EITHER/OR by Elif Batuman

Selin, a sophomore at Harvard, was born in the U.S. but is of Turkish descent, speaks some Hungarian, and is learning Russian.  She has never had sex, never been kissed, and never been asked out on a date.  Her shoe size is eleven and a half.  This novel reads like a year-long diary and may contain an excessive amount of navel-gazing, but it had me at the first page.  Selin has a wry sense of self-deprecating humor, which contradicts her obsession with death, and she over-analyzes almost everything.  This novel is funny in an erudite sort of way and would appeal to anyone who likes a heavy dose of philosophy (Kierkegaard) with their fiction.  It is all about a personal journey—destination unknown—and  culminates in a really wild actual summer trip, sponsored by a company that recruits college students to investigate and write about foreign travel “off the beaten path.”  This whirlwind final section is absolutely my favorite part of the book and sets us up for a sequel.  Sign me up!  Selin’s freshman year is the subject of Batuman’s other novel, The Idiot, which I have not read.  If I had read it, I might be able to keep up with her vast circle of friends, with names like Svetlana and Lakshmi.  At one point she meets a guy whose name even she has trouble pronouncing, so that she just refers to him throughout the book as the Count, like a character in an Iris Murdoch novel.  To say that Selin is well-read is an understatement.  I am afraid that she puts me to shame in that department.

CALLING FOR A BLANKET DANCE by Oscar Hokeah

Ever is the main character in this story, but his prominence is not initially apparent, as he is only six months old.  Part Cherokee, part Kiowa, and part Mexican, we follow his development from an angry and unmanageable child to a man who works with troubled kids, although that transition seemed very abrupt to me.  His first wife, Lonnie, bears him three children, who become his responsibility when she becomes a meth addict.  Ever struggles to keep his family safe and whole and even adds a fourth charge named Leander, an adolescent whose fury and accompanying violence closely resemble Ever’s own issues at that age.  This book is largely about family, especially in the various Native American communities, but Ever’s relatives have problems of their own, especially alcoholism and drug abuse.  Both Ever and his sister, Sissy, both pin their romantic hopes on unworthy candidates for partners, making their journey toward keeping their heads above water that much harder.  This book bears some similarities to several of Louise Erdrich’s novels, and I found this one easier to follow in terms of the relationships between the characters.  Another plus is that this book has a very straightforward timeline.  However, there’s just not enough of a plot here to hold my attention.  The most memorable section of the book is the final chapter, but up until that point, the book is mostly poignant, with a feeling of inevitable hopelessness.

CHECKOUT 19 by Claire-Louise Bennett

I do not understand why the New York Times named this one of the ten best books of 2022.  It basically has only one character—the female narrator—and no plot.  This book is mostly a litany of books and authors that the narrator has read and some nebulous stories that she has written.  For reasons I cannot fathom the author sometimes switches from first person to third person, making me wonder if both are the same character but always deducing that they are.  We get sidelong glances into her life with few real specifics until near the end when she describes two rather significant horrifying events.  There are several scenes with a guy named Dale, whom the narrator does not claim as a boyfriend “but often behaved just as if he were.”  His actions made me wonder why on earth she would spend any time with him, boyfriend or not.  To top it all off, paragraph breaks are at a minimum, so that I can flip to almost any page, and nonstop words occupy both sides.  For me, this book was a chore to read with no reward for my effort.

THE BOOK OF GOOSE by Yiyun Li

Two inseparable adolescent girls, Agnes and Fabienne, in rural France in the 1950s decide to write a macabre book.  They enlist the help of a man whose wife has died recently in order to get the book published, but actually Fabienne is the author, and Agnes is merely the scribe.  Agnes follows Fabienne’s every lead and seems to have no identity apart from her relationship with Fabienne.  In their conversations, it is evident that Fabienne tells Agnes not only what to do but what to think.  However, when the book is accepted for publication, Fabienne wants no credit whatsoever.  In other words, this is plagiarism with permission.  Agnes goes to Paris to meet with the publisher and eventually moves to England to attend a finishing school for girls, where she becomes somewhat of a rebel in her own right.  Death figures prominently in this book, as it does in the book the girls write, but this is a coming-of-age story in which a one-sided friendship dominates the plot.  Fabienne is not only the creative and somewhat sadistic half of this pair; she is probably brighter than Agnes but has had to abandon formal schooling in order to tend to her family’s farm animals.  Agnes may not be that brilliant but does prove to have a pretty fertile imagination herself, as she writes some stories while the two girls are separated that are her work alone.  As a result, I was never really sure if she didn’t really deserve some, if not most, of the accolades she received for her book.  This novel wasn’t torturous to read, but neither was it engrossing.  Agnes narrates the story as a married adult woman living in the U.S. and reflecting on her friendship with Fabienne, as well as her experiences as a celebrated child prodigy who is presumed to have written a book.  The degree to which these experiences have shaped her life is somewhat nebulous, and it is equally unclear whether Agnes outgrows Fabienne during her time away, or vice versa.

