BILLY SUMMERS by Stephen King

Stephen King is a master of suspense, and this book exudes it, despite its overly familiar plot devices—a book within a book and a hired assassin planning to retire after one last lucrative hit.  King is obviously aware of the triteness of his subject matter, even going so far as to describe the one-last-hit-job plot as its own subgenre of noir fiction.  Still, he pulls this novel off as seemingly as effortlessly as ever, with characters that I enjoyed getting to know over the course of 500+ pages and only the barest hint of the supernatural.  Billy Summers is the stereotypical hit man in question who goes through aliases and disguises at a lickety-split pace and poses as a writer.  The book-within-a book is Billy’s autobiography, but I rushed through Billy’s backstory in order to return to his current situation in which he bonds with neighbors, especially children, agonizing over how disappointed they are going to be when they find out his vocation.  The hit in question takes place relatively early in the novel, but Billy suspects that his usual disappearing act after a hit is actually going to be more final.  In other words, this will be his final hit, because his employers will ensure that he doesn’t live to do another.  What’s really nifty about this book, though, is that Billy’s post-hit life takes an unforeseen trajectory, due to a good Samaritan act on his part.  Such humanity is not something we would expect of a hitman, but Billy kills only bad guys, of course, although the length of his victim list leaves Billy with no doubt that he, too, is a bad guy.

A LITTLE LIFE by Hanya Yanagihara

After I finished his book, I was stunned to discover that the author is a woman.  Her focus is on four male characters who meet in college and become lifelong friends; the female characters are basically bystanders.  Two of the male characters, Willem and especially Jude, receive by far the most attention, but all four men become very successful, albeit with a few bumps along the way as they weave in and out of one other’s lives.  Jude is tortured, enigmatic, brilliant, and self-loathing to an extreme, due to an abusive childhood for which he feels so much shame that he refuses to discuss it.  The book becomes very dark about halfway through, not only because we begin to get glimpses of Jude’s past, but also because he becomes susceptible to a predatory character as an adult.  His friend JB finds himself in a very similar situation earlier in the book, and both Jude’s and JB’s lives spiral out of control, until their friends basically stage interventions in both cases.  This book is very long and very immersive, but the degree to which Jude inspires devotion from his friends and mentors is not well explained.  In other words, he does not come across as supremely lovable, and loving him requires Herculean energy.  It’s not that he is a demanding person, but his physical and emotional issues render him very high maintenance.  Overall, the other three most consequential characters are well drawn, although Malcolm gets short shrift, and Willem comes off as a saint—not a word we normally associate with an actor.  One of my favorite takeaways from this book is JB’s statement that striving for success is like running, whereas maintaining success is like running in place, which is not very satisfying nor very motivating and helps explain why so many artists fizzle later in life.

DOCTOR DEALER by Mark Bowden

Larry Lavin was a smart and charming guy who came to be a massive cocaine dealer while attending the University of Pennsylvania.  After college he indulged in a hedonistic lifestyle, full of wild parties and trashed hotel rooms, but his kingpin status never seemed to interfere with his dental practice.  However, good help in the cocaine business was always hard to find, especially when the employees were dipping into the product a little too much.  Plus, the ineptitude of Larry’s guys who did not partake is almost unfathomable as is Larry’s trust in patently untrustworthy characters.  His long-suffering wife pleaded with him for years to get out of the drug business, to no avail.  There was always one more reason to stick it out a little longer.  This story is immersive in a weird way, but the writing is atrocious.  I get that this book was written in the 1980s, but “ahold” was not a word then, either.  At times, the breezy writing style is tolerable, but the level of detail is ridiculous.  The author describes what types of fish were in Larry’s home aquarium and the layout of homes Larry didn’t even buy.  Who cares?  And this unnecessary trivia makes me wonder about the accuracy of other minutiae, such as what Larry was wearing on any given day.  Spare me.

THE LATECOMER by Jean Hanff Korelitz

The Oppenheimer triplets despise one another, for reasons that I never understood.  Their family is extremely wealthy, but true affection is in short supply.  In fact, Sally and Lewyn both decide to attend their father’s alma mater, Cornell, but they both refuse to acknowledge to anyone that they have a sibling on campus.  The third triplet is Harrison, a know-it-all who opts for a very untraditional two-year school for men before his eventual matriculation at Harvard.  As these three flee the nest, their mother discovers her husband’s infidelity and uses it as leverage to get him to agree to having another child.  This one will be carried by a surrogate, but all four children were conceived in vitro at the same time.  The fourth child, Phoebe, is the most normal, despite being raised solely by her mother, who has basically checked out emotionally.  This family is a walking billboard for the adage that money doesn’t buy happiness.  This book, for me, was something of a chore until about halfway through, when all hell breaks loose, due to a dirty deed by Sally that, of course, backfires. The triplets are the epitome of unlikeable characters at this point, but their three-way train-wreck of a quarrel on their 19^th birthday is the sort of disaster that we can’t help watching.  The author juggles the myriad family secrets quite deftly so that we are much better informed than the characters themselves.  It’s like being a fly on the wall in anticipation of the inevitable brawl.  The author does hide one shocker from us until the very end, but I didn’t think this revelation was nearly as big a deal as the other happenings she meted out that caused me to gasp.