I AM HOMELESS IF THIS IS NOT MY HOME by Lorrie Moore

The best thing about this book is that it’s short.  A close second is the fabulous writing.  However, the plot is bizarre.  Actually, there are two storylines that intersect eventually.  The first is a series of letters written by a rooming house proprietor shortly after the Civil War.  She describes a handsome lodger who seems to be John Wilkes Booth, although she never says so.  The second storyline is the one that is extremely weird and unfortunately occupies most of the pages.  Finn is a history teacher who doesn’t believe in homework and who doubles as a math teacher.  He sits at the bedside of his dying brother who is hanging on to life by watching the World Series.  Then Finn gets a phone call demanding that he drive halfway across the country because something has happened to his mentally ill ex-girlfriend, Lily.  He immediately abandons his brother and jumps in the car.  It turns out that Lily has finally accomplished the suicide she has always wished for. However, her wish for her body to be given to the Body Farm, the forensic anthropology site at the University of Tennessee, was not fulfilled.  Finn is completely enthralled with Lily--dead or alive, it seems, and she’s actually in some kind of undead state--maybe.  Anyway, why is Finn with the dead(?) ex-girlfriend who didn’t want to live and not with the brother who does?  Also, how does Finn do such a massive amount of driving on almost no sleep?

CITY ON FIRE by Don Winslow

In a novel about the Rhode Island mob in the 1980s (who knew there was such a thing?), I don’t mind wise guy grammar in the dialog, but the author applies it inconsistently in the third-person narrative as well.  For example, on page 3, we have “what he doesn’t know,” but then on page 5, there’s “He don’t have it in him to cheat.  She don’t mind he looks at other women… .”  I found these choices disconcerting, but this novel still works, if you don’t mind a high body count.  A turf war develops between the Irish mob and the Italian mob, after a long period of uneasy détente.  Marty Ryan’s alcoholism has forced him to yield his power position on the Irish side to John Murphy.  Marty’s son Danny, the protagonist here, is married to John Murphy’s daughter but has never earned a seat at the table.  With a baby on the way, Danny is tempted to take the Feds’ offer to rat out the mob on both sides and get out.  The question is which “family” deserves his loyalty, given that he thinks of Pat Murphy as more of a brother than a brother-in-law.  Unfortunately, Pat’s brother Liam has a propensity for igniting powder kegs.

THE COVENANT OF WATER by Abraham Verghese

A matchmaker pairs a twelve-year-old girl with a 40-year-old widower in southern India in 1900.  The groom sees his bride for the first time at the wedding and balks at marrying a child, but the wedding takes place anyway.  Not consummated for years, the marriage actually works out well, but the bride learns that she has married into a family in which someone in every past generation drowns.  We follow this family for three generations through thick and thin.  Other characters have their own story, including two surgeons, one of whom is Scottish, but everyone has ties to the family of our original couple.  There is enough tragedy here—children dying in unusual ways, a lover dying in a fire, a mother abandoning her child, a man becoming an opium addict—to sink this book into a melodramatic tearjerker, but instead it always manages to lift the reader up into a world where sunny horizons await.  For example, a retreat for lepers becomes a self-sufficient community where everyone pitches in.  Of course, a novel that covers this much ground is going to be long, and this one is exceptionally so.  The tragedies keep the plot moving forward, but they are merely setbacks to lives that refuse to stay mournful indefinitely.

THE EMPEROR OF GLADNESS by Ocean Vuong

Hai is a 19-year-old Vietnamese-American on the brink of suicide when an elderly Lithuanian immigrant, Grazina, talks him out of jumping from a bridge.  Ultimately, Hai saves her as well, by moving in with her and becoming her de facto caretaker.  Grazina is still having flashbacks of Russians and Nazis, and Hai plays along during these episodes to calm her down, calling himself Sgt. Pepper.  Hai still has a drug problem after rehab and has convinced his mother that he is in medical school.  In reality he is working a minimum wage job at HomeMarket, whose menu sounds a lot like the now almost defunct Boston Market.  The misfit employees of HomeMarket, including Hai’s cousin whose mother is incarcerated, become Hai’s family, along with Grazina.  The characters in this novel are well-developed, colorful and poignant, as all are struggling with an assortment of problems—mental, physical, financial, you name it.  However, the tone never descends into melancholy.  The writing is mostly good but is occasionally overdone and pretentious, and the pace is glacial.  The opening chapter in particular is purely descriptive of the setting, and we have to make it to Chapter 2 to get to the aborted suicide.  A road trip near the end has the potential to provide a spark but doesn’t really deliver. 

