ALOFT by Chang-rae Lee

Sixty-year-old Jerry Battle works part-time at a travel agency, now that his son Jack is at the helm of the family landscaping company.  However, Jack’s “lofty” attempts to change the company’s direction now have the company teetering toward bankruptcy.  Jerry spends as much time as he can, weather permitting, in his Cessna plane, drifting above Long Island and all the problems down below.  In fact, Jerry is much maligned by both his family and Rita, his former girlfriend of twenty years, for being emotionally distant, even after the tragic death of his mentally ill wife, Daisy.  Jerry’s life just keeps getting more complicated by family issues, as his daughter, Theresa, has made a difficult and possibly unwise decision, and Jerry’s aging father is creating crises of his own.   What Jerry really wants is to persuade Rita to come back to him, but she is now involved with a very successful and wealthy lawyer.  One particularly entertaining scene in the novel is a tennis match between Jerry and Rita’s lover on which an outlandish bet is made.  Another terrific section is at the beginning when Jerry is buying the plane from a guy who had a stroke while piloting it at 9500 feet.  This beautifully written book obviously has lots of family drama, plus plenty of soul-searching as Jerry tries to navigate through the turbulence and steer his life’s sudden bumps toward a smooth landing.

NATIVE SPEAKER by Chang-rae Lee

Henry Park is a Korean-American with an unusual job:  he is expected to cozy up to a particular person in order to get dirt on them.  After his assignment to a psychiatrist turns into a fiasco, he is offered redemption by having to join the volunteer staff of a rising political star named John Kwang, who is also Korean-American.  Park’s problem, if you want to call it that, is that he identifies too closely with his assigned mark, and empathy is not conducive to his getting the goods on anyone.  John Kwang in particular is respected and charismatic and offers hope to the New York Korean community that he will break down ethnic barriers.  The novel follows Henry’s gradual rise through the ranks of Kwang’s minions as well as the possible reconciliation between Henry and his wife, Lelia.  Their marriage has been ripped apart perhaps due to her ethical concerns about Henry’s job and by the accidental death of their young son. I’m not sure what the plot gains from this family tragedy, but, ironically, Lelia is a speech therapist who often works with children from non-English-speaking families.  These children sometimes feel like surrogates for her lost son, and Kwang is something of a stand-in for Henry’s deceased father.  Henry may be the protagonist here, but Kwang is the more intriguing character whose true self emerges, little by little, over the course of the novel.  The author keeps the tone of the novel on an even keel throughout, somehow amplifying, rather than diminishing, the shock value of some revelations.

WHAT COMES AFTER by JoAnne Tompkins

Daniel and Jonah are two key characters in this novel, but they are both dead from the beginning.  Daniel was a handsome, popular, athletic teenager who disappeared.  His body was found days later after his awkward semi-friend, Jonah, killed himself and confessed to Daniel’s murder.  Isaac, Daniel’s divorced, schoolteacher father, is a devout Quaker who was emotionally unavailable to his son.  Lorrie, Jonah’s widowed mother, lives next door and struggles to support herself and her daughter.  The catalyst to a possible truce between Isaac and Lorrie is Evangeline, a pregnant, homeless sixteen-year-old.  Isaac is stubborn and judgmental in his assessments of people, despite evidence that he is completely wrong.  He particularly has a blind spot with regard to his son, who was no saint by any stretch of the imagination.  In fact, Isaac refuses to see the flaws in the novel’s most flawed characters but freezes out those who could use some compassion, with the exception of Evangeline, whom he takes under his protective wing.  As you might expect, grief is a dominant force in this novel, but the prospect of a new life when the spunky Evangeline gives birth provides a source of hope.  Her circumstances have made her rough around the edges but have also forced her to figure out how to survive.  She is the central figure around which everything in the novel revolves, and the ultimate question is whether or not she was a source of strife between the two dead boys.

