and her signature magical realism is mostly absent as well.  Even without the magical realism, the book’s credibility is stretched at times, and it’s certainly not a literary masterpiece, but so what?

THE PROBABLE FUTURE by Alice Hoffman

Alice Hoffman’s magical realism novels never disappoint, if you’re looking for a breath of optimism.  All generations of women in the Sparrow family are born in March, starting with Rebecca in the 1600s.  Each woman discovers that she has a superpower on her thirteenth birthday.  Stella is no exception when she discovers that she can see how people will die.  This ability has its plusses and minuses.  Her mother Jenny can experience other people’s dreams, and that power led her to her charismatic but basically worthless husband Will, whom she is finally divorcing.  Jenny has had no contact with her own mother, Elinor, since she ran off with Will at the age of seventeen, but now she must send Stella to live with Elinor to escape the chaos surrounding Will’s arrest for murder.  Elinor’s gift is that she can tell when someone is lying, and she knows that Will does so habitually.  This is a fast and easy read with everything wrapped up in a tidy fashion at the end, and a month from now I won’t remember the plot at all.  Still, I enjoyed the break from heavier stuff.

AMERICAN PASTORAL by Philip Roth

The title of this novel is an intentional misnomer.  Plus, the main character’s daughter Merry is anything but.  In fact, she’s the reason that Seymour “The Swede” Levov’s life is not the pastoral existence he has strived for.  The Swede is an extraordinary high school athlete who later marries Miss New Jersey and takes over the reins of his father’s leather glove manufacturing business.  His near-perfect life in the late 1960s is shattered when Merry as a teenager becomes an activist against the Vietnam War and purportedly bombs the local general store, killing a well-loved physician.  Merry then goes underground, and the Swede’s only link to her is a mysterious young woman named Rita Cohen.  As the novel progresses, the Swede gains more and more disturbing information about Merry and the bombing, but I didn’t think the ending brought sufficient closure.  Other than that, this was a compelling novel about a family trying to come to terms with their child having done the unthinkable.  The Swede does a lot of ruminating on what may have driven Merry to violence, and I think Roth gets carried away at times.  I love his character treatment, but his verbosity gets to me when he’s describing flowers and countryside, for example.  Some reviewers have complained about the bleakness of this novel, but I felt that the happy ending, so to speak, is really at the beginning when the Swede is waxing poetic about his sons from his second marriage.  Knowing how his life turns out kept me from getting totally depressed while reading this book, and I think Roth wisely gives the reader the good news first.

THE GREAT AMERICAN NOVEL by Philip Roth

Philip Roth’s novels are hit or miss, and this one is a definite miss for me.  His great American novel is about the great American pastime—baseball.  Although I watch a lot of baseball, this book did not resonate with me at all.  It’s more of a satire than an homage, and the LOL moments are too few and far between.  It’s the story of a fictional third league, the Patriot League, which includes a team of misfits known as the Ruppert Mundys.  The Mundys are obliged to play all of their games away during the 1943 season, because the War Department has commandeered their ballpark.  The disadvantage of never having a home game is compounded by the fact that two of the team’s players are missing limbs, along with one too old to stay awake for nine innings, and one outfielder who frequently concusses himself by running into the wall.  Their star player is playing for free on the worst team in the league, because his father desperately wants to curb his son’s arrogance with a generous dose of humility.  Political correctness does not live here, as the author skewers everyone, regardless of religion, political leaning, gender, or disability.  I realize that it’s intended as a farce and not something you’re really going to sink your teeth into, but the whole thing is just too ridiculous and unpleasant.  I think this book would have been more entertaining if there were an underdog worth cheering on, but instead we just have a lot of losers, in more ways than one.

BACK TO BLOOD by Tom Wolfe

If this final novel of Tom Wolfe’s had held my attention just a little more tightly, I would have given it five stars.  The setting is Miami, with its mélange of ethnicities.  The main character, Nestor Comache, is of Cuban heritage, but we also have a well-to-do Haitian family and several Russians of questionable moral fiber.  Nestor is a cop who is called upon to rescue a Cuban refugee from the top of a yacht’s mast, but his amazing feat brings him only disdain from his family, because the refugee will now probably be deported.  His beautiful but shallow girlfriend Magdalena dumps him, not because of the rescue but because she is now involved with her boss, a sleazy psychiatrist who treats porn addicts and aspires to the life of the rich and famous.  Next, Nestor alienates the black community after subduing a drug dealer and being caught on video shouting some racially charged verbal abuse.  During that encounter, he meets Ghislaine, the daughter of a Haitian college professor, and she is concerned about her brother’s possible gang affiliation and the fate of a teacher who has been arrested for attacking a belligerent student.  Wolfe handles these multiple interwoven storylines and perspectives seamlessly and without a confusing and meandering timeline that seems to be so popular with today’s novelists.  Wolfe wrote only four novels, and, although I liked all of them, this is my favorite.  Nestor is a heroic character who epitomizes the saying that no good deed goes unpunished.  He may be a little vain and naïve, but he has nothing but the best intentions, and he’s a pretty sharp cookie, too, albeit with a weakness for damsels in distress.