VLADIMIR by Julia May Jonas

This novel made me think of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?.  As in Albee’s play, the plot focuses on two couples, all four of whom write and teach at a small, pricey New England college—upstate New York, in this case.  The first-person unnamed narrator here is the wife in the older of the two couples.  She and her husband have an open marriage, but he is facing possible termination due to a series of affairs he had with female students, some of whom have filed grievances.  To be clear, these occurred before the college outlawed such relationships, and all of these students were consenting adults.  The narrator merely shrugs off her husband’s infidelities, because she has had several flings of her own.  Now her lustful imagination is going wild over a new professor named Vladimir, and a teaser at the beginning of the novel hints at weird things to come.  The narrator goes completely off the rails, but the only consequences she suffers are for seemingly being complicit in her husband’s sexual peccadilloes.  As in the Albee play, this is a boozy bunch, but I don’t mean to sound judgmental.  In fact, one major theme here is that one couple’s marriage contract should not be the subject of speculation or disapproval by outside parties.  I agree wholeheartedly with their right to choose the parameters of their marriage, even if theirs is not the type of marriage that most of us want for ourselves.  In any case, this is what good writing looks like, and the author kept me engaged throughout.  However, the editing sorely needs some grammatical improvement.  For example, on page 190, a sentence begins with this phrase:  “The thought of he and Sid and Alexis all working together.”  Ouch.  That makes my teeth hurt.

NORTH WOODS by Daniel Mason

A novel spanning centuries is usually about multiple generations of a family, but that is not the case here.  An apple orchard in western Massachusetts is the tie that binds as this book chronicles the lives of its owners, and what a curious bunch they are.  Just as I would become engrossed in the story of, for example, an artist who falls in love with a writer, we abandon their story and move on to the next inhabitants of the yellow house on the property.  Then some of the residents never really leave; they live on as ghosts who may annoy a subsequent resident, causing that resident to be deemed mentally ill.  One would expect life surrounding an apple orchard to be serene, but this property sees murders, a séance, a narrowly avoided lobotomy, wild animal attacks, you name it, not to mention the ghosts’ shenanigans.  It’s more like an enchanted forest that is not immune to devastation itself, as it suffers blight, insect invasions, and clearing of the land by humans, of course.  I really enjoyed Daniel Mason’s The Piano Tuner and especially The Winter Soldier, but, for me, this is more of a novel to admire than to sink your teeth into.  I have to say that the ending is absolutely my favorite part—not necessarily the storyline but the way the author so skillfully and stealthily misleads the reader, offers clues, and then enlightens.

SWIFT RIVER by Essie Chambers

Diamond is the only Black person left in Swift River, now that her father has disappeared.  She is a 300-pound teenager who lives with her white mother.  She has never met any of her father’s family, but she gets to know them via letters that start arriving from her father’s cousin Lena.  Since her mother does not drive, forcing them to hitchhike from place to place, Diamond has been tucking away some of her earnings from her job at the local motel so that she can take driving lessons.  She has aced the written test and now finds herself practicing driving along with her classmate Shelly under the tutelage of a frisky young man. This would all be funny if it weren’t so sad—Diamond’s eating habits, her loneliness, her mother’s poor judgment, and especially the uncertainty of her father’s whereabouts.  He is presumed dead, but Diamond and her mother have had to wait seven years to obtain a death certificate that will free up his life insurance money.  In one flashback Diamond’s father gives her a $100 bill when she loses a tooth while they are away from home.  This is not a family that can afford tooth fairy gifts of $100, and I did not understand why her father did this.  Diamond and her mother are both shocked, but the ultimate fate of the $100 bill is even weirder.  Thanks to superb writing, though, this book was a joy to read.  On the one hand, I did not love having most of Diamond’s family history conveyed via sometimes lengthy letters that appear in the book.  However, this technique limited the number of timelines in the rest of the narrative to just stuff that happened during Diamond’s lifetime and made it easy to recognize what was ancient history.  Thank you to Book Club Favorites at Simon & Schuster for the free copy for review.