BLUE SKIES by T.C. Boyle

The title of this book is ironic, as climate change is rearing its ugly head on both coasts.  Cat is a twenty-something in Florida where the rain never stops.  Her parents and brother, Cooper, are in California where wildfires rule.  These family members are on opposite coasts with opposite attitudes.  Cat buys a python as a fashion accessory, while her mother is experimenting with recipes using crickets that she is raising.  Cooper is an entomologist who loses his arm due to a tick infection and becomes sullen after his “abridgement.”  Will an environmental catastrophe in which all the insects die wake him up?  Cat, however, is the real focus here, and she just does not get any smarter as the book progresses.  I knew what calamity was coming and didn’t have to tear through too many pages to get there.  Afterward, Cat becomes marginally less vapid and more responsible but not enough to anticipate or head off the next disaster.  She and Cooper both attack their problems with lots of drinking, adding to Cooper’s depression and Cat’s tendency to screw up.  The sanest person in this novel is their mother, whose attempts at being a good steward of the planet, repeatedly get thwarted, but she keeps on striving to keep her family afloat—literally.  

TALK TO ME by T.C. Boyle

This novel bears some similarity to Karen Joy Fowler’s We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, in that it focuses on a chimpanzee who lives among humans and has learned sign language.  In both books, the chimp’s effect on human lives is significant.  Aimee is a college student who responds to a help-wanted ad posted by Guy, a professor at her university who is training Sam, the chimp.  Sam and Aimee bond instantly, and Aimee becomes a necessity to Sam’s world, just as Sam becomes the focal point of Aimee’s life.  Sam eats cheeseburgers, drinks beer, and smokes weed along with his caretakers, but his time among humans is limited.  Once he becomes fully grown, he will be in a position to overpower them, and the consequences could be catastrophic.  Sam may live among humans, but he is not exactly domesticated, and one of his tantrums has resulted in a serious facial wound to a woman who previously worked with him.  What happens to Sam at the end of his term with Guy is not something that Aimee has really contemplated, as there really are no good options, especially since she and Guy do not “own” Sam.  His fate is in the hands of a scientist who couldn’t care less about Sam’s and Aimee’s attachment to one another and sees Sam’s value in financial terms only.  Sam is not only ill-equipped to be returned to the wild, but he has never been around members of his own species.  The humans will survive without Sam, but his survival is totally dependent on humans. In other words, proving that a chimp can develop language skills may have scientific value, but his unfortunate endgame is cruel.  Boyle reminds us that animals are not on this planet to serve the needs of humans, but somehow we humans see them as property that exists to serve our own purposes.

OUTSIDE LOOKING IN by T.C. Boyle

Imagine a group of Harvard psychology professors and grad students in a big house regularly tripping on LSD in the 1960s when it was legal.  I have nothing against Timothy Leary or psychedelic drugs, for that matter, but my immersion in this novel was not always pleasant.  It focuses on a married couple, Fitz and Joanie, and their teenage son, Corey, who join Leary’s commune-like inner circle.  A grad student himself, Fitz, along with the others, is ostensibly engaging in an experiment to evaluate how LSD might cure mental illness, although none of the participants are technically mentally ill.  However, one might suggest that imprinting on Leary as their beloved leader and tripping in front of their children are not exactly ringing endorsements of their sanity.  These people are the epitome of bad role models, and just when you think they can’t get any more reckless, they give their kids LSD, too.  I am a huge T.C. Boyle fan, but this is not one of my favorites.  My problem is that he does not make LSD seem like all that much fun, while at the same time the characters’ lives all revolve around the drug—and around Leary, whose charisma does not leap off the page.  Part of the attraction that Fitz and Joanie have for this group habitation is financial, as Leary and his rich girlfriend mostly foot the bills.  Leary’s other hangers-on come across as smarmy and insincere.

THE TERRANAUTS by T.C. Boyle

Anything can happen, and does, when you put four men and four women in a giant terrarium, called an Ecosphere, with the media and the public keeping apprised of their activities.  This human experiment, as a dry run for populating Mars, did actually take place in the 1990s but fizzled.  In Boyle’s reimagining, the eight terranauts face overheating, under-oxygenating, and intense personal disagreements as they share an enclosed world, complete with livestock, agriculture, wild animals, and a small ocean.  Three first-person narrators carry the story.  Ramsay and Dawn are among the eight selected to spend two years in the Ecosphere, and Linda, who is best friends with Dawn, remains on the outside, working toward making the cut for the next group.  Having a narrator like Linda who is not a part of the experiment might seem like a bad idea, but her role entails gathering dirt on Ramsay’s and Dawn’s ex-lovers, along with other assorted gossip, which she may or may not pass along.  At first she is Dawn’s champion, or least tries to be, but Dawn makes some decisions that cause Linda’s attitude to deteriorate and devolve into bitterness and jealousy.  Even as she contemplates how to get even, Linda quotes her Korean grandfather as saying, “Before you set out for revenge, be sure to dig two graves.”  I love that!  Linda definitely does not exhibit the qualities that would make her a good fit for this experiment, but Dawn, who is perhaps more adamant than anyone other than Ramsay that they not “break closure,” is the one whose actions continually require spin control.  This book is full of surprises, and at each juncture I couldn’t wait to find out what the impact would be.

WHEN THE KILLING'S DONE by T.C. Boyle

This novel has an edge-of-your-seat opening.  It’s 1946, and a boat with three people on it sinks near the Channel Islands off the coast of Santa Barbara, CA.  Beverly is the only one who survives, and her granddaughter, Alma, is the main character.  Alma Takesue works for the National Park Service and is involved in the eradication of invasive animal species on the Channel Islands.  Her nemesis is Dave LaJoy, a successful businessman and fanatical animal rights activist who does not want to see the rats on Anacopa Island poisoned.  These two warring factions both have a legitimate argument, but Dave takes his battles to an extreme and dangerous level, thus diminishing his influence.  In one scene, he and Alma are actually at a restaurant together, and he proves himself to be rude to the point of total irrationality.  That behavior is just the tip of the iceberg, compared to what else he does.  His most deranged acts don’t even have anything to do with preserving animal life.  This book recounts a multitude of adventures of several generations of channel island dwellers, divers, and pleasure seekers but never strays far from the central ecological issue.  Prior to her job in California, Alma was in Guam for three years, where the brown tree snake, accidentally introduced there, has almost completely annihilated all of the native animals.  This experience has fostered her passion for protecting the Channel Islands from a similar fate.  The novel keeps coming back to Alma’s personal and professional journey, but the myriad misadventures on land and sea of other characters, some of whom make a very brief appearance, provide the thrill ride that jumps off the page.