THE ELECTRIC KOOL-AID ACID TEST by Tom Wolfe

They say that if you can remember the 60s, then you weren’t really there.  I’m a bit younger than the people in this book, and I wasn’t in California in the 60s, where most of the action takes place.  The main character and leader of the pack is Ken Kesey, author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Sometimes a Great Notion.  I loved both of Kesey’s acclaimed novels, both of which were made into movies, and generally I like Tom Wolfe.  However, this is sort of a loose biography of Kesey’s LSD experimentation period, and I wasn’t that fond of it.  One of the main characters is actually the bus, named Furthur (intentionally misspelled), which makes a cross-country trip, helmed by Neal Cassady, the real-life Dean Moriarty from Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, as well as a sojourn into Mexico, when Kesey is on the run from the authorities.  The phrase “drinking the Kool-Aid” came along after this period, but in some ways it applies here as well.  Kesey has sort of a cult following that drinks LSD-laced Kool-Aid at one of their soirees, but so do some unsuspecting guests.  Of course, if you’re going to a Pranksters party and don’t expect LSD to be floating around, then you must have been totally out of touch and you wouldn’t have been at the party in the first place.  Apparently, Kesey was a very charismatic man, but his charm did not come through on the page for me.  I did find it fascinating how these great writers found each other:  Kesey, Wolfe, Larry McMurtry, and others.  Wolfe mentions Kerouac only in connection with Cassady, and although I didn’t love this book, Wolfe is a way better writer than Kerouac, in my opinion, and Wolfe steers clear of language that would make the book feel dated.

THE SILENT SISTER by Diane Chamberlain

Riley, now in her twenties, was two years old when her sister Lisa, a 17-year-old violin prodigy with a very promising future, apparently committed suicide.  Riley’s mother never really recovered from the loss of her daughter and predeceased Riley’s father, who has just died.   Spending the summer going through all the stuff in the house where she grew up, Riley uncovers some surprising facts about her family and what may have prompted Lisa to take her own life.  New mysteries keep cropping up, as Riley tries to connect with her brother Danny, who suffers from PTSD and harbors ill feelings toward all of their family members who are no longer alive.  Their father owned an RV park, and left his pipe collection to a married couple, Verniece and Tom Kyle, in residence there, who may be able to help unravel some of the family mysteries, if Riley can bear Tom’s puzzling animosity.  Riley’s shifting reality makes her somewhat impulsive and not always rational, but Danny is even less rational, and I never really did figure out why he was so angry with their parents.  For me, he was the most difficult character to relate to.  If anything, the truth about what happened with Lisa should have made him irate, whereas Lisa’s apparent suicide should have made him sympathetic toward his parents.  I think this novel works better as a dysfunctional family saga than as a mystery, as I found some of the twists and turns to be not wholly unexpected.  I enjoyed the book, but there was nothing particularly special about it.

EVENTIDE by Kent Haruf

I was afraid that this sequel to Plainsong would not live up to the standard set by its predecessor, but it absolutely does.  Cattle ranchers Raymond and Harold are back, and their ward, Victoria, is off to college with her young daughter Katie.  The two men have to adapt to having only one another’s company again, and then tragedy strikes.  In another household we have Luther and Betty and their two children, living in a trailer on welfare.  Betty’s Uncle Hoyt comes to live with them, and he is very bad news, but Luther and Betty are too terrified of him to turn him out.  Mary Wells has turned to drinking since her husband abandoned her and their two daughters.  You get the picture.  Social worker Rose Tyler seems to be the most stable person in this Colorado town, but even she occasionally loses her composure, especially when well-meaning but inadequate parents can’t take care of themselves, much less protect their children.  The tone and dialog in Haruf’s novels is so pitch-perfect that I just want to immerse myself in these people’s lives as long as possible, even when things are going badly for them.  Haruf has set a high bar for the third book in the series, Benediction, and I already have it on my bookshelf.  He treats his characters with such tenderness that I find it difficult to blame them for occasionally wallowing in their despair.  If I had a complaint about this novel, and I really don’t, it’s that everyone seems to be a victim of some sort of heartbreak, but the beauty of the novel is how most of them manage to overcome it and perhaps even provide solace to those who are still suffering.