THE FINAL REVIVAL OF OPAL & NEV by Dawnie Walton

I did not like the format of this book, which is a series of interviews conducted by Sunny Shelton, the editor-in-chief of a music-oriented publication.  I sometimes lost track of who was speaking and had to flip back, and the timeline was meandering.  Sunny’s comments had a different font, making them easy to distinguish, but I did not like the hopping around from one speaker to another.  Enough about that.  The storyline, if you want to call it that, involves a rock duo—a red-haired Englishman (Nev) and a Black woman from Detroit (Opal).  An Altamont-style disaster is the focal point of the whole novel and plays a role in the undulating relationship between the two main characters.  Both are guilty of lapses in judgment on that fateful day, but it’s hard to fault either one of them, since they couldn’t know what the tragic result would be.  Opal is definitely the character who gets the most air time and has the better moral compass, but her colorful fashionista friend Virgil was my favorite, and I would have liked to have heard more from him.  Nev, on the other hand, gets credit for snatching Opal out of oblivion and into the limelight, but after that, he’s not much more than an ambitious songwriter and guitar player.  As the daughter of Opal and Nev’s former drummer, Sunny’s personal connection is both a boon and a detriment to getting their story right.  When she receives a piece of information that may or may not be true, her plans for a book about Opal and Nev start to unravel, as does her relationship with them.

THE MAGICIAN by Colm Toibin

I was reluctant to read this novel, because, for me, Toibin’s biographical novel about Henry James, The Master, was a dud.  However, the German author Thomas Mann proves to be a much more book-worthy subject.  Like Henry James, he is a closeted homosexual, but he marries Katia and fathers six children with her.  Plus, his life is in an almost constant state of upheaval, due to WWI, WWII, McCarthyism, and the political activism of some of his family members.  The success of his novels propel him to an affluent life but with the aforementioned serious bumps along the way, plus the drug addiction of one of his children and the suicides of two of his siblings.  After having moved to the U.S., he and Katia find themselves inconveniently in Sweden when Hitler goes to war, leading them to a harrowing and desperate escape from Europe.  I did find it a bit challenging to keep track of his siblings, his children, their spouses and lovers, and his many acquaintances, including composers and other writers.  Plus, there are three Klauses(!), but the vast cast of characters did not detract from my enjoyment of the novel.  I do have a copy of Mann’s The Magic Mountain, whose length is somewhat intimidating, but I’m more inspired to tackle it now.

DEATH IN VENICE by Thomas Mann

Gustave von Aschenbach is an aging German writer who suddenly decides to vacation in Venice.  While there, he becomes obsessed with a beautiful Polish boy named Tadzio.  Aschenbach never communicates directly with the boy, but his attraction to the boy leads him to stalk him.  Apparently this story is a somewhat autobiographical, although what really happened probably is not quite as disturbing.  This is my first Thomas Mann novel, and I chose it because it has fewer than a hundred pages.  As translations go, I think it captures the mood of Venice and Aschenbach’s tormented infatuation quite well, but I’m not wild about the subject matter—the musings of a frustrated pedophile. 

I HAVE SOME QUESTIONS FOR YOU by Rebecca Makkai

We know from Rebecca Makkai’s The Great Believers that she can write vivid characters, but this book is more plot-driven.  It’s basically a murder mystery that takes place twenty years after the actual murder.  Seventeen-year-old Thalia died in her prep school’s swimming pool in what was initially considered an accident.  By the time the authorities realized that she was murdered, the crime scene had been completely contaminated.  Now, our narrator, Bodie Kane, Thalia’s former roommate, is teaching a podcast seminar at Granby, the prep school she and Thalia attended, and one of Bodie’s students wants to investigate Thalia’s death as her podcast project.  Granby’s athletic trainer, Omar, has been serving time for the murder, but the evidence for his conviction now seems dodgy.  The “you” in this book is Denny Bloch, the music teacher at Granby, who increasingly becomes Bodie’s prime suspect, as more and more details emerge regarding Thalia’s relationship with him.  This book was a slow starter for me, but I got more into it as the story progressed and more and more clues were revealed.  Also, the author takes some detours that I found to be unnecessary distractions, particularly with regard to the past behavior of Bodie’s soon-to-be ex-husband.  Ultimately, I pegged the wrong person for the murder, meaning that I didn’t really have a clue.