THE OTHER VALLEY by Scott Alexander Howard

I love time-travel novels with their tricky handling of interference with the past.  In this one, the author has conjured up a unique world--a series of identical valleys with a twenty-year time difference between each one.  The valley to the west is twenty years in the past, and the valley to the east is twenty years in the future.  The boundaries are manned by a gendarmerie who ensure that no one crosses into an adjacent valley without an assigned escort and permission from the Conseil of both the visitor’s home valley and destination valley.  Denied petitions require vigilance, as those petitioners may attempt to cross anyway.  We meet Odile, the first-person narrator, when she is sixteen years old.  She becomes friends with Edme, a violin prodigy, and then recognizes his parents visiting from the future, despite the black masks that are meant to disguise them.  This visit can only mean that Edme’s parents want another glimpse of him while he is still alive and that Edme’s death is imminent.  The tacit rule against sharing that information with his family in the present sets the course for Odile’s future, as she is riddled with guilt and keeps tripping up in her efforts to improve her lot in life.  There is not a lot of border crossing in this novel, but the concept certainly dominates the plot.  The author manages what time travel does take place with an eye for the intricacies and pitfalls that accompany such scenarios as people running into their past or future selves.  Thank you to Book Club Favorites at Simon & Schuster for the free copy for review.

THE SENTENCE by Louise Erdrich

Tookie, a Native American woman living in Minneapolis, is arrested for stealing a corpse.  Plus, said corpse had crack cocaine hidden in his armpits.  After ten years in prison reading voraciously, Tookie lands a job at an independent bookstore and marries her arresting officer, Pollux.  Then her most annoying customer, Flora, who wishes that she herself were Native American, dies.  All is well, but things have to start going awry or we don’t have a story worth telling.  Flora’s ghost haunts the bookstore, George Floyd is murdered, and Covid-19 causes life as we know it to grind to a halt.  Then there’s the double meaning of the title.  First, Tookie has to endure a prison sentence, and Flora seems to be serving a sentence of being trapped between the land of the living and the afterlife.  On the other hand, this book is largely about books, and Tookie believes that a particular sentence in a book killed Flora when she read it.  As with all Erdrich novels, this one serves up a heavy dose of fascinating Native American beliefs and traditions, including how to evict a ghost.  Erdrich also inhabits her own book here, as the writer who owns the bookstore.  I love how she describes herself and hope that her real-life bookstore is as welcoming and full of warmth as the one in this novel.  What ghost would not want to reside there?

FOUR SOULS by Louise Erdrich

Louise Erdrich’s older books, such as this one, read like folklore that has been passed down through the Ojibwe tribe for generations, rather than a novel that has sprouted from her imagination.  For me, these books are challenging in that the pace is on a par with molasses.  Here we have multiple narrators and two semi-related storylines.  Fleur Pillager signs on as the laundress for the wealthy man who acquired her land by paying the back taxes and then stripped it of all the trees.  Fleur becomes his wife, bears him a son, and then plots how to regain her property.  She is the adopted daughter of Nanapush, whose unfounded jealousy drives him to some shenanigans, which spectacularly backfire, against the man he suspects of trying to steal his wife.  Side stories abound, and although it is culturally enlightening, this is just not the kind of book that I can sink my teeth into.

THE BINGO PALACE by Louise Erdrich

Lipsha is a young Chippewa man who falls in love with his uncle’s girlfriend, Shawnee Ray.  She has a good head on her shoulders, and why she would put up with either of these men is mystifying.  Lipsha’s life is a mess until he obtains through some magical means a stack of bingo cards that never lose.  However, Lipsha’s sudden financial windfall does not seem to portend a better life for him or success in the romance department.  Shawnee Ray seems to prefer Lipsha to his uncle, who is also Lipsha’s boss, but that’s a pretty low bar.  Almost all of the action in this novel happens near the end.  Until then, Lipsha is on a mission to win Shawnee Ray’s heart through love medicine potions or starvation-induced visions or whatever.  The fact that he and his uncle maintain a cordial relationship despite their rivalry is the source of some humor in the novel, but the narrative drags at times.  Plus, keeping up with the other characters and their familial relationships is somewhat of a challenge.  I get that the author wants to give us an authentic glimpse of reservation life, as well as the spirit world, but the side stories just confused me and detracted from the main plot.  I stayed with it because I so wanted to see Lipsha get his act together, with or without Shawnee Ray.

THE SUN COLLECTIVE by Charles Baxter

After reading The Feast of Love, I thought I would love every Charles Baxter book, but sadly that was not the case.  Baxter’s prose itself is entertaining, but the storyline and characters did not grab me.  The title refers to an activist group whose manifesto preaches both love and anarchy.  Harry Brettigan is a retired structural engineer who picks up a copy of the manifesto during his regular walk through the mall with his group of friends called the Thundering Herd.  He refers to homeless people as Victims of Capitalism, and they seem to be the main recipients of the Sun Collective’s beneficence.  Harry’s wife, Alma, is actually more sympathetic to the group than her husband, particularly after she suffers an episode that may be a mini-stroke.  Two younger characters, Christina and Ludlow, are affiliated with the Sun Collective and add some spice to the storyline, particularly when Christina is on the Blue Telephone, a hallucinogenic drug.  Christina’s role becomes more pivotal as the novel progresses and we learn more about the whereabouts of the Brettigans’ son, Tim.  The problem for me is that all the characters, including the Trump-like president, seemed more like caricatures than real people.  The wordplay is the book’s salvation, but it’s just not enough.  The leader of the Sun Collective is named Wye, frequently misunderstood as “why,” and that’s the question I kept asking myself as I read this book and tried to decipher what the author’s, or the Sun Collective’s, message was.