A FRIEND OF THE EARTH by T.C. Boyle

“To be a friend of the earth, you have to be an enemy of the people.”  This is the mantra of Ty Tierwater, an eco-terrorist in the 1980s who vandalizes logging equipment and who, along with others, blocks a logging road by standing in cement.  These stunts, including a three-year tree-sitting protest by Ty’s daughter, seem crazy, but we also see Ty in his mid 70s in the year 2025, when the climate change apocalypse has arrived; almost all animals are extinct and the weather is either a monsoon or 130 degrees F.  The younger Ty may be a vandal with a cause, but his righteous indignation frequently gets the better of him, particularly when he starts to feel useless, landing him in jail and his daughter in foster care.  The purpose of these stunts is to gain media attention, but the bottom line is that they are totally ineffective at turning the tide of global warming trends.  The author’s gorgeous, evocative prose feels very prophetic.  For a book written 20+ years ago, it seems very current, especially when everyone starts wearing a mask during what appears to be a pandemic.  It also introduces themes that contemporary novels, such as Richard Powers’s The Overstory and Michael Christie’s Greenwood, have addressed, decades after this novel was written.  Ty is our flawed hero here who just doesn’t seem to be able to rein in his destructive impulses.  He constantly overestimates his own skill at avoiding detection and underestimates the inevitable consequences of his being caught.

BUDDING PROSPECTS by T.C. Boyle

T.C. Boyle can dole out vivid and comical metaphors like nobody’s business.  The storyline here stagnates occasionally, but generally it moves along at a decent pace.  The plot is a get-rich-quick scheme that doesn’t pan out.  No surprise there.  It’s the 1980s, and Felix, at the suggestion of his enterprising so-called friend Vogelsang, recruits two buddies, Phil and Gesh, to plant, tend, and harvest two thousand marijuana plants on Vogelsang’s property.  Vogelsang neglects to tell Felix how rudimentary their housing will be, not to mention how hard the work will be, including fencing and irrigation.  The work is the least of their worries, though, with a nosy neighbor, a mean cop, and, of course, Mother Nature—rodents, bears, and monsoon-like rain.  These guys are not really screw-ups, although one accident lands Phil in the ER.  I was amazed that there weren’t more such mishaps, given the amount of booze and drugs these guys consume.  And any trip into town is bound to spell trouble.

WATER MUSIC by T.C. Boyle

Mungo Park, a character based on a real explorer, is arrogant and impractical, and sometimes even cowardly in his personal relationships.  To accompany this real life character with a weird name, the author has fun giving cheeky names to his fictional characters.  Ned Rise, whose surname hints of his multiple resurrections, is an enterprising rascal of London’s underbelly.  His nemesis is the dastardly Smirke.  Ned may not be a real historical figure, but he serves as a guide to the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century happenings in this novel.  He is also the antithesis of Mungo in background and temperament.  These two men’s stories will eventually converge, but, until then, this first novel of T.C. Boyle’s seems overly ambitious and is tedious at times.  Mungo Park is determined to be the first white man to follow the Niger River to its mouth, and he makes this journey twice.  Both journeys are long and life-threatening, and somewhat repetitive, if you ask me. As with Boyle’s other fictional biographies, this real-life framework constrains the author’s creativity.  A welcome aside is the author’s occasional focus on Park’s long-suffering wife, who can’t decide whether to wait for Park’s return or get on with her life—twice!  Ned, however, is a far more colorful character than either of the Parks, and he lends heart and sparkle to this otherwise long and arduous tale.

ROMANTIC COMEDY by Curtis Sittenfeld

 Sally Milz, our first-person narrator, writes sketches for a live TV comedy show that sounds exactly like SNL.  When the week’s host/musical guest Noah Brewster asks her to help him revise a sketch of his own, Sally begins to wonder if someone as hot and famous could be interested in an average-looking woman like herself.  Noah shows signs of being attracted to Sally, but she sabotages the moment at the after-party.  Then Covid changes everyone’s lives, including theirs, and they reconnect by email.  Their email exchange runs a solid 70 pages in the middle of the book, but this section was my favorite part.  Not only is it snappy and clever, but it allows Sally and Noah to expose their vulnerabilities more candidly than they would have been inclined to in person.  My second favorite part is the beginning section, which details how an SNL-type TV show operates.  The third section is more about how or if this relationship is going to work.  Noah seems to hold all the cards here with his good looks and L.A. mansion, not to mention his kind and respectful demeanor; he exudes tenderness.  However, Sally is not an easy sell, simply because she cannot quite believe that this hot guy would be more interested in her mind than her body.  The overall best feature of this book is, of course, the superb prose of Curtis Sittenfeld, including some insightful statements about life in general that prove she knows something about that as well.  Here’s an exchange from page 259 that impressed me with its wisdom:

He laughed.  “There’s a compliment I’ve wanted to give you, but I’m not sure I’ve figured out how to say it in a way that doesn’t make me sound self-centered.”

              “Everyone is self-centered,” I said.  “Go for it.”

TELL ME EVERYTHING by Elizabeth Strout

Bob Burgess is the central character here, but the book is populated with lots of people in his orbit:  his wife Margaret, his ex-wife Pam, his brother Jim, his friend Olive Kitteridge, and his friend Lucy Barton.  All of these people have appeared in Strout’s other books, but one new character, Matt, is accused of murdering his mother.  Bob signs on as Matt’s defense attorney and firmly believes in Matt’s innocence.  Bob’s other problem is that he may be falling in love with Lucy, who describes Bob as a “sin-eater”—someone who absorbs other people’s failings.  In other words, Bob—a married man—is not the type to be committing sins of his own, like adultery.  The main action, if you want to call it that, may revolve around Bob, but the central theme seems to be unrecorded lives.  Lucy and Olive get together regularly to swap stories about themselves and others.  Some of these stories are significant, and some are not, and I have already forgotten most of them.  Therein lies the problem for me:  there are just too many stories.  I think a trend toward an amalgamation of vignettes is developing in literary fiction, and I’m not wild about it.  Fortunately, here Bob is the anchor that supplies the main artery of the book, but there are a lot of tributaries that drifted away from my consciousness all too fast.