CELINE by Peter Heller

How refreshing it is to have a heroine who is a 60-something female private investigator.  Celine’s specialty is reuniting family members, and she has a personal reason for pursuing these types of cases, often pro bono.  She takes on a case from a young woman, Gabriela, whose mother drowned when she was a child and whose father, a National Geographic photographer, vanished over 20 years ago.  He was declared dead from a bear attack, but his body was never recovered, and Gabriela now wants closure.  Celine and her very laidback husband Pete borrow her son’s popup camper and head to Yellowstone, near where Gabriela’s father disappeared.  We soon find that Celine is crafty and skilled in ways we, and her husband, never would have imagined, despite the fact that she sometimes needs supplemental oxygen, especially at high altitudes.  Plus, they are trying to outsmart a guy who is tracking them and who also may have an interest in finding Gabriela’s father.   This book does have a few flaws, particularly in the believability department.  For example, Pete and Celine are able to gather every magazine issue that featured Gabriela’s father’s work as they are making their way across Wyoming and Montana.  I also felt that the reason for Gabriela’s father’s disappearance was totally out of left field.  Still, this is an enjoyable read, especially if you like seeing a badass old lady clear out a bar full of bikers with bad attitudes.  After a few months I may not remember much about this intrepid geriatric duo, but I enjoyed the time I spent with them.

NEW ENGLAND WHITE by Stephen L. Carter

I didn’t like this book as well as his first novel, The Emperor of Ocean Park, partly because the formula was pretty much the same.  We’re still in a New England college town, where Lemaster Carlyle is the president of the college.  His wife Julia is a dean in the divinity school, and she is the main character.  The Carlyles are black, although all of their neighbors are white.  Their teenage daughter Vanessa is having behavioral problems and seeing a psychiatrist.  She is obsessed with the murder of Gina Joule, a teenager who was murdered in the community years ago.  Meanwhile, Julia’s ex-lover Kellen Zant has been murdered, and he too seems to have been trying to find out who really killed Gina Joule.   Kellen has left Julia a slew of obscure clues, and she embarks on a dangerous scavenger hunt to discover what Kellen was up to and who killed him.  The plot is a little too convoluted, and the author keeps us (and Julia) guessing about the intentions of the secondary characters, such as the campus security chief and a writer whom Julia meets at Kellen’s funeral.  Nagging at Julia throughout the novel is her suspicion that her husband may have been involved in Gina’s murder while he was in college, or at least in a cover-up.  I actually got a little tired of Julia and her class consciousness, but what really annoyed me was that she seemed to leave a lot of conversations unfinished.  For example, at one point her husband is talking about something that happened with one of his three roommates in college, but he doesn’t tell her which one.  Obviously, he wants to keep that person’s identity a secret, but it’s not obvious that Julia even asks.  This same scenario happens several times, where Julia obtains incomplete information but doesn’t press for the full story.  I think this failing is more the author’s fault than the character’s, because Julia certainly comes across as being very thorough and leaving no stone unturned in her quest for the truth.

ORIGIN by Dan Brown

I read this book for book club, and it did not change my opinion of Dan Brown.  The subject matter is as thought-provoking as ever, but the writing has not improved.  Still, you have to give the guy credit for tackling the origin of life and whether it can be scientifically explained.  Robert Langford is on the scene again, with the help of another beautiful woman, to find out what his friend Edmund Kirsch had discovered.  Kirsch’s highly anticipated announcement is cut short by the bullet of an assassin who is a member of an ultra-conservative religious sect.  Langford’s cohort is Ambra Vidal, engaged to the future king of Spain, but the two of them must wrestle with the question of who orchestrated Kirsch’s murder.  It could have been Ambra’s fiancé or the priest who has been the long-time adviser and confidant to the king.  Catholicism is an integral part of Spanish culture, and Kirsch’s discovery threatens to discredit the Adam and Eve story.  (Hasn’t Darwin already done that?)  For me, this was not really a page-turner and had no startling revelations or surprises.  I did enjoy the discussion of the difference between patterns--which exist in nature in snowflakes and tornadoes, among other things--and codes.  DNA is the one obvious code, and Langford ruminates on the question of whether its existence implies divine intervention.  Also, am I the only person who didn’t know there is an arrow in the negative space of the FedEx logo?

