THE INNER CIRCLE by T.C. Boyle

Boyle’s historical fiction is never as good as the stuff that emanates strictly from his imagination.  Plus, I always wonder how much is fiction and how much is true, but I’m way too lazy to do any significant research.  In this case, the narrator, John Milk, is entirely fictional.  After taking one of Professor Alfred Kinsey’s classes at Indiana University in the 1940s, Milk becomes Kinsey’s assistant in gathering and assembling data for what would later be known as the Kinsey Report, or, more accurately, Reports—two books about human sexual behavior.  Kinsey is certainly an enigma, coming off alternately as totally objective and non-judgmental regarding human sexual activity and at other times as totally heartless.  Milk’s wife has to remind her husband that Kinsey is not God, but Milk does not tolerate any criticism of Kinsey, even as Milk’s work life, and Kinsey’s laser-like focus on their research, threatens Milk’s marriage.  In any case, Kinsey was certainly a pioneer, and we are in his debt for helping to ease the taboo of homosexuality and masturbation, but his failure to condemn pedophilia, for example, at least in this narrative, is repulsive.  I would add that most of us still do not condone sex with farm animals or pets; that sort of activity still seems abusive to me.  Milk is the main character of this book, though, and although he wants to buy into Kinsey’s attitudes about marital infidelity and voyeurism, both fine in Kinsey’s view, Milk finds himself caught between Kinsey’s unconventional world and that of his home life.  Milk does not share with his wife the details of his job for two reasons:  for one thing, Kinsey demands complete secrecy, particularly as the first book’s publication nears, and furthermore, Milk knows that some of Kinsey’s activities would stretch Milk’s wife’s tolerance to the breaking point.

PATSY by Nicole Dennis-Benn

Patsy is a Jamaican woman who finally obtains a 6-month visa to go to the U.S.  Her main motivation is to reunite with her long-time friend and lover, Cicely, in New York.  There’s one catch, however.  Patsy has to leave her 6-year-old daughter, Tru, behind, with Tru’s father, who has a wife and family of his own.  Tru’s story is the heartbreaking one here.  Nothing but disappointment awaits her mother in the U.S., but it is nothing compared to Tru’s loss.  Patsy has never embraced motherhood, but now Tru keeps wondering when her mother will come back for her, as promised.  Patsy, of course, has no intention of ever returning to Jamaica, despite the drudgery and financial desperation she faces in the U.S., taking menial jobs and barely scraping by.  The upside is that Tru’s life with her policeman father is in many ways better than the one she shared with her mother.  Patsy grapples with guilt over her abandonment of Tru, but she never takes the steps necessary to assuage that guilt.  I get that Patsy aspires to life on her own terms, but her plans for resuming her relationship with Cicely are completely unrealistic, since she knows that Cicely is married, even if only for residency purposes.  For me, this story is unbearably sad, and not just for Tru and Patsy.  Cicely is trapped in a marriage to a successful but abusive husband, and her son is just as cowed as his mother.  She seems to have written to Patsy, begging her to come to New York, in an effort to bring some joy to her life.  It is unclear whether she has been fantasizing about a life for Patsy and herself, when she knows she doesn’t have the courage or the means to leave her husband, or if she has just been telling Patsy what she knows Patsy wants to hear.  Either way, her letters are the catalyst to an unfortunate series of events in which Tru is the one who suffers the most.  The central questions are these:  How long is Patsy going to carry a torch for Cicely, and is she going to make an effort to mend her relationship with her own daughter?

On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong

This is a book in search of a plot.  From its inauspicious beginning onward, I just wanted to get it over with.  The book’s format is that of a letter from the Vietnamese-American narrator to his illiterate mother, and that letter is rife with poetry, as the author is himself a poet.  However, I am a fan of fiction—not poetry.  Plus, I found nothing to endear me to the narrator other than the fact that he is abused by his mentally ill mother.  He discovers at an early age that he is gay and strikes up a relationship with Trevor, whose home life is just as awful as the narrator’s.  If ever there were a book with a central theme of identity, this is it, but actually I felt that Trevor and the narrator’s mother were both more compelling characters than the narrator.  Plus, the storyline, such as it is, is profoundly grim, with rare moments of beauty or joy, such as scaling a fence next to the freeway to pick wildflowers.  I mean, really, that’s about as joyful as it gets.  The most disturbing aspect of this novel is the story of Trevor’s opioid addiction that stemmed from a sprained ankle.  The narrator lambasts Purdue Pharma for destroying this boy’s life, and I’m with him on this point.  The upside is that, since the author voices his rage in a novel, I actually read it.  Not that I haven’t read or heard about the opioid crisis in the news, but the author here puts a face, albeit fictional, to the many innocent victims.  And I can’t even bear to mention what happens to the macaque in the misguided interest of male virility.  This book drives home the stark reality of how humanity can often be all too inhumane.

THE NIGHT TIGER by Yangsze Choo

One storyline in this novel concerns a 10-year-old orphan, Ren, who is looking for a severed finger.  The second storyline is about a young woman, Ji Lin, who possesses the finger.  Ren’s former employer, Dr. MacFarlane, is dying and has insisted that Ren retrieve the doctor’s missing finger so that it can be interred with him within 49 days of his death.  Thus begins this terrific novel that takes place in Malaya in the 1930s—before it became the independent nation of Malaysia.  Sinister forces are at work here, as the number of sudden deaths begins to mount.  The author keeps us guessing as to whether the culprit is a human or something called a weretiger, which is a person in a tiger’s body.  Ren and Ji Lin’s stories eventually intersect, and they discover that they both dream about Ren’s dead twin brother Yi.  Ji Lin has a sort of twin of her own—Shin, the stepbrother with whom she shares a birthday.  Ji Lin starts to realize that she is developing a romantic attraction toward Shin, which she is unsuccessful at stifling.  There’s no big surprise here that Shin has been carrying a torch for her as well.  The predictable love story perhaps prevents this book from being taken seriously by the literary community, but it drew me in anyway.  I was more put off by the many secrets and misunderstandings between Ji Lin and Shin, which seemed to be tired devices for keeping the pair apart.  Anyway, what’s not to love about a love story between step-siblings, with a healthy dose of intrigue and Chinese superstition thrown in?  Speculation about a sequel makes me hopeful.

THE MIDNIGHT LIBRARY by Matt Haig

Nora Seed is in her mid-thirties, and she is depressed.  Instead of seeking out a good therapist, she tries to kill herself.  In limbo between life and death, she lands in the Midnight Library, where she can review her “book of regrets” and try out some different paths through life that would have resulted from having made different choices.  The outcome of this book is painfully predictable, and the highlights are when Nora has to improvise her way through lives for which she is frightfully unprepared.  The prose is choppy, and it’s basically a fictional self-help book—too preachy, too moralizing, too heavy-handed with the life lessons, and too flippant with regard to attempted suicide.  Perhaps this book can inspire a reader to give pause to some minor self-reflection, like a Mitch Albom or Fredrik Backman book might, but it’s also just as poorly written and unappetizing as books by those guys.  Speaking of heavy-handed, Nora Seed’s real life is called her “root” life.  Root?  Seed?  Really?  It fails in the originality department, too.  In this book, Nora meets a man who experiments with thousands of different lives and calls it “sliding.”  Remember the Gwyneth Paltrow movie Sliding Doors, which explores two different fates?   I don’t mind reading a little fantasy now and then, or even some magical realism, but when Nora encounters several seemingly intelligent people who admit to believing in parallel universes, I just threw up my hands in exasperation.  Nora is obviously not the only character who needs a good therapist.  This book is way overrated.