VICTORY CITY by Salman Rushdie

Two former cowherds sprinkle magic beans in ancient India, and what pops up?  Not a beanstalk but an entire city called Bisnaga.  Pampa Kampana, a woman who ages so slowly that she lives almost 250 years, provides the magic, and her narrative poem, discovered over four centuries later, supplies the story.  This fantasy novel comes across as a sort of parable or fable, but I’m not sure what the moral of the story is.  Great empires are fragile?  Bisnaga starts out as a melting pot for all types of people of various religions, and its military force is all women.  However, rulers come and go here, and most of them are not so enlightened.  The problem with this book is that it fails to fulfill my expectations of good fiction—suspense, complicated characters, and perhaps a cataclysmic event.  None of these components are present, and I was never invested in this tale.  The fact that it is based on a real city, minus the supernatural stuff, makes this book marginally more appealing.

HOW TO STOP TIME by Matt Haig

Tom Hazard has been alive for centuries due to an abnormality that causes him to age very slowly.  He has met Shakespeare and F. Scott Fitzgerald and has to keep moving so that people don’t start noticing that he still looks the same after years and years.  The love of his life, Rose, died of the plague, but they had a daughter, Marion, who inherited Tom’s condition.  The author definitely makes a case for not wanting to live forever, as all that keeps Tom going is his search for Marion.  Hendrich is the somewhat tyrannical head of the Albatross Society, which is a group of people with Tom’s condition.  Tom wrestles with doubt as to whether Hendrich really has his best interests at heart, but Tom thinks the society is his best chance for locating Marion.  The pace is not lively, as Tom constantly ponders whether he wants to continue living.  I get his fatigue with life, sort of, but he has the body of a 40-year-old.  His real problem is that he feels he can’t get too attached to people without divulging his condition eventually, knowing that they won’t believe him.  I think the premise here holds a lot of promise, but I don’t think the author makes the most of this semi-realistic alternative to time travel.  However, this book is way more convincing than Haig’s The Midnight Library, which also had a depressed protagonist, but I feel that this novel could have been so much more.

CHAIN-GANG ALL-STARS by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah

A research scientist in this novel goes to prison for burning down her own lab, in which she has perfected the science of inflicting pain.  Apparently her work survives, however, as an instrument of torture known as the Influencer.  It is used on anyone who doesn’t toe the line—civilian protesters and incarcerated criminals alike—in the not too distant future.  The real story here, though, is that the spectacle of gladiators has made a comeback.  Prisoners fight one another to the death as a spectator sport, and their lives are chronicled on reality TV.  Two women, Hurricane Staxxx and Loretta Thurwar, are the stars of these battles, and they also happen to be lovers.  Their adoring fans are either Team Staxxx or Team Thurwar, but some pushback against this violence does exist, especially when a sports TV anchor walks off the set in protest.  The only upside for these prisoners is that they will be exonerated and set free if they can survive three years on the circuit, and Thurwar is on the cusp of her three-year mark.  The problem with this book is that I never warmed to any of these characters.  As a reader I felt almost like one of the TV viewers of these characters’ lives in that I saw them but didn’t really get to know them.  I’m not usually a fan of footnotes, but I did find the ones in this book revealing, as the author cites real legal references that often either support or refute the notion of prisoners killing each other.  The author doesn’t make clear whether this practice was introduced as a deterrent to violent crime and then evolved into entertainment or whether the viewing pleasure aspect was its intention all along.

CHENNEVILLE by Paulette Jiles

John Chenneville wakes up from a coma in a Civil War infirmary in Virginia.  Slowly but surely he begins to remember his past and makes his way home to Missouri.  There he discovers that his sister and her family have been brutally murdered by a sheriff’s deputy named Dodd.  Thus begins Chenneville’s quest for vengeance as he travels through Indian Territory and into Texas, tracking Dodd.  Chenneville himself becomes a suspect in another murder so that he is both the hunter and the hunted.  This is a rather low-key adventure novel in which Chenneville encounters both the worst and the best kind of people along his journey.  He has to be wary at every juncture, but he is savvy and possesses good survival skills, including knowledge of Morse code, which comes in handy more than once.  He is also compassionate and seems to attract stray animals, while Dodd leaves a trail of horses that he has literally ridden to death.  Chenneville is such a good man that he is a bit one-dimensional, but my support for him did not waver until I realized that he was potentially sacrificing the prospect of a happy life in order to continue his pursuit of Dodd.  Predictability is one of the weaknesses of this novel, but Jiles still knows how to spin a good yarn and manages to weave in characters from her other novels.  In fact, Dodd himself, who adopts several aliases, actually appears in Simon the Fiddler under a different name.  Nifty.

SIMON THE FIDDLER by Paulette Jiles

This may be my least favorite Paulette Jiles book.  As the Civil War is winding down, the title character puts together a ragtag but talented musical group that meanders through southwest Texas, playing gigs at parties, saloons, and hotels.  Simon becomes smitten with Doris, a beautiful Irish lass who is serving out a 3-year contract as the governess for Colonel Webb’s daughter.  Doris is constantly having to fight off the Colonel’s attempts to get her alone at his new home in San Antonio, while Simon plots how to make his way there from Galveston and marry her.  They surreptitiously send letters to one another via the Colonel’s maid, as the Colonel has forbidden almost all outside contact for Doris.  This has the makings of a very good novel, and the author’s writing is exquisite, but the storyline is just not very peppy.  The beginning is lively, and so is the ending, but the middle drags, and the characters of Simon’s bandmates are not fully developed.  Sure, one of them likes to quote Poe, but the other two, except for an early letter-writing subterfuge, could have been left out altogether.  News of the World was such a standout, but this novel was a bit of a disappointment.

