SMALL RAIN by Garth Greenwell

Overweight but fairly healthy, our unnamed narrator in his forties is suddenly struck by excruciating pain in his abdominal area.  It’s 2020, and the hospitals are overwhelmed, so he delays going to the ER for five days.  Medical staff eventually usher him into the ICU, where most of the novel takes place.  They discover that he has a tear in his aorta, a condition that generally affects much older people with underlying health conditions.  Surgery is on the horizon if they can just figure out why this tear occurred, but in the meantime, his doctors are “carpet-bombing” him with antibiotics.  I became totally immersed in this book, as the narrator copes with a gazillion IVs stuck in his arms, painful heparin shots, and the embarrassment of having a nurse help him go to the bathroom.  I bought both this book and Greenwell’s What Belongs to You, and I was so put off by the other book that I was reluctant to tackle this one.  However, I was very pleasantly surprised, as Small Rain is obviously intended for a more mainstream audience and perhaps even open-minded book clubs.  I savored all of the time that I spent with this character and shared his horror when an inexperienced nurse allows his blood pressure to rise, threatening to make his condition worse, if not fatal.  Other than that one bad apple, I can see this as an homage to all the nurses who gave their all to save lives during COVID, including those patients with other grave illnesses.

WHAT BELONGS TO YOU by Garth Greenwell

The only character in this book who has a name is Mitko, a male prostitute in Sofia, Bulgaria.  The first-person narrator, an American teacher in Bulgaria, is unnamed, and the other minor characters are known simply by their first initial.  The plot—thin to say the least—mostly involves the narrator’s relationship to Mitko, which starts out as purely transactional and morphs into something else, at least for the narrator.  What he seeks from Mitko is not exactly clear to himself or to the reader, but his sexual attraction to Mitko overwhelms any thoughts he has of denying Mitko’s constant requests for money.  Mitko refers to his customers as friends, and the central question is whether a transactional relationship can develop into a friendship.  Mitko’s decline from hale and robust to sickly and pitiful is heartbreaking, but even more so is the narrator’s relationship with his father.  Much of this book made me uncomfortable, and I’m not just talking about the sex scenes.  In particular, there’s a shower scene that is particularly squirm-inducing. The content, however, is not the only aspect of this book that made it difficult to read.  Part II is forty-plus pages without a paragraph break.

SHRED SISTERS by Betsy Lerner

Amy and Olivia (“Ollie”) are the Shred sisters, and the younger, Amy, is the first-person narrator.  Ollie is out of control, lands in a psychiatric facility, gets released and pops in and out of the narrative.  However, her presence is continually felt as a sister and daughter.  Just when her family thinks Ollie has her act together finally, she steals their money, disappears, and breaks their hearts—again.  Amy, the “good” daughter, has issues of her own, being bullied in school, partly because of her small stature and partly because she excels academically, earning her a reputation as a know-it-all.  Her situation improves when she is placed among other smart students at a private high school and then in college at Columbia.  Still, she struggles, becoming too focused on her lab research and then making a huge mistake on the eve of her marriage.  I really loved Amy as a character and cringed every time Ollie reappeared, knowing that she was going to do what she always did—disappoint her loved ones.  Her father clings to the hope that Ollie will straighten herself out, and he enables her financially, responding to criticism with the quip that he can’t “disable” her.  Ollie is the epitome of the prodigal daughter who grabs all the attention, none of which she deserves, but then mental illness is, in fact, an illness.  However, it’s up to the victim to accept treatment. 

BLUE SISTERS by Coco Mellors

Avery, Bonnie, and Lucky are grieving the loss of their sister Nicky on the anniversary of her death from an accidental overdose.  Addiction seems to run in the family, as their father is an alcoholic, and Avery kicked heroin before going to law school.  Lucky has been modeling since she was fifteen but has an insatiable appetite for booze and drugs.  Bonnie, the only sister without substance abuse problems, is a former boxing champion.  She has taken a job as a bouncer in California after a particularly humiliating fight in which she was still trying to wrap her head around Nicky’s death.  The other two sisters can throw some verbal punches of their own, especially Avery who has little tolerance for Lucky’s debauchery.  Nicky, a teacher, is the real enigma, although she appears on the surface to have been the most grounded.  Addicted to painkillers due to endometriosis, she could have opted for a hysterectomy to alleviate the problem.  However, she was determined to marry and have a child, with no future husband in sight.  I’m no doctor, but I think there are hormonal treatments for endometriosis.  Plus, the disease can also impair a woman’s ability to become pregnant, so I felt that she died for a dream that might never have come to fruition.  Someone should have counseled her about her options before she turned to street drugs.

