YELLOWFACE by R.F. Kuang

My favorite novel involving plagiarism is Old School by Tobias Wolff, which took place long before social media became a thing.  This book has a lot in common with The Plot by Jean Hanff Korelitz, which did involve online harassment, and in both cases the character being harassed is guilty of plagiarism.  The Korelitz book is more of a mystery, but I think I would have appreciated this book more if it were not so similar.  In this book, June, a mediocre writer, steals the book draft of her dead friend, Athena, who is a celebrated Asian-American author.  June is vilified not only because she is suspected of plagiarism but also because, as a white woman, the resulting book about the Chinese Labour Corps in WWI is considered “inauthentic.”  Kuang gives a nod here to American Dirt, which was similarly criticized.  How much of June’s novel is her own work is not really clear, but the fact that she stole the idea and the plot causes her to vacillate between mind-numbing guilt and brazen indignation toward her accusers.  June rationalizes her actions in every way possible, even viewing the stolen novel as payback to Athena for stealing June’s personal story about a possible rape.  I enjoyed this book very much for the most part, but June’s constant hand-wringing and obsession with public perception of her book became tedious at times.  She occasionally falls into a state of deep depression but cannot stop herself from reading the online allegations and negative reviews.  Rarely, though, does she consider coming clean about the origins of the book.  Once the lie is out there, she can’t unsay it and chooses instead to dig in her heels.

BABEL by R.F. Kuang

Three foreign-born students, two men and one woman, enter the translation program at Oxford in the 1800s.  They become fast friends as outsiders, along with one native British student, as they prepare for a career in magic.  Does this sound Harry-Potterish?  It did to me, but this story is much darker, and the magic involves pairs of words in different languages that are inscribed on silver bars.  If etymology is your thing, this is the book for you, but I just found it tedious after a while.  Robin Swift, self-named after his English biological father snatches him from a cholera epidemic in Canton, China, is the main character.  He and his two best friends, one from Calcutta and one from Haiti, wrestle with their identity and struggle for acceptance, despite being native speakers of languages much in demand in their curriculum.  In fact, the silver bars, housed in an Oxford tower called Babel, basically control everything in the UK, from the water supply to transportation.  When a former student tries to recruit Robin for clandestine Robin-Hood-like purposes, Robin has to reevaluate his role in a global power grab.  Ultimately, the question for Robin is whether the end justifies the means and whether he wants to risk deportation or incarceration.  He also grapples with the question of whether the future that has been laid out for him is really what he wants or whether he would be happier if he had never left China.  I like the premise, but this book is just too long, and the final standoff goes on seemingly forever.  Also, I do not like footnotes in a work of fiction, and this novel has tons of them.  They would have driven me even crazier if I had read this on a kindle.

ABSOLUTION by Alice McDermott

Alice McDermott’s novels are generally somewhat sedate, but this one takes place in Saigon during the early 1960s.  However, the young wives of American engineers and intelligence personnel are rarely in dangerous circumstances, especially if they stick to their villas, protected by walls and barbed wire.  Our first-person narrator, Patricia, soon comes under the influence of Charlene, a “dynamo” who is determined to spread a little cheer to the Vietnamese people, including a leper colony and the children’s ward of a hospital.  Whether the trinkets and Saigon Barbies she distributes are really worth the time and effort is questionable, and a gift she bestows at the end is beyond the pale.  Decades later back in the States, Charlene’s daughter and a kind young man named Dominic that Patricia knew in Saigon are neighbors in Maryland, and this coincidence seems unlikely and unnecessary.  His story is a compelling one, but I think it could have been conveyed via a different pathway.  Even more unlikely is the fact that my favorite line in the book is actually a quote from Stalin:  “If one man dies of hunger, that is a tragedy.  If millions die, that is a statistic.”  What a sad but true statement, and it applies to more types of fatalities than just hunger.

