THE BOY IN THE FIELD by Margot Livesey

Three siblings—Matthew, Zoe, and Duncan—happen upon a badly beaten and barely conscious boy in a field.  This discovery has a marked impact on each of them, as does the realization that their father is having an affair.   Matthew, the oldest, embarks on a quest to determine who attacked the boy.  Sixteen-year-old Zoe becomes romantically involved with an older man.  Duncan, a talented young artists who is adopted, decides that he wants to find his birth mother.  In some ways, this book feels as though it is intended for a young adult audience, but the beautiful writing and zippy pace make for a good read for us older adults as well.  The mystery of who assaulted the boy may be the hub of the story, but the author focuses more on how the three siblings individually process the event and how it affects their lives.  The author also addresses how truth is not always knowable:  the boy whispers one word when they first find him, but the three kids each hear a different word.  A feeling of sadness pervades most of the novel, but the conclusion is almost too saccharine.  I’d rather have that than one that’s too harsh, but not everyone lives happily ever after, either.  The boy in the field serves as a catalyst for the growth of the three main characters, but I would have liked a little more exploration of his backstory.  As is often the case, the character who appealed to me most was an animal--Lily, Duncan’s very perceptive dog.

MERCURY by Margot Livesey

Mercury is the name of a very special horse—so special that Viv has sacrificed all of her ideals for this horse, which she does not even own.  Like Gone Girl, this novel contains Donald’s perspective, then Viv’s, and then goes back to Donald’s.  These two are married with children, and their marriage starts to go off the rails when Mercury comes to the stable where Viv works.  Her ambitions for Mercury, with herself as the rider, crescendos into an unhealthy obsession.  In fact, obsession is not even a strong enough word.  Viv’s passion for Mercury is more like an addiction.  I devoured this book.  The author drops a few too many broad hints of major trouble on the horizon, but she managed the suspense level really well with good pacing and excellent writing.  A moral dilemma eventually develops for Donald, and that, too, provided motivation for me to keep reading when I should have been doing other things.  Viv, on the other hand, is a somewhat one-dimensional character.  She may love her children, but her love of Mercury trumps everything else.  Donald’s biggest failing seems to be inertia, and he seems to be blind at times to what is going on with Viv.  Ironically, he is an optometrist, but his friend Jack, who manages to hide his blindness from his girlfriend initially, has better vision than Donald when it comes to a person’s true character.

BEAUTIFUL WORLD, WHERE ARE YOU by Sally Rooney

Whereas Normal People was about one on-again, off-again couple, two such couples inhabit this novel, which is largely epistolary.  Eileen and Simon, who live in Dublin, have known each other since childhood, but Eileen fears that she will lose Simon as a friend if she commits to being his lover.  Alice, Eileen’s best friend, is an author with two successful novels to her credit and is living rent-free in a large house on the coast.  She meets Felix, who works in a warehouse, on a dating app and then spontaneously invites him to Italy with her on a press junket for her latest book.  Alice and Eileen exchange lengthy emails on a number of topics, including the collapse of civilization and the meaning of beauty, until Eileen and Simon finally visit Alice and meet Felix.  While the women are constantly second-guessing themselves, the men seem to know what they want.  In fact, the women do not come across as particularly lovable, and I’m not sure what the men see in them.  Felix is my favorite character. He seems to have excellent insight into the psyches of the other three characters, as his observations usually prove to be accurate.  He may not be book-smart, considering that he has no intention of reading the books Alice has written, but he is able to peel back the layers of everyone else’s insecurities to see what makes them tick.  I love the dialog in this book, and I can hear in my mind the Irish lilt in Felix’s voice. 

