CREATION LAKE by Rachel Kushner

Sadie Smith is not her real name, and she’s a 34-year-old American spy for hire.  Her current job is to infiltrate and ultimately destroy a subversive commune in rural France.  She has hacked the email account of this group’s mentor, an old man named Bruno who seems more obsessed with hieroglyphics, caves, the night sky, and Neanderthals than with advising the radical group.  For me, good writing does not salvage this book, which fails as an espionage novel, since the plot lacks suspense and Sadie is completely unlikeable.  She has a certain swagger that falls short of being charismatic, and she drinks too much.  Also, she is living alone in her boyfriend’s family’s mansion, but because she’s a short-timer, she doesn’t bother throwing away her liquor bottles or washing the dishes, until she schedules a tryst with her lover from the commune.  In fact, she always drinks from the cup that is the least dirty.  Her slovenliness is a minor personality flaw compared to the manner in which she uses other people.  I get that this is her job, and she’s good at it, except for being fired by the FBI when her mark was exonerated due to entrapment.  Reading this book was not exactly a chore, but it wasn’t a delight, either.  In fact, Bruno’s musings on our prehistoric predecessors and celestial navigation were the best part.  He makes a big deal about how to locate Polaris (the North Star), although I learned that a long time ago and have since assumed that it was common knowledge.  Apparently not.  The biggest mystery of this novel is the origin of the title, and I’m going to crown The Flamethrowers as my favorite Rachel Kushner novel.

THE FLAMETHROWERS by Rachel Kushner

Motorcycles, art, and radical politics dominate this captivating novel, told by a woman in her early twenties, whom we know only by the nickname Reno—her hometown.  Her narration comes across as somewhat detached, making her story all the more alluring, which begins with her becoming the fastest woman in the world in 1975—on a motorcycle at the Bonneville Salt Flats.  Some books are page-turners, and some just make you want to savor every page to make it last as long as possible.  This book is the latter type, although most chapters end with a surprising event.  Then the author delays telling us the consequences of the event for a chapter or two.  Intermittent diversions, such as dinner parties for New York artists and gallery owners, cause the plot to stall and become tedious at times.  After hearing about a group of anarchists in New York at one of these dinner parties, Reno then becomes more than just a bystander to another group of anarchists in Italy who are protesting against the company her boyfriend’s family owns.  This is definitely my favorite Rachel Kushner novel so far, as Reno’s misadventures in Utah, New York, and Italy all held me rapt until another unwanted dead space in the novel cropped up.

THE CORRESPONDENT by Virginia Evans

Sybil Van Antwerp, the title character, is a retired lawyer in her 70s who keeps up with family and friends largely via snail mail.  She also has no qualms about writing to famous authors, including Ann Patchett, Kazuo Ishiguro, Larry McMurtry, and Joan Didion, and I loved her commentary on their books.  Her various personal problems come and go, but the overarching problem in her life is her guilt and grief over the death of one of her children.  Plus, she was so distraught at the time that she failed to show compassion in the legal case of an immigrant man.  To me, this is a bigger failing than the neglect that contributed to her son’s death.  In any case, the book has several problems, including the fact that it has no plot. Nor is it suspenseful.  At times the identity of the sender of a letter addressed to Sybil is not obvious, and I think the author could have alleviated that source of confusion.  That said, this may not be my favorite epistolary novel, as it falls short of The Egyptologist and The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, but it is somewhat addictive.  It’s not exactly a page turner, either, but every time I sat down to read it, I kept saying to myself that I would read just one more letter, and that plan would repeat itself through another dozen or so.

MARTYR! by Kaveh Akbar

Cyrus Shams is a 30-year-old Iranian-American with a death wish.  The only thing stopping him from committing suicide is that he wants his death to matter.  The book he is writing about martyrs is supposed to be his legacy, if he could just actually manage to write it.  When he was three months old in Iran, his mother’s commercial flight to visit her brother was shot down by an American Navy missile cruiser.  Hence Cyrus’s obsession with meaningless death.  Ironically, Cyrus’s father takes a job on a chicken farm in Indiana, so that Cyrus grows up in the country whose military killed his mother.  As an adult, Cyrus struggles with addiction, particularly alcoholism, but has been clean for two years when he travels to New York to meet an artist dying of cancer.  There is a twist at the end of this book, but it is not sufficient to redeem the rest of this slow-paced, depressing novel.  Also, the twist results from a very implausible coincidence, making the plot more absurd than thought-provoking.  My biggest problem with the book, though, is that provides no real incentive to keep reading. Its best value is that of a cure for insomnia, as drowsiness set in whenever I tried to read more than five pages at a sitting.