SCAFFOLDING by Lauren Elkin

Anna, a psychoanalyst in her late thirties in Paris, is in a holding pattern after a miscarriage, while her husband, David, is working in London.  She meets a neighbor in her twenties, Clementine, who is involved with a group that is pasting feminist slogans all over the city, and the book basically treads water for 140 pages.  Then a not-so-surprising revelation stops Anna in her tracks, and we switch to a different couple, Henry and Florence, who apparently occupied Anna’s apartment in the late 1960s.  The novel then devolves into a bunch of extra-marital affairs, inscrutable psychoanalytical theory, and lots of untranslated French, although the author does translate the feminist slogans at the end of the book.  The middle section just fizzles and is basically unfinished, I think, although I could have missed something.  After one particularly maddening conversation between Anna and Clementine, Anna makes this observation on page 371:

“There was still so much to talk about.  I was left frustrated, as if there were soap left on my skin and the hot water had gone.”

I love this analogy, but, really, a great book requires a whole lot more than great writing.

YOU DREAMED OF EMPIRES by Alvaro Enrigue

I think this is supposed to be reimagined history with a heavy dose of humor, but it did not work for me.  It is basically about the meeting of Cortez and Montezuma, but it is very hard to follow, partly because the setting can change in a heartbeat.  One minute we are reading about the Spaniards in a temple, and the next paragraph is about Montezuma’s sister/wife in the palace.  Then we switch back to the Spaniards or to the translator who goes AWOL.  Much confusion stems from the unfamiliar Aztec names, amplified by the fact that the author sometimes refers to characters by their names and sometimes by their titles.  Cortez has two titles—one Aztec and one Spanish—and is also known, in our English translation, as the captain general.  Some of the names of lesser characters are translated into two lines of English.  There is some almost funny stuff here, such as when the Spaniards get lost in Montezuma’s labyrinthine castle and try to follow the kitchen smells to avoid going in circles.  One of the Spaniards almost gags on his lunch, due to the odors exuded by the Aztecs, but I can’t imagine that the Spaniards smelled much better, especially since their most important personal hygiene task was cutting their toenails.  Anyway, here’s a priceless line from page 128:

“In Mexico, authority has always flowed from the smack of a flip-flop.”

I’m not even sure what that sentence means, but I do know it’s not the only intentional anachronism.  Montezuma, portrayed here as being obsessed with hallucinogens and the Spaniards’ horses, sways to the beat of a T.Rex song.

REJECTION by Tony Tulathimutte

This may not be my least favorite book ever, but it’s close.  These linked stories are about angry people who, despite their efforts, are experiencing rejection in a major way.  To be clear, this is not a novel.  Some stories are sad, some are surprising, and some are just absurd, with characters that are more like caricatures then real people.  One character has a fantasy so outrageous that I can almost imagine it as a pornographic cartoon. I concede that some characters have very unfortunate physical characteristics, causing their mental health to suffer and leading them to wallow in self-pity.  Social media plays a large role here, and the lingo, acronyms and texting shorthand kept me from understanding everything that happens, and I didn’t bother to investigate further.  Identity is a major theme, and in one story the protagonist refuses all labels as far as ethnicity, gender, whatever, refusing to be pigeonholed and ultimately being resigned to a life online. If this book is supposed to be funny, I missed the point.  If I am supposed to empathize with these offbeat characters, I have to admit that I could not warm up to them or even feel sorry for them as social outcasts, and I could not wait to be done with this book.  I have obviously aged out of this type of literature.