LIGHTHOUSE ISLAND by Paulette Jiles

Abandoned as a toddler, twenty-something Nadia Stepan embarks on a dystopian adventure in 2198, cleverly lying her way out of capture by the powers-that-be, who think that live executions on TV are suitable entertainment.  Water is the most precious commodity, with everyone suffering from dehydration and trying to subsist on their rationed quart per day.  Nadia is on a quest to reach Lighthouse Island, a resort advertised on TV.  Along the way, she meets James, a demolitions expert/cartographer in a wheelchair, and he immediately falls in love with her.  (Really)  Fortunately, he has connections that allow Nadia to switch identities with a prison counselor.  He also gives her a card that provides dispensation of food and drink from vending machines and gains her entry to various sites that would otherwise be off-limits.  Although the timeline of this book is completely sequential, it is hard to follow at times, particularly when it gets into the radio communications.  Plus, all of the characters except James and Nadia have very minor roles, and the plot feels sort of slapped together at times.  I did enjoy this novel to a degree, but it didn’t move me or teach me anything or raise compelling questions, except possibly about the disastrous state of the environment 200 years from now, and that’s no surprise.  In fact, I thought it was a bit unimaginative in that it doesn’t suggest major technological advances in communication and transportation.  Perhaps the author is suggesting that the oppressive, reactionary government has basically stifled all innovation.

BLACK SHEEP by Rachel Harrison

Named as one of the top horror books of 2023 by the New York Times, this book is not believable enough to be scary.  However, it is macabre entertainment of the first order, almost like a sequel to Rosemary’s Baby but less grim.  In fact, this book needs its own sequel.  Vesper is a twenty-something young woman waiting tables since her escape from the cult-like religious enclave in which she grew up.  I was thinking maybe Scientology, but that’s not nearly creepy enough.  Vesper receives a mysterious anonymous invitation to the wedding of her former best friend and her former boyfriend and decides what the heck.  Now that she’s been fired from her job, she may as well go home to visit her estranged family.  She also has high hopes of seeing her elusive and charismatic father there.  Vesper’s icy mother is a former horror movie actress whose home décor includes myriad props from her films.  This is the perfect Halloween read—an eerie treat with a snarky but relatable first-person protagonist.  The author taunts us with clues about the identity of Vesper’s father, but these clues are not substantial enough to give it away.

CANDELARIA by Melissa Lozada-Oliva

I cannot think of anything good to say about this novel.  We have three generations of women here—sisters Paola, Bianca, and Candy, along with their mother Lucia, and her mother Candelaria.  However, this is not only a family drama (I guess); it is also a zombie story.  The action whips back and forth between Christmas Eve and the preceding year.  To say that this novel is very hard to follow is an understatement, with floating see-through televisions, characters eating other characters quite nonchalantly, and conversations where it is unclear who is speaking.  How exactly the zombies come into being is still a mystery to me, but it has to do with a cultish workout center called The Women’s Stone. Paola, who has renamed herself to Zoe after having disappeared for a decade, lands a job as a spin class instructor there and soon comes to suspect that something fishy is going on.  Candy, who did a stint in rehab after a drug overdose, becomes pregnant by Bianca’s dead ex-boyfriend, goes to an abortion clinic where they drug her and send her home, still pregnant, and is basically carrying some kind of messiah for the undead.  I couldn’t quite determine if this novel was supposed to be farcical or a serious horror story, but it was a nightmare to read, one way or the other.

My copy of this book was an advance reader’s edition, and the numerous typos further tarnished my reading experience.  Words and phrases were frequently left out or duplicated, and letters were transposed to form other legitimate but inappropriate words.

THE VASTER WILDS by Lauren Groff

A teenage girl escapes from the famine of Jamestown with a small sack of tools, including flint, a knife, and a cup.  She dons the boots of a smallpox victim and heads out into the frozen wilderness.  Already starving before embarking on this adventure, food is hard to come by, and she has to take her chances choosing leaves, berries, and mushrooms that she hopes will not kill her.  This story of survival inspired me to familiarize myself a bit with the history of Jamestown and why they couldn’t feed themselves.  Basically, their supply ships got caught in hurricanes, or the ships brought more people than supplies.  Plus, the English colonists had no experience with agriculture.  I’m not much of a history buff, but I found this fatal example of poor planning to be fascinating.  Anyway, back to our girl trying to put some distance between herself and the failed settlement, which can hardly be called civilized.  She has had various appellations, including Lamentations and Zed, but she contemplates naming herself, just as Adam named all the animals, according to the Bible.  In fact, when she’s not dodging wolves, bears, native Americans, and another escapee, she ponders the validity of the religion she has always known. Her physical struggle to say alive may get top billing here, but her suffering began long before, and her constant reassessment of life’s essentials is almost as impressive as her resourcefulness.

AUDITION by Katie Kitamura

I really liked A Separation, and I loved Intimacies, but this book I just didn’t get.  It’s a head-scratcher, for sure.  The novel has two distinct and somewhat contradictory halves, just like the play that the narrator is starring in.  Both halves involve three characters—the narrator, her husband Tomas, and a young man named Xavier whose looks and mannerisms are very similar to the narrator’s.  The first half ends with sort of a cliffhanger, in which Tomas texts the narrator that they need to talk.  Then the second half begins, and it is completely inconsistent with what we understood from the first half.  What do we have here?  A highly unreliable narrator, for sure, but is she also delusional?  While the first half is taut and fraught with unanswered questions, the second half eventually gets crazily out of hand when a fourth character, a young woman named Hana, joins the cast.  She is the catalyst to a bizarre family dynamic.  The title also has me baffled, although I did wonder at times if the two halves were supposed to be different versions of the same play.  The saving grace here is Kitamura’s fabulous writing, but I just wish she had tied up the loose ends of the first storyline instead of abruptly starting a second one that weirdly intersects the first but then veers off in a completely different direction.

THE PEACOCK AND THE SPARROW by I.S. Berry

Shane Collins drinks too much, smokes too much, and has affairs with married women.  He is an American spy in Bahrain during the Arab Spring of 2011.  His career is winding down, not just because of his bad habits, but also because he is in his fifties and is mediocre at his job.  He has recruited Rashid as an informant for the Opposition to the monarchy in power, but Collins is supposed to remain neutral and just report his findings.  However, as things start to heat up, Collins becomes increasingly inclined to take sides, as he is forced to choose whether to be loyal to Rashid or to his superiors.  To further complicate matters, he falls in love with a local artist who is half his age.  Collins is principled with regard to the safety of his informant but not so principled in his love life.  He may be a flawed protagonist, but somehow his flaws just make him that much more human.  Sometimes he is a despicable person, and sometimes he is compassionate.  Sometimes he makes big mistakes, and sometimes he is brilliant. The tension in this book is palpable, especially when Collins occasionally goes rogue and proves that he still has some tricks up his sleeve.  I loved everything about this book—the characters, the twisty plot, and the gritty setting.  On reflection, this novel is largely about manipulation, but the challenge is to figure out who is manipulating whom.  Collins is a manipulator but is also being manipulated.  I think that if you know you’re being manipulated, then it doesn’t count, but being caught unawares in a scheme where you misunderstood your role is a good indication that you are the puppet rather than the puppeteer.