THE SOUL THIEF by Charles Baxter

My biggest problem with this book is that I did not totally understand what happened.  Nathaniel Mason is a grad student in Buffalo in the 1970s.  At a party he meets Jerome Coolberg, who weirdly seems to want to hijack Nathaniel’s entire identity, including his family history and his possessions.  Whether or not Nathaniel’s soul is worth stealing is debatable, since he doesn’t seem to be committed to much of anything except his beloved lesbian friend, Jamie.  Things veer into treacherous territory during a nighttime Niagara Falls outing, but Nathaniel maintains his unflappable acceptance of everything, even serving coffee to a burglar, until one of Coolberg’s more grim predictions comes true.  A revelation near the end renders the plot of this book even more inscrutable, with several unanswered questions remaining.  On the plus side, I love Baxter’s writing.  Decades after Nathaniel’s grad school days, he travels to Los Angeles to meet Coolberg again.  The author’s descriptions of “the ritualistic hostility of LAX” and the “emblems of four-star neglect” in a Sunset Boulevard hotel are priceless.

THE FEAST OF LOVE by Charles Baxter

This is my first Charles Baxter novel, but it most certainly will not be my last.  In fact, I wish all novels could be as good as this one, as I completely fell in love with the writing style.  Every sentence is a splendidly written gem, and the characters are splendid as well.  I think there are about ten main characters, and they connect with one another in a closely woven narrative that is not exactly a plot.  It’s more along the lines of the movie Love Actually.  It starts out as Bradley’s story, but then it branches out to include the stories of other people in his life, including his two ex-wives, their lovers, his neighbors, and two young people who work in his mall coffee shop.  All of the characters are completely unique and easy to distinguish from one another.  Part of the fun of this novel is figuring out who is narrating each chapter, but their identity becomes obvious pretty quickly from context.  I think that I could read this novel many times, just for the sheer joy that the language delivers.  Bradley may be the fulcrum of the novel, but his satellite characters are more colorful.  For such a nice guy, he seems to be somewhat clueless and insensitive.  For example, he takes his first wife to visit the animal shelter, in spite of the fact that she is extremely afraid of dogs.  In that same vein, he takes his second wife to a remote B&B for their honeymoon, completely ignoring her phobia of open spaces.  These adventures seem a little torturous on the surface, but Bradley thinks he will somehow cure both wives of their fears, and, honestly, these uncomfortable situations make for some great reading.  Humor abounds here, but the author does not shy away from human tragedy and addresses it with a clear-eyed directness while also offering hope that the grief will one day morph into a new beginning.

BIRNAM WOOD by Eleanor Catton

The title is a MacBeth reference, but here it’s a New Zealand environmental activist group that surreptitiously plants vegetables on unoccupied lands they don’t own.  Mira founded the group, and now she has accepted a large donation from American billionaire Robert Lemoine.  Is this a pact with the devil?  Time will tell, but Lemoine certainly is not known for his ecological awareness.  Under the guise of building a doomsday bunker, Lemoine is conducting an illegal mining operation.  Tony, a former Birnam Wood member and aspiring journalist, becomes curious about Lemoine’s activities and finds himself being pursued by Lemoine’s heat-seeking drones.  Lemoine is the perfect villain—charismatic but ruthless, unscrupulous, self-serving, and opportunistic.  I don’t love the fact that Mira and her roommate Shelley are more than a little starstruck by Lemoine, whereas it takes a man (Tony) to see through his façade.  That quibble aside, this novel is full of suspense and adventure and therefore right up my alley.  Plus, it mentions that fewer than a million days have passed since the birth of Jesus.  I love fascinating tidbits like this, as well as the suggestion that we replace “I’m sorry” with “Thank you.”  For example, instead of saying to my tennis partner, “I’m sorry I muffed that shot,” I could say, “Thank you for not yelling at me for muffing that shot.”  What a concept.

MY YEAR ABROAD by Chang-rae Lee

This is my least favorite Chang-rae Lee book.  As expected, the writing is stellar, but the plot is just too bizarre.  Tiller is a 20-year-old, living with thirty-something Val and her eight-year-old son Victor, Jr.—Veej for short.  Tiller is supposed to be doing a year abroad for college, but he has settled into some version of domestic bliss after a wild and crazy junket that is also not college-sanctioned but certainly educational in its own way.  He travels with Pong, a fifty-something entrepreneur, whom Tiller meets at a golf event.   Then Tiller becomes Pong’s assistant of sorts, ostensibly tasked with helping Pong market an elixir to a young audience.  The narration alternates between the Val/Veej story and the Pong story, both of which are kooky.  Veej becomes quite the chef, and strangers start showing up from all over town to sample his wares, despite the fact that he and Val are under witness protection.  The Pong story, though, is what takes the cake in the weirdness department, as Tiller is part of an entourage that jets all over the Pacific Rim and finally lands in a luxurious lodge in China.  Tiller shows a talent for karaoke, but other than that, it’s not clear what his real role is, other than serving as a boy-toy for the daughter of the lodge’s owner.  Things turn very dark, but, fortunately, we know that Tiller will land on his feet, in the company of Val and Veej, who have dark moments of their own.  This novel is very long, and the plot is a whirlwind going nowhere until about three-quarters of the way through.  Pong’s backstory takes place during Mao’s Cultural Revolution in China, and I felt as though he ultimately subjects Tiller to a similar experience.