WE ARE ALL COMPLETELY BESIDE OURSELVES by Karen Joy Fowler

Fern and Rosemary were raised as sisters for the first five years of their lives.  Then Fern had to leave the family, and this book deals largely with her departure and subsequent whereabouts.  Fern is a chimpanzee who learns sign language, wears human clothes, becomes potty-trained, and functions as a full member of the Cooke family, in which the father is a psychologist.  Rosemary narrates this story during her college years.  Her brother Lowell disappeared several years earlier, probably to engage in animal rights activism.  Neither sibling has gotten over Fern’s removal from the family, and we don’t learn what led to her departure until late in the novel.  Rosemary has some social issues, perhaps partly due to the grief of being separated from Fern, but more from having spent her early childhood with a chimp for a sister.  Rosemary as a child was a chatterbox for one thing, but she also adopted some chimp-like behaviors, such as touching someone’s hair, that made her a bit of a problem child during her early school years.  Now that she’s in college and in need of friends, she lands in jail with Harlow, a fellow student with behavioral problems of her own.  The beginning of the book is very funny, but things get darker in a hurry, and my enthusiasm for the book went downhill with the change of tone.  I certainly found it very disturbing that a chimp raised completely with loving humans would suddenly be thrust into an environment that was completely foreign to her.  Then again, cats do not fare too well in this novel, either.  All in all, for most of us it’s easier to read about the mistreatment of people than the mistreatment of helpless animals.

THE COURSE OF LOVE by Alain de Botton

At least the reader of this novel doesn’t have to deal with multiple unidentified narrators or a wacky timeline.  However, the author interrupts the narrative on almost every page with observations about romantic or marital love.  I don’t think I would have missed anything if I had skipped these snippets, but I realize that they are integral to the author’s intentions.  The storyline involves Rabih and Kirsten, both of whom lost a parent at a young age.  Rabih’s mother died of cancer, and Kirsten’s father walked out on Kirsten and her mother.  Consequently, they have a parental loss in common, but illness and abandonment bring very different insecurities to the victims, and the aggrieved children therefore have very different coping mechanisms that linger into their adult lives.  In any case, Rabih and Kirsten fall in love and get married, and this book seeks to explore the mundane and sometimes boring aspects of marriage rather than the exhilaration of the initial meeting and courtship.  The author examines both partners, but primarily Rabih, and their approach to marriage and raising a family, with all the required compromises, challenges, and division of labor.  Although I was not overly fond of the author’s frequent musings on the relationship, I did find the writings of a marriage counselor somewhat enlightening as to why Rabih and Kirsten struggle in their relationship, despite their obvious love for one another.  I kept expecting something drastic to happen, but the author did not have that in mind here.  This is not a book about human tragedy.  Rather, the author offers some philosophical commentary on the millions of ordinary people who make up this world.

NOWHERE MAN by Alexsandar Hemon

This book was more incomprehensible than incomparable, if you ask me.  It has several first person narrators, none of whom are the primary character, a Bosnian named Josef Pronek.  We witness several stages of Pronek’s life in no particular order, including his attendance of an ESL program in Chicago, his college days in the Ukraine, his time in the Bosnian army, his work in Chicago as a door-to-door solicitor for Greenpeace, and a stint as process server to another Yugoslavian.  He is fortunately in the U.S. during the war between the Croats and the Serbs, but his parents are still there, and his mother barely avoids being hit by a bomb.  The last section is the weirdest, as it concerns a Captain Pick who lived in Shanghai during WWII but also used the name Joseph Pronek.  What is that supposed to mean?  Was he our Josef’s father or a previous incarnation or not related in any way?  And does Greenpeace really solicit donations door-to-door?  This was perhaps the most entertaining section, as Pronek gives himself a new identity and nationality at each home he visits.  The title comes from the Beatles song, since at one point he and his buddy in Bosnia form a cover band that performs Beatles songs (in English), which then morphs into a blues band in which he passes himself off as “Blind” Josef Pronek.  This kaleidoscope of adventures may be semi-autobiographical in its juxtaposition of the comical and the doleful, but I would have preferred a more conventional rendering.

ANNIHILATION by Jeff VanderMeer

I liked this book, but did I like it enough to read the other two books in the trilogy?  Probably not.  Four women, identified only by their occupations, have come to Area X as the twelfth expedition there.  The biologist is the narrator whose husband was part of the previous expedition but returned home as a shell of his former self.  Area X is the site of an environmental contamination where things become weirder and weirder as the novel progresses.  There are two main landmarks—an underground tower that some view as a tunnel and a lighthouse.  Both are very spooky in their own way, but the other members of the expedition are even scarier--an anthropologist, a psychologist, and a surveyor.  The psychologist is the obvious leader, as she has the power to hypnotize the other three into doing her bidding.  Where exactly is Area X?  What is the purpose of all these expeditions?  Why is the tower/tunnel not on the maps?  What happens when you cross the border into and out of Area X?  We don’t know the answer to this last question because everyone on this expedition, except presumably the psychologist, was hypnotized for the border crossing.  Certainly these questions are all teasers for the books to come, but I’m not sure if I care.  The movie might be worth watching, though.