THE FETISHIST by Katherine Min

Kyoko, a singer in a punk rock band, wants to avenge the death of her mother, Emi, whose suicide stemmed from being rejected by a fellow violinist named Daniel.  Kyoko’s attempt at murdering Daniel comically fails, but she and her boyfriend do succeed in kidnapping Daniel while, ironically, he is in the midst of committing his own suicide.  Another of Daniel’s former Asian lovers, Alma, has had to give up her musical career due to MS, and she decides to kill herself on the same day as Daniel’s abduction.  A friend finds her in a coma, and her memories while comatose fill a number of pages in the book.  The title character, apparently, is Daniel, as he seems to follow Alma’s adage, “Once Asian, never again Caucasian,” meaning that all of his lovers after Alma will also be Asian.  For the record, though, his short-lived marriage is to a Caucasian woman.  In any case, Daniel is a cad who reflects on his many transgressions toward women while he is locked in Kyoko’s basement and enduring a steady diet of bologna on white bread, which could be a metaphor, but I’m not sure about that.  My favorite character is Kornell, Kyoko’s boyfriend and drummer in her band, who is literally her partner in crime.  His commitment to Kyoko’s plans for Daniel seems solid, but this is not his fight, and I kept wondering when or if he was going to save Kyoko from herself.  Basically, almost everyone in this book is a musician, and there are dozens of references to classical music pieces here.  I would love to see a list of what composition was played when, where, and by whom.

THE WREN, THE WREN by Anne Enright

Three generations of an Irish family tell their stories, but there’s not really that much to tell.  Phil, now deceased, was a fairly well-known poet who checked out of his marriage for good when his wife developed breast cancer.  His daughter Carmel, whose chapters are third-person for some reason, claims never to have been in love, but she is a single mother to Nell, a twenty-something travel writer for places she has never actually visited.  I would say that Nell, whose uneventful narrative mostly reads like a diary, does travel to some exotic locales later in the book, and I was never clear on how she had the money to do so.  She never knew her famous grandfather and sees and hears him only via old TV interview footage.  Nell’s passion, though, seems to be birds and not just the ones in her grandfather’s poetry.  Oddly enough, Phil’s first person coverage is shorter than that of either of the women, and he is the narcissistic one. His celebrity gave him the right, in his mind, to go ballistic when he couldn’t find his watch, which he happened to be wearing.  My favorite section of the book is where Nell is watching videos of deaf children’s reactions when they receive cochlear implants.  Now that kind of story might be a good basis for a book plot, but this book really does not have one.

LET US DESCEND by Jesmyn Ward

If slaves were such valuable property and so vital to their owners as farmworkers, why did their owners starve them?  Wouldn’t nutrition make them stronger and more efficient?  More puzzling is a slave trader who drags slaves for weeks and miles to market.  Wouldn’t they bring a higher price if they looked strong and well-fed?  Slave owners treated their livestock better.  Annis is a young slave whose mother is sold and whose owner is her biological father.  Hers is a hopeless and dreadful life, as she endures every nature of hardship.  A spirit, who may be benevolent or may have her own agenda, visits Annis from time to time, and I am not generally a fan of magical realism.  With or without the help of this spirit, Annis struggles to survive, although at times I think she just wants to die, and who can blame her, when living is sheer agony.   She has memories of a better life and envisions a life of freedom that does not involve constant fear of capture by the brutal slave patrols; constant anxiety for a runaway is not really freedom. This country was not the land of the free for slaves.  On the contrary, it was a hellacious place to endure.

THIS OTHER EDEN by Paul Harding

This fictional account of the real displacement of the people living on an island off the coast of Maine could have gotten bogged down in sentimentality.  Instead, it is a clear-eyed view of a very small mostly Black population who live in isolation, and we know from the beginning that all of the residents will eventually be evicted and resettled elsewhere or institutionalized.  The novel opens with a gripping account of a flood, and generations later a murder occurs, and this latter time period is when the rest of the action takes place, although the word “action” may not be appropriate, since the pace is pretty slow.  A white man, Matthew Diamond, starts a school there, and despite his disdain for Black people in general, he finds that several of his students are very bright.  One girl becomes a Latin scholar, and another soon exceeds the teacher’s mathematical ability.  A teenage boy, Ethan, a mixed race artist who can pass for white, has exceptional talent and goes to the mainland so that he can attend art school.  One section of the book is devoted to his experiences away from the island, and except for the auspicious beginning of the novel, this section was the most engrossing.  One of the men involved in removing the island residents describes the situation to his wife in very stark and unsavory terms, giving us some idea of why this displacement was allowed to happen.  However, his observations ignore the fact that these people are a loving family to one another and not just poor and dirty nameless beings.  The intermarrying and incest may have ultimately doomed this tiny population anyway, but booting them out of their homes was cruel and unnecessary.

NIGHT WHEREVER WE GO by Tracey Rose Peyton

Six women slaves of varying backgrounds live on a Texas farm that is struggling to make a profit.  Next to the land itself, these women are the most valuable proper that the Lucys own.  Lucy is not their actual surname, but it is the one assigned by the slave women because they associate their devilish owners with Lucifer.  Lashes may be the most frequent punishment, but that does not compare to the anguish they experience over separation from their loved ones.  One woman is in love with a slave on a neighboring plantation, and one hopes to visit her children on a steamboat trip with Mrs. Lucy.  One has a teenage son, also owned by the Lucys, but the other women expect never to see their families again. In order to expand their workforce, the Lucys bring in a slave whose only job is to impregnate the women, but they go to some lengths to thwart this plan.  The problem with this book is that it doesn’t really seem to go anywhere until we get to the very rushed and not entirely clear ending.  I felt so puzzled, let down, and frustrated that I regretted having ever started reading this book.  Inside the dust jacket the blurb has this headline:  “A gripping, radically intimate debut novel about a group of enslaved women staging a covert rebellion against their owners.”  This description is entirely misleading, as it implies more action than actually takes place.