DEATH AT THE SIGN OF THE ROOK by Kate Atkinson

Jackson Brodie, private investigator, is back, along with the author’s usual clever dialog.  His conversation partner here is Reggie, a cop who views Brodie as sort of a know-it-all father figure.  However, the book gets off to a rather slow start, except for the chapter about Simon Cate, the vicar.  His calling to the ministry is somewhat in doubt, and now he makes an effort not to disclose his atheism to his meager congregation.  Anyway, back to the crime-solving duo, Reggie and Jackson, who are each investigating an art theft, and their two heists may be related, as the housekeeper is the prime suspect in both cases.  Several other characters wander into the plot, which culminates in a murder mystery weekend at the estate from which one of the paintings was stolen.  A series of madcap misadventures, some caused by a blizzard, lands most of the characters at the castle as the audience for the mystery performance.  Yes, this is somewhat Agatha Christie-like and somewhat entertaining but totally outside the realm of believability, what with the dead nanny’s body in the pantry, bricks being thrown, and fireplace pokers being wielded as weapons.  Jackson has a reputation, with Reggie at least, for differentiating between what is legal and what is just, and he demonstrates that distinction quite clearly here.

EVERY MAN A KING by Walter Mosley

Ex-cop Joe Oliver is now a private investigator.  His very wealthy friend, Roger Ferris, who also happens to be Joe’s grandmother’s boyfriend, has asked Joe to look into the detainment of Alfred Xavier Quiller.  This job has two unpleasant aspects that give Joe the willies. First and foremost, Quiller is a white nationalist.  Secondly, he is currently locked in a private cell at Riker’s Island where Joe did a stint of solitary confinement.  Then another onerous task comes along.  Joe’s ex-wife’s husband, Coleman Tesserat, has been arrested, and Joe has to bail him out for the sake of his daughter.  Joe enlists a variety of friends to assist in both of these cases, calling in favors as necessary.  A third mystery involves Ferris’s interest in the Quiller case and his motivation for hiring Joe.  Mosley’s writing style is always enjoyable, but I find that I can barely keep up with all the characters, and the plot gets a little overly convoluted, especially since there are two cases, which may or may not be intertwined.

THE LAST DAYS OF PTOLEMY GREY by Walter Mosley

I hate to be the dissident in thinking this book is not great, but it moved along as slowly as its 91-year-old protagonist.  Ptolemy Grey’s apartment has become a cesspool, and he is too feeble to clean it up.  Plus, Reggie, a nephew (several times removed) who checks on him every few days and takes him to buy groceries, has been killed in a drive-by shooting.  Seventeen-year-old Robyn, who is not a blood relative, steps in and takes over Ptolemy’s care with aplomb.  Ptolemy has some unfinished business that he wants to address before he dies, not the least of which is avenging Reggie’s murder. However, his dementia is interfering with his ability to express himself, and his memory is fading fast.  If only there were a miracle cure.  Well, guess what?  There’s a doctor who can restore Ptolemy’s faculties temporarily, but the drug will ultimately hasten his death.  (This reminds me of the book Flowers for Algernon, but this one is not nearly as poignant.)  Ptolemy likens the doctor to Satan, but he has sold only his body, which he must donate for scientific research, not his soul.  The remainder of the novel is about Ptolemy’s newfound clarity and his mission to right a number of wrongs.  Ptolemy and Robyn develop a bond that evolves into a sort of May-December romance—platonic, thankfully.  Frankly, I found this aspect of the novel to be a little creepy, particularly when they become jealous of each other’s age-appropriate relationships.