I AM HOMELESS IF THIS IS NOT MY HOME by Lorrie Moore

The best thing about this book is that it’s short.  A close second is the fabulous writing.  However, the plot is bizarre.  Actually, there are two storylines that intersect eventually.  The first is a series of letters written by a rooming house proprietor shortly after the Civil War.  She describes a handsome lodger who seems to be John Wilkes Booth, although she never says so.  The second storyline is the one that is extremely weird and unfortunately occupies most of the pages.  Finn is a history teacher who doesn’t believe in homework and who doubles as a math teacher.  He sits at the bedside of his dying brother who is hanging on to life by watching the World Series.  Then Finn gets a phone call demanding that he drive halfway across the country because something has happened to his mentally ill ex-girlfriend, Lily.  He immediately abandons his brother and jumps in the car.  It turns out that Lily has finally accomplished the suicide she has always wished for. However, her wish for her body to be given to the Body Farm, the forensic anthropology site at the University of Tennessee, was not fulfilled.  Finn is completely enthralled with Lily--dead or alive, it seems, and she’s actually in some kind of undead state--maybe.  Anyway, why is Finn with the dead(?) ex-girlfriend who didn’t want to live and not with the brother who does?  Also, how does Finn do such a massive amount of driving on almost no sleep?

CITY ON FIRE by Don Winslow

In a novel about the Rhode Island mob in the 1980s (who knew there was such a thing?), I don’t mind wise guy grammar in the dialog, but the author applies it inconsistently in the third-person narrative as well.  For example, on page 3, we have “what he doesn’t know,” but then on page 5, there’s “He don’t have it in him to cheat.  She don’t mind he looks at other women… .”  I found these choices disconcerting, but this novel still works, if you don’t mind a high body count.  A turf war develops between the Irish mob and the Italian mob, after a long period of uneasy détente.  Marty Ryan’s alcoholism has forced him to yield his power position on the Irish side to John Murphy.  Marty’s son Danny, the protagonist here, is married to John Murphy’s daughter but has never earned a seat at the table.  With a baby on the way, Danny is tempted to take the Feds’ offer to rat out the mob on both sides and get out.  The question is which “family” deserves his loyalty, given that he thinks of Pat Murphy as more of a brother than a brother-in-law.  Unfortunately, Pat’s brother Liam has a propensity for igniting powder kegs.

THE COVENANT OF WATER by Abraham Verghese

A matchmaker pairs a twelve-year-old girl with a 40-year-old widower in southern India in 1900.  The groom sees his bride for the first time at the wedding and balks at marrying a child, but the wedding takes place anyway.  Not consummated for years, the marriage actually works out well, but the bride learns that she has married into a family in which someone in every past generation drowns.  We follow this family for three generations through thick and thin.  Other characters have their own story, including two surgeons, one of whom is Scottish, but everyone has ties to the family of our original couple.  There is enough tragedy here—children dying in unusual ways, a lover dying in a fire, a mother abandoning her child, a man becoming an opium addict—to sink this book into a melodramatic tearjerker, but instead it always manages to lift the reader up into a world where sunny horizons await.  For example, a retreat for lepers becomes a self-sufficient community where everyone pitches in.  Of course, a novel that covers this much ground is going to be long, and this one is exceptionally so.  The tragedies keep the plot moving forward, but they are merely setbacks to lives that refuse to stay mournful indefinitely.

THE EMPEROR OF GLADNESS by Ocean Vuong

Hai is a 19-year-old Vietnamese-American on the brink of suicide when an elderly Lithuanian immigrant, Grazina, talks him out of jumping from a bridge.  Ultimately, Hai saves her as well, by moving in with her and becoming her de facto caretaker.  Grazina is still having flashbacks of Russians and Nazis, and Hai plays along during these episodes to calm her down, calling himself Sgt. Pepper.  Hai still has a drug problem after rehab and has convinced his mother that he is in medical school.  In reality he is working a minimum wage job at HomeMarket, whose menu sounds a lot like the now almost defunct Boston Market.  The misfit employees of HomeMarket, including Hai’s cousin whose mother is incarcerated, become Hai’s family, along with Grazina.  The characters in this novel are well-developed, colorful and poignant, as all are struggling with an assortment of problems—mental, physical, financial, you name it.  However, the tone never descends into melancholy.  The writing is mostly good but is occasionally overdone and pretentious, and the pace is glacial.  The opening chapter in particular is purely descriptive of the setting, and we have to make it to Chapter 2 to get to the aborted suicide.  A road trip near the end has the potential to provide a spark but doesn’t really deliver.