INTERMEZZO by Sally Rooney

Two brothers, a decade apart in age, are both mourning the recent death of their father for different reasons.  Ivan, the younger brother, is a 23-year-old chess wizard with a degree in theoretical physics and questionable social skills.  Peter is a lawyer in his early thirties with a substance abuse problem who fights for the welfare of the underdog, including equal rights for women in the workplace. The age difference between these two is nothing compared to the contrast in personalities.  Peter views Ivan as a child, and Ivan views Peter as arrogant and condescending.  Now, what makes this novel hum, besides the sibling friction, is their lusty romantic relationships.  Peter’s longtime girlfriend, Sylvia, has been relegated to friend status, due to a severe accident that has rendered her unable to be a complete sexual partner.  To fill the gap, Peter has become involved with a woman his brother’s age, Naomi, who has no job, no money, and no place to live.  The one flaw in this book for me is that I never could really understand Peter’s affection for her.  Ivan, on the other hand, falls in love with a delightful woman Peter’s age named Margaret who is still married to her absent alcoholic husband.  In other words, both men have girlfriends who are not traditionally age-appropriate.  I guess you’re either a Sally Rooney fan or you’re not, and I am solidly in the fan camp.  I adored everything about this novel—the characters, the plot, the writing, and especially the inner workings of the characters’ minds.  Please, may I have another?

CONVERSATIONS WITH FRIENDS by Sally Rooney

Two 21-year-old women who do poetry readings, Frances and Bobbi, meet Melissa, a photographer, and her husband Nick, a very handsome but not particularly famous actor.  The novel seldom diverges from interactions among these four people, except for the inner thoughts of Frances, the first-person narrator.  Frances and Bobbi were lovers at one time, but now they are just very good friends.  Frances develops a crush on Nick, who is twelve years older than Frances, which blossoms into her first sexual relationship with a man.  Her guilt is assuaged by the fact that Nick and Melissa no longer share a bed and don’t seem to have a very close marriage.  Although Nick and Frances communicate regularly online and in person, neither is able to express their feelings about the relationship, partly because neither seems to have a clue about what their feelings are.  Frances tries to shield herself from becoming too attached to Nick by making flippant and sometimes hurtful remarks to him.  I just wanted these two to start being honest with each other for a change and for Frances to stop vacillating about whether she cares about Nick or not.  Obviously, Nick is equally to blame, since he never feels secure in their relationship and is ambivalent about his marriage.  Frances also chooses not to open up to Nick or Bobbi when health and money issues arise.  These side plots don’t really distract from the main issue at hand, but, of course, plot is not a high priority in any of Sally Rooney’s novels.  Still, she somehow holds the reader’s attention with characters who don’t seem to be able to make up their minds. 

ALL FOURS by Miranda July

Our unnamed first-person narrator is a fairly well-known 45-year-old multimedia artist who refers to her child with gender-neutral pronouns.  She’s a creative, progressive thinker and becomes even more so as the plot develops.  Her tale begins with a planned three-week trip in which she will drive from Los Angeles to New York and back.   However, she stops at a motel in Monrovia and remains there until her scheduled return home, all the while giving her husband false and sparse details about experiences on a route that she has not actually traveled.  She meets a handsome thirty-year-old man named Davey and employs his wife to remodel her motel room.  Ok, this scenario is ludicrous, but the narrator has money to burn, so why not?  She is also helping this young couple fund their nest egg, even as she becomes friendly with Davey, who offers to show her around town.  When he takes his shirt off during a hike, her sexual attraction to him goes full throttle, and things go from heated to steamy in a hurry.  The visceral, lusty first half of this novel held my rapt attention, but the plot cools down significantly in the second half and becomes more about the narrator having to grapple with two issues.  One is the anticipated loss of her libido during perimenopause, and the other, naturally, is the precarious state of her marriage.