A CALLING FOR CHARLIE BARNES by Joshua Ferris

At first, the title character completely turned me off, with his five marriages and countless absurd failed business ventures.  I thought this book was going to turn out to be a farce.  However, as the book unfolds, we find that Charlie has redeeming qualities, despite the marital infidelities and poor judgment with regard to building a business.  I wouldn’t go so far as to say that he has a heart of gold, but neither is he heartless.  At 68 years old, he convinces himself that he has pancreatic cancer and proceeds to alert his children regarding his imminent death.  Apparently this is not the first time that he has diagnosed himself with a terminal illness, and his children are rightfully skeptical.  I don’t know to what degree this novel is autobiographical, but the narrator is Charlie’s son Jake, who is a writer.  Jake holds his father in high esteem, despite his father’s flaws and the uneasy relationship Jake has with Charlie’s current wife, Barbara, who seems to love Charlie more than perhaps he deserves.  Certainly Barbara and Charlie grew on me as the story unfolded, but the book has basically two endings, sort of like Atonement or Life of Pi.   I was not wild about this device in any of these books.  I can understand a need for dual endings if unreliable memories are at play, but that’s not the case.  The author has a different purpose here, and it ties in with Jake having given his father an unfinished draft of a book that Jake has written about Charlie, which is obviously this novel.  Several family members read this draft and uniformly react to it negatively, even denying some of its obvious facts, perhaps giving Jake pause about whether the truth is always the best path.

THE UNNAMED by Joshua Ferris

Tim Farnsworth, a partner in a New York law firm, suffers from bouts of the ultimate wanderlust.  When the urge to walk hits him, he can’t stop until he drops.  He eventually falls asleep in his tracks, even if he is in his bathrobe and barefoot in a snowstorm.  This affliction has his doctors baffled and his wife, Jane, at her wit’s end.  She has tried handcuffing him to the bed, but that solution is just as impractical as insisting that he keep a backpack of warm clothing with him at all times.  As he embarks on one of his unplanned excursions, he encounters a man who claims to have the knife with which a woman was murdered.  Tim is defending the man charged with the murder but can’t interrupt his walk to get more info from the man with the knife.  This failing is almost as crushing for Tim as the effect that his walking has on his family.  His compulsion is not entirely believable and is no doubt a metaphor for something I can’t identify, although drug addiction comes to mind.  Equally unbelievable is the fact that his episodes do not elicit the harassment that vagrants often endure or the pilfering of his wallet while he is sleeping in inconvenient places.  In fact, his odysseys are largely uneventful, except for the toll they take on his body.  Still, the issues with his job and his family keep this unusual story from seeming too outrageously absurd.

THE HEAVEN & EARTH GROCERY STORE by James McBride

Jews and Blacks live semi-harmoniously in this semi-voluminous cast of characters.  In fact, at times I had to remind myself who was Jewish and who was Black, and if I couldn’t remember, then it just didn’t really matter.  This amalgamation of ethnicities occupy Chicken Hill, a section of Pottstown, PA, in the 1930s, along with the usual bigots.  The intricate plot at times bogs down but ultimately revolves around Dodo, a Black teenager who lost his hearing in a home explosion.  The neighborhood bands together to hide Dodo from the authorities who want to confine him to a huge mental institution where abuse is rampant.  Moshe and Chona, who own the title establishment, shoulder most of the responsibility for keeping Dodo safe, but he is the nephew of Nate and Addie.  These four are the heart and soul of the novel.  The final section of the book covers two overlapping schemes, one of which requires more moving parts than I could fathom ever being successful.  This book also has a number of side plots whose relevance is not obvious until the finale, and McBride makes sure that all of his puzzle pieces fit together in the end.  Although obviously focused on community and connection, the book opens with an unidentified skeleton whose story eventually unfolds.  McBride also throws in a sprinkling of disabilities.  Aside from Dodo’s deafness, a number of characters seem to have foot problems, giving a pair of shoemakers some bit parts in this story, and Chona has one leg shorter than the other.  I’m not sure what the point is, except to demonstrate more fully what a blended community could look like.  There are definitely some evil dudes here, but kindness and acceptance prevail.