SOMEONE by Alice McDermott

Alice McDermott’s novels often seem to be about unexceptional people in unexceptional circumstances, but somehow she makes their story worthy of our attention with her lyrical prose and attention to detail.  Here we have Marie, who is neither attractive nor ambitious, and she is not particularly smart, getting her left and right mixed up with unfortunate consequences.  When her first suitor, Walter Hartnett (sometimes spelled Harnett in the hardbound version--an inconsistency which I found weird for such a respected author), talks about their getting married, she is all in.  Then he suddenly tells her that he is marrying someone else, and her world is shaken.  She eventually moves on, gets a job, gets married, and raises a family. Ho hum, right?  Not so fast.  The birth of her first child is quite a nightmare, and her job at a funeral home is a surprisingly good fit.  The surrounding characters have even more drama to offer, especially her handsome older brother who abruptly leaves the priesthood--and the “someone” who eventually becomes her husband.

CHILD OF MY HEART by Alice McDermott

Fifteen-year-old Theresa is an only child of middle-class parents who live in the Hamptons in the hope that their beautiful daughter will land a wealthy husband.  She has been ushered into adulthood a bit too fast, having become a popular babysitter and dog-walker almost as soon as her age reached double-digits.  During the summer in which this novel takes place she has also taken on care of her 8-year-old cousin, Daisy, who accompanies Theresa as she walks from house to house and performs her duties.  One of Theresa’s charges is Flora, a toddler, who is routinely left on the porch in her stroller for Theresa to pick up, take to the beach, provide lunch, bathe, and entertain.  More alluring than Flora, though, is her father, a successful artist in his 70s.  Two aspects of Theresa’s life drive this novel:  the not-so-subtle advances Flora’s father makes toward Theresa and the worrisome bruises on Daisy’s body that beg for medical attention.  Theresa’s responses to both of these situations are problematic.  In both cases, I felt that she made the wrong decisions and that she was a foolish teenager, but then I had to rethink my opinions and ask myself if perhaps her choices were not so unwise.  There are arguments to be made on both sides, and I love how the author does not provide consequences or pass judgment but just allows us readers to draw our own conclusions.

AT WEDDINGS AND WAKES by Alice McDermott

Sometimes I like books with good characters but scant plot, and sometimes I don’t.  In this case, I enjoyed the book for its lyrical writing and vivid sense of place.  Three children—Margaret, Bobby, and Maryanne—accompany their mother, Lucy, twice a week to visit her three unmarried sisters and her stepmother, Momma.  Momma raised all four of her sister’s girls and married her sister’s husband after her sister died in childbirth.  The author treats Lucy’s three children as sort of a collective entity that is observing and listening to the interactions among the adult women, eagerly awaiting the arrival of their father to rescue them.  Despite the languid pace of this novel, I was never bored and chose just to savor every word.  The tragedies of the past haunt this family, but their story is not really morbid.  Then we have the occasional anecdote, such as the story of Momma arriving in the U.S. from Ireland literally penniless because she spent all of her money on chocolate during the voyage.  My only problem with this book is that sometimes I had to remind myself which generation was which, as the author fuses the past with the present at times, and we even get a brief glimpse of the future in which the three children are adults.

THE BEE STING by Paul Murray

I found this book to be absorbing at times and aggravating at times.  The Barnes family is a fairly affluent family until they fall on hard times.  Then family secrets start to emerge, and each family member struggles with a different problem that they, for whatever reason, refuse to share with the very people who could help them.  Dickie, the father/husband, is running his father’s car dealership, and some would say he is running it into the ground, as customers discover that someone in his shop is stealing their catalytic converters.  Cass, the daughter, plans to attend Trinity College but doesn’t act like it with her excessive drinking.  PJ, the son, is being bullied and shaken down for money he doesn’t have.  Finally, we have Imelda, the beautiful wife/mother, who comes from poverty and an abusive father.  Each family member’s story is heartbreaking in its own way, and Imelda’s rather lengthy story just about drove me crazy, since it has zero punctuation marks.  These are just not the kind of people I would normally want to spend 600+ pages with, as they felt a little too real, and not in a good way.  However, except for Imelda’s sections, which actually I finally became more or less accustomed to, this book is very readable, although it is, I think, overly and unnecessarily long.  The author keeps the reader guessing about a lot of things, and that uncertainty propels the individual storylines ultimately toward a convergence.  This was not a book that I was eager to get back to, but it was a book that I couldn’t stop thinking about.