THE OTHER AMERICANS by Laila Lalami

A variety of first person narrators, including a dead man, tie this novel together in an intimate way.  These narrators are all very candid, but, particularly in one case, the author cleverly chooses that narrator’s words in order to mislead the reader.  The most prominent character is Nora, a musician who returns home to the Mohave Desert after her father dies in a hit-and-run that may or may not have been an accident.  Nora feels certain that her father, a successful business owner, was murdered, given that he was Moroccan and his donut shop was torched after 9/11.  Even after the alleged driver confesses, his intent remains murky, and proving vehicular homicide is problematic.  An undocumented man actually witnessed the accident but is fearful about coming forward and exposing his immigration status.  Nora’s family, however, remains the focal point, as surprising secrets about Nora’s father and sister surface but are not always shared with those who might benefit from such information.  The chinks in the armor of these two characters lend suspense to the storyline, as does at least one character with anger management issues.  I would have liked a chapter from Beatrice, a mysterious character that remains mysterious, and perhaps she remains in the shadows to retain that elusiveness.  Nora, puzzling over an unexpected inheritance from her father, strikes up a relationship with Jeremy, a cop who seems to be a bad fit for her but who ultimately helps her find her way through her grief.  This pair is the heart and soul of this novel, and I so wanted them to find a path to a future together. 

THE MOOR'S ACCOUNT by Laila Lalami

 Mustafa is a young black man in northern Africa in the 1500s who sells himself into slavery to save his family from starvation.  He soon finds himself in the New World on an ill-fated quest to find gold.  Although he is better equipped intellectually and physically to survive than the other men, he remains in the service of a white captain.  Their adventures are laced with hardships, including near starvation and disease, which decimate their numbers, and they find themselves relying on Indian villages to help them regain their strength, until the white men essentially become servants themselves.  Escape in this unknown and unforgiving land is a dicey prospect, but the remaining three white men, plus Mustafa, eventually become itinerant healers for the various Indian tribes in the Gulf Coast region.  At one point, Mustafa makes the poignant comment that he has finally heard the word “thank you” for the first time in his life.  He tells his story in order to correct the historical record that paints the Indians as murderers, thieves, rapists, and cannibals, when the white men are the ones most guilty of these crimes.  One of the greatest crimes, however, in Mustafa’s story, is that of deceit, as he comes to recognize that his contributions to their survival has not won him his freedom.  This is not the first novel about the atrocities that white men committed in conquering the New World, but I don’t know of any others narrated by a black man.  Unfortunately, I found this book tedious, and I had difficulty following the route that the men took through Florida and Mexico.  A map with the locations of the Indian settlements would have been extremely helpful, although perhaps that information is not known.

A TIME FOR MERCY by John Grisham

I count myself as a John Grisham fan, as I’ve read many of his books and really liked most of them.  The Street Lawyer is still my favorite, and I may reread it one of these days, but I rate this as one of his best.  Jake Brigance, from A Time to Kill and Sycamore Row, is back, reluctantly defending a prepubescent 16-year-old boy, Drew Gamble, for the murder of deputy Stuart Kofer in Clanton, MS.  Drew’s mother is Kofer’s frequently abused live-in girlfriend, and Drew and his sister have lived in fear of Kofer’s temper.  Kofer is something of a Dr, Jekyll and Mr, Hyde, in that his fellow officers like and respect him, but he is a violent drunk.  Saddled with Drew’s case, Jake is barely scraping by, financially speaking, and another indigent client is not making things any better.  He foolishly derails, pun intended, his lawsuit of a railroad company, which he had hoped would get him out of debt.  Jake’s money problems, however, have to take a backseat to preparation for Drew’s trial, and he has a few surprises in store for the prosecution.  For one thing, although being tried as an adult, Drew looks like he is about twelve.  The trial itself, of course, lives up to its buildup, providing a gripping finale.  However, the ending feels like a setup for a sequel, as there are some loose ends, although Grisham may feel that the Jake Brigance narrative has run its course.  His paralegal, Portia, could probably carry her own novel, despite the fact that Grisham’s protagonists are generally male.

