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.

MECCA by Susan Straight

The title refers to a small agricultural town in southern California, inhabited by a number of characters in this book, along with their extended families.  The first such character is Johnny Frias, a highway patrolman, whose family has lived in California for generations.  Matelasse, originally from Louisiana, works in a flower shop, supports her two sons, and is separated from her husband, who wishes he were Brazilian.  Ximena works in a cosmetic surgery spa, and then later becomes the housekeeper for a very wealthy woman, who calls her “X.”  Ximena is an undocumented Mixtec woman from Oaxaca who speaks almost no Spanish.  The fly in the ointment for all of these characters is ICE—the acronym for the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency.  All of these characters are connected in some way, and this book is ultimately about family, whether blood-related or not.  One person’s problem or mistake becomes the entire family’s problem to solve; everyone has everyone else’s back.  Many characters have little to no relationship with their biological parents, and an “uncle” may have served as a father, even though he may be a friend of a relative, rather than an actual relative.  These relationships are hard to keep up with sometimes, and the cast of characters is quite large.  A character may appear briefly and then reappear in a more important role.  In other words, the plot is a rather intricate jigsaw puzzle, which I liked theoretically but found a bit challenging to piece together.

SUDDENLY by Isabelle Autissier

This intense book was exhausting to read, and I had to keep reminding myself that it was fiction.  Louise and Ludovic enjoy a months-long sailing trip and decide to explore a remote island on which visitors are forbidden.  A violent storm comes up, and the unthinkable happens.  Actually, it is quite imaginable, given the circumstances, but Louise and Ludovic are ill-prepared for it, in either experience or equipment.  This pair is deeply in love, but they could not be more different in temperament or stature.  Ludovic is tall, handsome, charming, affable, dangerously optimistic, and has zero common sense.  Louise, although a very petite woman, is an experienced climber, and she knows when the conditions dictate caution.  Despite being the sensible one of the two, she yields to Ludovic, frequently against her better judgment, with life-threatening results.  At one point she makes every effort to do what obviously needs to be done, but he thwarts her with his own ill-conceived, impossible plan.  She ultimately faces a moral dilemma and makes a fateful decision that is her decision alone, in order to maximize the chance of survival.  This decision is the crux of the entire plot, and I would argue that she makes the right one.  However, her actions afterward are hard to endorse.  Even when she later grapples with guilt about the decision, I don’t believe that she ever confronts the horrific and selfish mistake she makes afterward.

THE FURROWS by Namwali Serpell

Cassandra Williams, our first-person narrator, is 12 and her brother, Wayne, is 7 when Cassandra tries to rescue Wayne from drowning.  She loses consciousness on the beach from the effort.  When she awakens, she knows that Wayne is dead, but his body is nowhere to be found, and a stranger drives Cassandra home.  Closure is impossible, Cassandra’s parents divorce, and her mother forms a foundation called Vigil for the families of missing children, holding out hope that Wayne is still alive.  The remainder of the book is largely a series of Cassandra’s encounters with the now-grown Wayne, which I assumed to be dreams.  These events are all described in intricate detail, but there are similarities among all of them, not the least of which is some sort of apocalyptic disaster during the encounter.  This series eventually becomes a bit redundant, causing me to say to myself, “Here we go again.”  Then everything changes, and we are in a different narrative altogether with a different first-person narrator—a man this time, with the same name as Cassandra’s brother.  What??  The title initially refers to ocean waves but then seems to encompass other wave-like natural dangers, especially earthquakes and tsunamis, and one philosophical character describes time, not specifically as having furrows, but certainly with that implication.  So…maybe Cassandra’s encounters with her brother were not dreams but were intended to represent some alternate reality.  This book is enigmatic, especially the ending, and not always one I was eager to resume.  It was not hard to follow, though, and from time to time I can appreciate a book that I can’t completely get my head around.

JAMES by Percival Everett

This book has received so many accolades, but I just did not love it.  I did love that the author elevates Jim, the runaway slave who accompanies Huckleberry Finn on his adventures down the Mississippi River.  Jim, in this retelling, hides the fact that he can read and write and is familiar with a smattering of erudite philosophers, especially Voltaire.  He and other slaves disguise their intellect behind a mask of dialect that they employ only in the company of white people.  Even on the river, Jim becomes a slave to the white people he encounters, including the notorious con men, the Duke and Dauphin, despite trying to convince them that he is Huck’s slave.  In an unusual exchange, Jim becomes the property of a blacksmith, but a blackface minstrel group admires Jim’s singing voice and pays the blacksmith to release Jim to their custody.  They assure him he is not a slave, but yet he can’t leave the group because of their investment.   So…OK, he’s an indentured servant but with no timeline in which he’ll be free?  Jim’s creativity in trying to survive while on the run sometimes backfires, as in the case where he pretends to be the slave of another runaway, Norman, who can pass as white.  The scheme is for Norman to sell Jim so that Jim can escape and be resold again and again.  Then two of them will split the money, but I cannot fathom how they neglected to account for the possibility of Jim being beaten and shackled while in the possession of their first buyer.  Also, as in Twain’s original, Jim does not disclose until late in the book that a body found at the beginning of their journey was that of Huck’s cruel father.  Given that Huck is on the run from his father, why would Jim withhold this information when he could set Huck’s mind at ease?  I would have liked the author to have offered an explanation for this deception.  For me, the idea of this book is just way more appealing than the book itself, which drags, especially in the beginning.