TRUST EXERCISE by Susan Choi

The third and final section of this book baffled me so much that I had to call into question everything that I had read before that.  Suffice it to say that the first section is not what it seems, and this novel brings the concept of an unreliable narrator to a whole new height.  The first section’s narrative follows Sarah, a theatre major at a performing arts high school, but her acting chops are such that she performs backstage tasks during all of the school’s performances.  Her failed romance with fellow student David catches the attention of Mr. Kingsley, the magnetic theatre instructor, who begins pairing the two up for trust exercises, bringing both of them to a new level of uncomfortable awkwardness in each other’s company.  Then a visiting troupe of English actors arrives to perform a production of Candide, and their relationships with the students become the focal point of the story.  The second section takes place fifteen years later and involves many of the same characters—sort of.  Reading this book is definitely a trust exercise in and of itself, as nothing in the novel, except perhaps the final section, can be taken at face value.  I found this level of unreliable narration both intriguing and frustrating at the same time.   I’m really sorry that my book club isn’t reading it, because it definitely lends itself to a rousing discussion and possibly some conclusions that I may have overlooked as possibilities.

A LESSON BEFORE DYING by Ernest J. Gaines

A young black man, Jefferson, was with two other young black men when they murdered a white storekeeper.  Everyone at the scene except Jefferson died in the ensuing gunfire.  He then goes to trial for murder, but the trial is a sham, and his attorney argues that there is no point in sentencing Jefferson to death, as he is basically a fool and an animal.  The all-white jury, of course, returns a verdict of first-degree murder in short order, and the judge sentences Jefferson to the electric chair.  Jefferson, however, is not the main character.  That role belongs to Grant Wiggins, a college-educated black schoolteacher, whose aunt and Jefferson’s godmother persuade him to counsel Jefferson.  Basically, Grant must attempt to bring Jefferson into a state of dignity and manhood before the execution.  In some ways, this seems to be not just a lost cause but an almost futile exercise.  Grant resents being placed in such an impossible position, now that Jefferson has become convinced that he is less than human, but this task is actually a redemptive opportunity for Grant.  He doesn’t feel that he is making a difference in the lives of the children he teaches, and he still has to enter through the back door of a white man’s house.  Furthermore, although a church serves as his schoolhouse, he is not a religious man.  His argument with the local pastor over the fate of Jefferson’s soul and the existence of heaven is one of my favorite sections.  My interpretation may be not what the author intended, but the pastor seems to imply that the idea of heaven is to comfort and ease the grief of loved ones left on earth, with the promise of meeting the deceased in the afterlife.

WHERE THE CRAWDADS SING by Delia Owens

Everyone else on the planet seems to love this book, but I feel like I’m being generous to give it 4 stars.  I just didn’t think it was special enough to warrant all the praise that others have lavished on it, and I felt as though I were reading a novel for young adults.  In any case, the book opens with the discovery of a dead body--that of Chase Andrews, who may or may not have been murdered.  Then we backtrack several decades to the life of Kya, a girl who basically raises herself in the swamplands of North Carolina.  She then later falls in love with Chase, but their relationship is doomed, as there is no chance that the “Marsh Girl” will ever get to marry Chase, the former star quarterback who can have any respectable girl he wants.  The plot is supremely predictable, including the ending, in which we finally discover what actually happened to Chase.  Frankly, he is such an odious, one-dimensional character that I really wasn’t exactly dying to know who had the biggest motive to kill him or if his death was an accident.  I had several theories about what happened to him, and one of them was right.  The number of characters is refreshingly small, and my favorites were a black man nicknamed Jumpin’, who owns a small store and serves as sort of a surrogate father to Kya, and Tate, who becomes Kya’s tutor and first boyfriend.  Tate bows out of the picture for a while, leaving Kya to become involved with the despicable Chase.  I just didn’t warm up to Kya, who makes some other rather bad choices, such as hiding from truant officers to avoid going to school.  She seems to crave interaction with other people and yet chooses isolation.

PURITY by Jonathan Franzen

I wavered between four and five stars in my opinion of this book.  On the one hand, it was overly long, but, on the other hand, I loved the way everything came together in the end.  The lives of the three main characters—Pip Tyler, Andreas Wolf, and Tom Aberant--are very intertwined, and, little by little, Franzen clues us in as to how their lives happen to intersect.  In other words, the plot unspools perfectly, in my opinion.  Andreas Wolf is a charismatic uncoverer of truths, a la Julian Assange, and has a dark secret that he shares with both Tom and Pip.  Pip is a twenty-something in a dead-end job with crushing student loan debts, but her main goal in life is to find out who her father is.  She doesn’t even know her mother’s real name, as her mother completely changed her identity around the time Pip was born in order to ensure that Pip’s father never discovered his daughter’s existence.  In fact, mothers figure largely in this book, as Andreas and Tom also have moms who become characters in their own right in this novel.   I found Tom to be the most enigmatic and least developed of the three main characters, perhaps because he seems the most normal, ironically, despite bearing a last name that seems to be a misspelling of “aberrant.”   His girlfriend Leila has her own chapter as well and lives part-time with her novelist husband, Charles, who hilariously laments that many lauded novelists these days bear the name Jonathan and write ridiculously long novels.  As always, Franzen’s prose is superb.  My favorite line comes when Tom is describing an early meeting with his future wife, Anabel, at an art gallery.  She “came clad in a black-trimmed crimson cashmere coat and strong opinions.”  For me, the part about the opinions is a compliment, although the coat doesn’t sound too bad, either.