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.