THE WORLD AND ALL THAT IT HOLDS by Aleksandar Hemon

Rafael Pinto steps outside his Jewish family’s pharmacy in Sarajevo and witnesses the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand.  Thus begins WWI, and what would seem to be an auspicious beginning for this book.  Pinto lands on the front lines, along with the handsome Osman, and the two become devoted lovers.  The storyline is a series of Pinto’s adventures, including imprisonment, near starvation, a six-year trek across the desert, a sandstorm, and almost wasting away in opium dens.  Pinto becomes the protector of a child named Rahela, who may be Osman’s biological daughter, and whose responsibility is the only thing standing between Pinto and the fulfillment of his death wish.  The storyline here should be exciting, but I found that the writing style does not supply sufficient verve.  A British spy appears in the narrative from time to time to spice things up, but moments that grabbed my attention were just too infrequent.  Also, the author includes many untranslated sentences and songs in Bosnian or German or Spanjol, which is a version of Spanish.  Frankly, I didn’t mind getting to leapfrog these sections, as skipping these foreign phrases propelled me to the finish a little faster.

THE LAZARUS PROJECT by Aleksandar Hemon

Vladimir Brik, a Bosnian native living in the U.S. with his neurosurgeon wife, has decided to write a book about Lazarus Averbuch, a young Jewish man who was killed under suspicious circumstances a century earlier.  Brik uses grant money to research Averbuch’s history in the Balkans, accompanied by an acquaintance from Brik’s Sarajevo days, Rora, a photographer.  The timeline here is fluid, to say the least, as the storyline oscillates between Averbuch’s story and Brik’s travels, which sometimes involve border crossings in cars with reckless drivers who frown on seatbelts.  At times, I got bogged down in the unfamiliar history of the breakup of Yugoslavia, and my attention span waned.  Hemon, however, is quite the wordsmith, especially given that English is not his first language.  For example, here are a couple of my favorite passages.  On page 229, we have the sentence, “Her hair seemed to be ponytailed to the point of pain.”  I love this visual and always admire an author who can convert a noun to a verb with such a vivid result.  Then on page 263, Hemon writes, “The bathroom walls were daubed over with various venereal diseases; the lines between the tiles brimmed with unspeakable ecosystems.”  The image may be yucky, but the metaphors are marvelous.

MOTHERS AND SONS by Adam Haslett

Peter Fischer is a lonely gay immigration lawyer who specializes in asylum cases, many of which involve persecution for sexual orientation.  Until now, Peter has avoided cases involving gay immigrants, possibly because they force him to dredge up his own past.  His relationship with his lesbian mother, a former priest who now co-owns a women’s retreat in Vermont, is strained.  Theirs is just one of several mother/son relationships that support the book title.  We also have Vasel, Peter’s first gay client, whose mother helped get him out of Albania but whom Vasel cannot ask for a letter confirming his homosexuality.  Another client is Sandra, whose son Felipe is terrified that she will be deported back to Honduras and leave him alone in the U.S.  Last but not least is Peter’s sister, Liz, whose 4-year-old son, Charlie, whom she adores, is still not completely potty-trained.  Despite the peaceful tone of this book, its subject matter is anything but peaceful.  I would say that it is an uncomfortable, squirm-inducing read with several violent backstories.  I also found it baffling at times.  How can a traumatized teenager whose mother is a priest not receive any sort of counseling?

Y/N by Esther Yi

Sometimes I read a book, and I think, “Really?”  This is one of those books.  This is not the worst book I’ve ever read, but it’s way down there.  I don’t even know how to classify this book, because it’s so nonsensical.  Borderline fantasy, maybe.  The unnamed first-person narrator is a twenty-something woman living in Berlin. She becomes obsessed with Moon (“mooning” over him), a member of a Korean boy band called the pack of boys.  She writes a fictional story about him, using the placeholder Y/N, so that the reader can insert “Your Name” for the person in a relationship with Moon. When Moon decides to step back from the band in real life, the narrator travels to Seoul on a quest to find him.  She eventually tracks him to a convalescent home called the Sanctuary where she sees a boy who looks like Moon.  Here’s her thought process, from page 154:

“In fact, his resemblance possibly proved he wasn’t Moon.  Similarity precluded equivalence:  If the boy were Moon, I’d never say he looked like Moon, just like I’d never say that I looked like myself.”

This odd deductive logic is my favorite passage in the book, but it’s a good example of how weird the whole thing is.  On the plus side, the cover art is stunning, but you know what they say:  You can’t judge a book by . . . .

BIOGRAPHY OF X by Catherine Lacey

X is a fictional artist and author with a mysterious past and more pseudonyms than you can count on both hands.  Her biographer is C.M. Lucca, a journalist and X’s widow.  The backdrop is alternative history, like Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America.  In 1945, as imagined here, the U.S. was divided into the Southern, Northern, and Western Territories.  The Southern Territory, as you might guess, was extremely right-wing, and X was a rare escapee whose multiple identities helped her evade authorities.  Fact and fiction overlap in odd ways here, as X became friends with David Bowie, Connie Converse, and Susan Sontag, to name a few real-life notables.  Some fictional elements seem to be intentionally outrageous, with real people in different roles with different ideologies, such as the naming of Ronald Reagan as a Green Party presidential candidate.  These humorous asides don’t quite redeem this novel, though, in which Lucca seems to be so much in X’s thrall, even eight years after X’s death, as to be a bit pathetic.  She completely subjugates herself to X, even abandoning her career, which she may be resurrecting by setting the record straight about X’s history.  X is a woman beloved by many, but I didn’t find her the least bit lovable.  She’s definitely enigmatic, disappearing for weeks without explanation, expecting Lucca to carry on in her absence. Most of the remarks that Lucca quotes X as saying are completely incomprehensible and borderline nonsensical.  The photos scattered throughout are a treat, though, and this could be one of those books where it’s more fun to look at the pictures than to read it.