THE BROKER by John Grisham

No courtroom drama or trial lawyers populate this 2005 novel from John Grisham.  Here Grisham dips his toe in the espionage genre, sort of.  Joel Backman finds himself suddenly pardoned, after six years securely behind bars, by an outgoing one-term President who doesn’t read his daily intelligence briefing.  Sound familiar?  It’s uncanny how so many authors have a knack for predicting the future.  Anyway, the CIA, who secured Backman’s pardon, hides him for a while in Italy until they are ready to release him to the wolves for slaughter.  The problem is that they have to keep an eye on him, because they want to find out who wants Backman dead.  Then the CIA will know who launched some very sophisticated surveillance satellites whose software Backman’s Pakistani contacts hacked.  Backman, true to his nickname, had brokered a deal with the Saudis for the software that takes control of the satellites, but pleaded guilty when his scheme was discovered, and all of his fellow schemers wound up dead. The storyline becomes a little tedious while Backman, in his witness protection of sorts, is studying Italian with a CIA-supplied tutor, eating scrumptious food, and exploring centuries-old cathedrals.  However, the frenetic finale more than makes up for this short pause in the action.  Obviously, Backman’s deeds brand him as an opportunist without a moral compass, but Grisham lures us into rooting for him nonetheless.  Maybe we are willing dupes because Backman’s handlers are so much more despicable.  Given Backman’s reputation and history, it’s hard to fathom why his son, whose own legal career Backman virtually destroyed, would willingly help him.  The son and the reader can only hope that Backman has realized the error of his ways and that he will somehow right the many wrongs that he has left in his wake.

OLIVE, AGAIN by Elizabeth Strout

The ever blunt and prickly Olive Kitteredge is back and in even better form this time around.  It is rare that I love a sequel more than the original, but that is certainly the case here.  Perhaps I was more prepared for the vignette style that Strout employs.  Olive is sometimes the main character and sometimes just appears as a cameo, but I also recognized beloved characters from The Burgess Boys and Amy and Isabelle in this novel.  What a treat!  Even better are the laugh-out-loud moments.  In the middle of some various serious dialog, such as one conversation about the sad and lonely lives of many nursing home residents, one of the characters will blurt out an outrageous and hilarious comment.  Several stories stand out as memorable, including one in which a teenage girl allows the man whose home she is cleaning to watch her fondle her own breasts, although such an act would at first seem reckless and perhaps even dangerous.  In another story, a woman confides in her beloved family lawyer about a marital indiscretion and grapples with whether or not to confess the affair to her husband.  In perhaps the most shocking story, a woman explains to her parents and sister that she earns money as a dominatrix.  Whoa.  Even more weird from my sheltered perspective is that her encounters do not include sex.  Ultimately, Olive is the hub to all of the spinning spokes of this novel.  She has met her match in Jack Kennison, a former Harvard professor, who just loves her “Oliveness.”  Here we have two souls with apparently little in common who find comfort in each other’s company late in life.  They do both, however, have uneasy relationships with their children.  Olive has never really liked her daughter-in-law but has to reevaluate her disapproval when she notices that the daughter-in-law treats Olive’s son in a similar condescending manner to the way in which Olive treated her son’s father.  The fact that her son may have chosen a wife whose personality resembles that of his mother is an eye-opener that may open the door to reconciliation between Olive and both her son and his wife.  Olive endures a brief stint in the hospital in which her son visits frequently and surreptitiously keeps track of her condition even more closely than she would ever have expected.

ANYTHING IS POSSIBLE by Elizabeth Strout

One could say that Elizabeth Strout makes ordinary people compelling, but, actually, this book is populated with characters who are anything but ordinary.  Lucy Barton, from Strout’s earlier work, My Name Is Lucy Barton, returns to her Midwestern hometown after having published a best-selling memoir.  When her siblings dredge up an incident from the past that paints their mother as an even worse monster than Lucy remembers, Lucy has a panic attack, cutting her visit short.  Her brother Pete, who lives in their poverty-stricken childhood home, has always harbored the opinion that their father started a fire that uprooted a family and killed their livestock.  Pete is such a tragic character, shouldering the guilt about his father and stressing out as he tries to make his house presentable for Lucy’s visit.  Other characters do not fare as well in the sympathy department, particularly Linda and her husband Jay.  Linda basically serves as her husband’s pimp, encouraging his voyeurism and sexual liaisons.  Yikes!  The aberrant actions of this pair backfire when his unwanted attention becomes predatory, and I found it impossible to be compassionate for them.  Aside from these two wackos, most of the other characters are people I would like to get to know.  Mary is especially appealing.  She lives in Italy with her decades-younger husband Paolo, when her beloved daughter Angelina finally comes to visit.  This reunion comes with some baring of souls, and I loved being a party to this mother-daughter conversation.  The writing here is just extraordinary in a very understated way, and I’m now accustomed to Strout’s usual format—individual stories that blend together to make a whole.  I see that her latest novel, Oh William!, is the third in this series, and I hope to read it before I forget these characters.