TREMOR by Teju Cole

My idea of a novel includes characters and a plot, but this novel really has only one character and no plot.  Tunde is a Nigerian-American professor and photographer who travels to Mali for a speaking engagement.  Chapter Five contains the entire text of the speech, and perhaps the audio version of this book gives it justice.  In written form, it is meandering and not exactly dazzling, just like the rest of this book.  Chapter Six is a series of first-person vignettes narrated by denizens of Lagos, Nigeria.  (One review suggested that these are Tunde’s interviewees.)  All that aside, I have two major complaints about this book.  First of all, there is a huge amount of discourse on African art and music, most of which was meaningless to me as a non-connoisseur.  Secondly, the narrative changes unexpectedly from third-person to first-person, with a few second-person references in which the “you” is never identified, at least as far as I could tell.  The change to first-person confused me to the point that I wasn’t really sure if the narrator was Tunde, but I assumed that it was.  Then on page 235, four pages from the end, in the middle of all of this first-person prose, we have a sentence that starts with “Tunde is making aviation cocktails with Sean’s help.”  Never mind that I have no idea what an aviation cocktail is.  My real question is whether or not Tunde is now referring to himself in third person, and if Tunde is not talking about himself, who is?  Needlessly frustrating.

THE MANIAC by Benjamin Labatut

I had to put my thinking cap on to read this book.  It centers around the life of John von Neumann, a brilliant physicist and mathematician who worked on the Manhatttan Project and who also co-wrote a book with major implications for the field of economics.  Each chapter in this novel features a different von Neumann acquaintance who sheds light on the man’s personality and intellectual gifts.    The title of the book could be a sort of double entendre, given that von Neumann could be very obsessive about his theories, but he also developed a computer whose acronym was MANIAC.  This book is not as enjoyable as When We Cease to Understand the World, but the last few chapters rescue the rest of the book, although they have little to do with von Neumann.  The last section, entitled “LEE or The Delusions of Artificial Intelligence,” focuses on computer programs written to play chess, and, more importantly, the Chinese game of Go.  The chapters in which an AI program called AlphaGo challenges the best Go player in the world, Lee Sedol, to a 5-game match are fascinating, even to someone like myself who knows nothing about Go.  We get a glimpse into the emotional psyche of Lee Sedol in this last section to about the same degree as we witnessed von Neumann’s reaction to his own successes and frustrations, even though the latter’s story occupies the majority of the book.

BROOKLYN CRIME NOVEL by Jonathan Lethem

Novels like this, especially with “Novel” in the title, should come with a disclaimer stating that its format is atypical.  Like Flights by Olga Tokarczuk, this book has no plot per se but is a series of vignettes.  It does have a bunch of characters, none of whom have proper names, and keeping them organized in my brain was impossible, since all the stories are shaken up and dealt piecemeal throughout the book.  On the plus side, this book takes a nostalgic look at a Brooklyn childhood in the midst of gentrification, despite everyday muggings.  Surprisingly, the muggers described here are mostly not adults, and weapons may be fictitious.  Mothers send their children out into the world with money hidden in their socks and “mugging money” in their pockets to appease the muggers. The problem is that snippets of narrative jump back and forth in time so that characters appear and then don’t appear again until much later.  The ambience that the author generates is vivid, and there’s a whole section on funny muggings, which morph into non-muggings in which the intended victim ingeniously thwarts the muggers.  On the flip side, we have a violent rape and a fake rape, but both the rapist and his non-raping ally have to face consequences.  Life is definitely not fair in this setting, but the author implies that Giuliani’s subsequent “stop and frisk” policy was not necessarily an improvement.

RETURN TO VALETTO by Dominic Smith

Hugh Fisher, a bereaved historian, returns to the Italian village of Valetto where his mother, Hazel Serafino, grew up, but the town now boasts only ten inhabitants.  Four of those are his three aunts and his grandmother, whose one hundredth birthday is approaching.  The family property includes a small cottage, which Hugh inherited from his mother but has now been claimed by Elisa, a chef from Milan. Elisa’s family apparently sheltered Hugh’s grandfather, who deserted his wife and four daughters to join the Resistance during WWII.  Elisa’s arrival on the scene solves at least one mystery—that of the whereabouts of Hugh’s grandfather after he disappeared.  Another mystery crops up when Hugh discovers that Elisa is the daughter of a woman who lived for a time as a refugee with the Serafino family.  Elisa’s mother and Hugh’s mother became great friends as children, but Hugh was never aware that refugee children lived with the Serafinos and has trouble coming to terms with why his mother never mentioned this fact.  Hugh soon finds that there is a lot more about his mother that he does not know, including an event whose details have been suppressed for decades and that only Elisa’s mother can shed light on.  All of the mysteries make for a good solid foundation, but the middle of the book drags, and the pace is almost as lethargic as the town of Valetto.  Ultimately, this is a family story about abandonment and regret, but it is not depressing.  I laughed at what Hugh’s grandmother says on page 37:  “I don’t recommend living a day over eighty-five.  Everything after that is like reading a novel you never liked for the second time.”  Oh my goodness, I hope not, but first, I have to get to eighty-five.

VENGEANCE IS MINE by Marie NDiaye

The translator of this novel tells us that Maitre is the title given to French lawyers, and Maitre Susane is the main character here.  She agrees to take as a client a woman, Marlyne, who drowned her three children, but that crime does not seem to bother her as much as the fact that she may have met the woman’s husband as a child, and that encounter may not have been totally innocent.  Remembrances of this encounter causes a rift between Maitre Susane and her parents—her father in particular—the reason for which I never grasped.  Another case she is pursuing is that of her housekeeper, Sharon, who is seeking legal residency status.  Sharon is an enigma in more ways than one but stubbornly refuses to provide her marriage certificate to Maitre Susane, who requires that document for Sharon’s case.  These two puzzles are never resolved, nor is the title, as far as I am concerned.  Vengeance is whose and for what?  I have to say that I was intrigued by Marlyne the most, especially the two radically different reasons she gives for murdering her children.  Both motives are equally unhinged, and in one description of her motivation, she describes her crime as premediated, but in her other explanation, she claims that she had no plans to kill them until the moment that she decided to do it.  She is a monster but still a more fascinating character than Maitre Susane.

THE MOST by Jessica Anthony

Even at fewer than 150 pages, this book does not exactly zip along.  It takes place over the course of one day in 1957, and the main character, Kathleen, spends the entire time in her apartment complex’s swimming pool.  Of course, there is plenty of reflection on her part as to why she’s lingering in the pool.  We also learn about her husband Virgil’s past, and neither wife nor husband is an ideal marriage partner.  In fact, it’s a wonder this marriage has not already been dissolved.  Virgil’s father, oddly enough, is the catalyst that may lead to some soul-baring sharing of past indiscretions.  Now, about the tennis.  Kathleen is a former standout college tennis player who talked herself out of going pro when she had the opportunity.  My problem, though, is that the tennis terminology used here is messed up, especially on page 82.  Players don’t volley from the baseline.  A volley is a type of shot where the ball is hit in the air before it bounces, and it is used primarily at the net.  Players rally from the baseline, meaning that they exchange a series of shots.  Maybe the author meant the service line instead of the baseline, or maybe the players really did volley from the baseline, meaning that the ball never bounced, but that would be weird.  Plus, a slice doesn’t “soar.”  It is an underspin shot, so that it moves slowly.  Sorry to get bogged down in tennis jargon, but this kind of stuff annoys me, just like bad grammar and misspelled words, neither of which are a problem in this book.  The writing here is good, and there’s sort of a magic word, like “Rosebud” in the movie Citizen Kane.  Clever.

PROPHET SONG by Paul Lynch

Unease escalates into an avalanche of chaos when a totalitarian regime takes over Ireland.  Eilish, a microbiologist, is left to manage her three teenagers and an infant after her husband is detained.  Plus, Eilish’s father’s dementia is getting worse, but he refuses to leave his home.  She has her hands full, and then her seventeen-year-old son joins the rebellion after he receives a conscription notice from the regime.  Eilish’s sister lives in Canada, so that it would behoove her to get the rest of her family out, but she stubbornly refuses to believe that things can get any worse, and she holds out hope that her son and husband will return home.  The situation continues to spin out of control, and the breakneck pace of the novel makes it frightening, to say the least.  In fact, this novel may supplant The Exorcist, which I read in 1974, as the scariest book I have ever read, and there is nothing supernatural about this one.  Also, the title is misleading for a book this gripping that feels all too real.

ORBITAL by Samantha Harvey

Here we glimpse 24 hours inside an orbiting space station on the day of the first moon landing since the Apollo project.  The six characters—four astronauts and two cosmonauts—are in need of a plot in order to keep this reader engaged and awake.  I liked the message of this book a lot more than the book itself, as the author indulges in quite a bit of philosophizing about Planet Earth as this vessel goes around and around.  Monotonous?  Maybe, but the six characters seem to be eternally in awe, seeing Earth from 250 miles away as what should be a borderless utopia.  However, they also witness the effects of pollution and climate change brought on by Earth’s human inhabitants but don’t seem to dwell on our shortcomings.  The book reminds us that everyone who has ever walked on the moon was an American—a fact that one of the Russian cosmonauts laments.  I was also surprised, though I shouldn’t have been, at how steep a toll weightlessness takes on the human body.  No amount of exercise can compensate for the absence of gravity on a body that is supposed to bear its own weight.

ALL THE SINNERS BLEED by S.A. Cosby

What a refreshing departure this book is from the not-so-great critically acclaimed books I’ve read this year.  Ok, maybe refreshing is not the best word for a book about the grisly torture and murder of several Black children, but it definitely held my attention.  Titus Crown is the Black sheriff of a Virginia county with its share of Southern white nationalist racists, including some of Titus’s deputies.  The novel opens with a Black school shooter who kills only one person—a beloved white teacher.  Titus’s deputies bring down the shooter, and the county is divided along race lines in its support of the shooter or the victim, who turns out to be a violent pedophile.  The teacher had a partner in his crimes against children, and that sicko is still at large, leaving a trail of mutilated bodies in his wake.  Titus has his hands full not only with this case but also with his hot-headed brother, a deputy on the take, an old girlfriend who materializes, and his current girlfriend, who is not quite the firecracker that the old girlfriend is.  Plus, Titus is still wracked with guilt over a case that spelled his departure from the FBI and desperately wants a better outcome for this one.  He is a good man and a good sheriff, but he is also serving as a detective here, and we are rooting for him to find the clue that will be the linchpin to identifying the monster who is still out there before the body count goes any higher.

CROOK MANIFESTO by Colson Whitehead

It’s the 1970s, and Ray Carney has retired from fencing stolen goods, but now he needs to score sold-out Jackson Five concert tickets for his daughter.  Really?  Pair that with the “one last job” plot, and I’m not exactly on board.  The author mashes together several other plots, several years apart, and I found the book very difficult to follow.  Ray is not even as prominent a character as his friend Pepper, who serves as security guard, crime solver, and locater of missing persons.  Arson is rampant throughout Harlem during this time period apparently, thanks to firebugs like a movie director named Zippo, for obvious reasons, and corrupt politicians who line their pockets with urban renewal kickbacks.  The cops are all on the take, of course, but when they started murdering each other, I was taken aback.  The setting may be bleak, but Colson Whitehead is still quite a wordsmith, and I marvel at some of the dynamite sentences he creates.  On page 15, he writes, “He conjured the lonely scene awaiting Foster at home. . .hoisting squealing grandchildren all day like barbells.”   Then on page 195, he says, “Then again, Pepper himself had visited ten of these United States—eleven if you count Connecticut. . .   A cup of coffee costs the same all over and the person who serves it is miserable in the same way. . .”.  Still, great sentences do not necessarily make a great novel, and I just prefer something that hangs together a little better.

LOOT by Tania James

Abbas is a teenager who does woodworking in 18^th century India, alongside his brothers and his father.  His talent for making beautiful toys has come to the attention of the local ruler, despite Abbas’s father’s disdain for such trivial pursuits.  Soon Abbas finds himself employed to carve a large tiger that will also roar and play music; a French clockmaker named Du Leze will supply the sound effects.  This collaboration launches Abbas on an unexpected life of adventure that includes a deadly battle, a sea voyage, an attempted heist, and a conflagration.  I devoured this novel that features a variety of settings, an eventful plot, and charming characters.  Who could ask for more?  Plus, although the characters here are fictional, the tiger that was created for a sultan actually does exist and is currently on display at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.  I must add a visit there to my bucket list.