ABIDE WITH ME by Elizabeth Strout

I am a huge fan of Elizabeth Strout’s writing but not of this book, mostly because I found the main character so unappealing.  Tyler Caskey is a great orater and the pastor of a church in a small New England town.  A year after the death of his wife, he appears to his congregation to be functioning, but in reality he is floundering.  His younger daughter is living with his mother, and his older daughter, who is in pre-schoo,l would be better off there as well.  Tyler sends her to school with virtually no food, her hair a tangled mess, and wearing the same clothes as the day before.  When the child begins to act out at school, due to grief and confusion, Tyler becomes a parent in denial, just as he was formerly in denial about his wife’s health.  Admired for his magnificent sermons delivered without notes, he soon faces increasing backlash from his parishioners as his life tumbles out of control.  He is in over his head at home and unable to offer advice to his parishioners, causing him to question his calling from God.  Unlike Strout’s character Olive Kitteridge, who is blunt to the point of meanness, Tyler is a coward, and I found his failure as a father hypocritical and difficult to forgive.  The book does contain one conversation that I particularly enjoyed, in which a woman has been coerced into phoning Tyler about his daughter’s latest behavior unbecoming to a minister’s daughter.  The woman makes it clear that she did not want to make this call while at the same time getting her point across very effectively.  This is just one of several wake-up calls for Tyler that he chooses to ignore—until he recognizes that his job may be in jeopardy.

AMY AND ISABELLE by Elizabeth Strout

This is one of those books where I can’t quite put my finger on why I liked it so much.  The novel takes place during one summer in the lives of a single mother, Isabelle, and her teenage daughter, Amy, who becomes involved with her math teacher, Mr. Robertson.  Isabelle, however, is the more fascinating character.  Isabelle struggles not only with her somewhat distant relationship with Amy but also with her own personal loneliness that may stem just from shyness.  She works in an office with a group of other women, but she has slightly superior status as the boss’s personal secretary.  Isabelle gradually comes out of her shell, as she discovers the many tribulations of the women in the office, particularly Dottie, who claims to have seen a UFO in her yard after she undergoes a hysterectomy.  Isabelle has enough compassion to know better than to ridicule Dottie’s imagined sighting and finds herself inadvertently forming alliances.  Amy’s dalliance with her teacher is more than just an adolescent crush, and it becomes an unhealthy obsession, partly fueled by Mr. Robertson’s recognition and encouragement of Amy’s intellectual potential.  The more I came to know both Isabelle and Amy, the more I wanted to embrace them.  The writing just thoroughly and effectively evokes who these women are, and I devoured this book with relish.

TO BE A MAN by Nicole Krauss

I very rarely read a collection of short stories, but I read this one for book club, and I do really like Nicole Krauss.  I much prefer characters that mature over the course of a novel and a plot that I can sink my teeth into, but this collection has its merits.  Some stories here can stand on their own just fine, and others feel like the first chapter of a novel, and that may indeed be their purpose, as they seem to end with a cliffhanger.  One in particular ends with a man taking a baby up to a building’s roof.  My favorite is “The Husband,” the first part of which is an odd phone conversation between mother and daughter.  This story seemed not only the most compelling but also the most complete, although it did leave me puzzling over a few unanswered questions.  Some of the stories have a dreamlike quality, and a few seem to be missing a beginning.  In one case, the city is distributing gas masks to everyone in response to an undisclosed emergency, and I love how the author compares the look of these masks to an anteater.  The last story, whose title is also the title of the collection, concerns the perils of an open marriage.  The stories cover a wide variety of topics, although several have a connection to Israel, but not all characters are pro-Israel from a political standpoint.  Actually, neither politics nor religion factors heavily into these stories.  They are all very human stories, mostly about relationships being built, being solidified, or being torn asunder.