THE NETANYAHUS by Joshua Cohen

This book needs a different title.  For one thing, it sounds like it’s about the family of Israel’s current Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and it is to some degree, but it’s fiction, although how much of it is fiction is not really clear.  Certainly the first person narrator is fictional--Ruben Blum, a history professor, specializing in the history of taxation (!) at a fictional college in the state of New York.  Blum’s family is also fictional, including his daughter, Judy, who will stop at nothing to get a nose job.  The event that finally prompts the nose job is one of the most memorable moments in the book.  The other noteworthy events involve the arrival of the Netanyahus and the bedlam that ensues.  It’s the late 1950s, and Ben-Zion Netanyahu, father of Benjamin, arrives at the college where Blum teaches for a job interview, with his wife and their three unbelievably ill-behaved children in tow.  Blum has been chosen to chaperone Netanyahu to his various appointments around campus, solely because he is also Jewish and is the only Jew employed by the college in any capacity.  One of Netanyahu’s tasks is to teach a class, and his lecture is enlightening in a twisted sort of way, but the most appealing aspect of this book for me is the dialog.  Blum’s quips are priceless throughout, and his wife, Edith, effectively voices her exasperation with the Netanyahu family’s behavior, as well as her husband’s failure to restore order.  Both Blum’s parents and his wife’s parents appear separately for visits, and they are disruptive and hilarious in their own ways but not rivaling the chaos that the Netanyahus are able to achieve.

GHOSTS by Dolly Alderton

I may not be the target audience, which is probably women in their thirties, for this juicy novel, but I devoured it with relish.  Nina, the first-person narrator, is a successful author celebrating her thirty-second birthday when the book opens.  After ending a seven-year relationship with Joe, she is now ready to play the dating game and signs up for a dating app.  She scoffs at most of the profiles but finally sets up a date with 37-year-old Max, an outdoorsy accountant.  Nina is also dealing with a rude and noisy neighbor and a father whose dementia is worsening at an alarming rate.  I found Nina’s biggest problem, however, to be the diverging lifestyles among Nina and her longtime friends, particularly those like Katherine who are now married with children.  Nina finds herself in the position of having to dodge landmines in conversations related to weddings and pregnancies, as well as having to accept that such friendships are now rather one-sided, with Nina having to make all the concessions to accommodate her friends with family responsibilities.  Nina is no slouch herself when it comes to shouldering responsibilities, although in my opinion she drinks too much, but her priorities have not changed as radically since college as those of her friends.  Her reflections on men and how they can father a child at any age are spot-on, and I love how she stands up to her inconsiderate neighbor and the ex-boyfriend who jilted her friend Lola.

THE BOOK OF FORM AND EMPTINESS by Ruth Ozeki

Fourteen-year-old Benny Oh and his mother, Annabelle, both have a problem with inanimate objects.  Since the death of Kenji, Benny’s father, Benny hears the voices of things like a table leg, which tells him the story of a toddler being tied to it.  Annabelle’s hoarding of useless stuff could result in their eviction and in Benny’s removal to foster care.  Benny’s issues lead him to do some really asinine things, and I felt for Annabelle as she struggles to keep her job and her sanity while Benny becomes increasingly more unmanageable.  At its heart, this book is an attack on the materialistic world in which we live. However, it also makes a statement on the inadequacy of our mental health system, although Benny’s problems would be a challenge for any doctor trying to diagnose and treat them.  I found this book to be a relatively fast read, despite its length, but I found some aspects of it to be unnecessary and confusing.  At times, the narrator is definitely a book or books, and sometimes Benny is the narrator.  It also contains snippets from a book called Tidy Magic, which Annabelle is reading, although her adherence to its advice is haphazard at best.  Whereas objects speak to Benny, Annabelle speaks to objects, as suggested in Tidy Magic, thanking them for their service before disposing of them.  Despite all this conversation with inanimate stuff, the only objects that actually come to life are the tidying-up book itself and a collection of words on refrigerator magnets that periodically rearrange themselves in a different order.  Then there’s the author of Tidy Magic, who lives in a Zen monastery.  She comes into the picture because Annabelle voices her frustrations to the author via email with no expectation of a reply, and I guess that’s why we need to know her situation.  The good news about this side plot is that the Zen author’s aide offhandedly offers a welcome explanation for Benny’s behavior.

DETRANSITION, BABY by Torrey Peters

Two trans women, Reese and Amy, fell in love, but then Reese cheated with married men, and Amy has detransitioned back to a man, because being a trans woman was just too difficult.  Now he muses that before he transitioned from a man to a woman, he felt like his body was a separate obedient entity, like a good dog.  Then he transitioned to Amy, and the dog disappeared.  That would seem to be a good thing, but then he implies that he detransitioned because he missed the comfort of the dog.  That’s all well and good, but the dog did not come back, and now he is going by Ames. Believing himself to be sterile due to hormone injections from his years as Amy, Ames has a sexual relationship with his boss, Katrina.  She becomes pregnant with Ames’s child, and Ames has to ‘fess up to his trans history.  Katrina reels from the shock of this revelation but then rebounds and pushes Ames to decide whether he wants to commit to being a father or not.  Ames, however, is still wrestling with his gender identity and has not ruled out the possibility of transitioning to a woman again.  He broaches the possibility that he, Reese, and Katrina all serve as the child’s parents.  What?  Well, OK, the family unit is evolving these days, and Katrina eventually warms up to the idea, adopting the attitude that queerness is cool.  This book was definitely an education for me, as I don’t know any trans men or women, at least none that I am aware of.  The three main characters are fully formed and in transition, in more ways than one. I have to say, though, that Katrina’s flexibility about how her child would be raised seemed radical to me.  Of course, fiction is fiction.

TOMORROW, AND TOMORROW, AND TOMORROW by Gabrielle Zevin

I struggled with this book and don’t understand why it has received so many accolades.  I had a long career as a software developer, so the technology aspect did not turn me off.  However, the two main characters, Sam and Sadie, did.  Yes, they experience a lot of trauma and grief, but Sam is very buttoned up emotionally, and Sadie just goes into hiding occasionally, waiting for someone to draw her out.  These two collaborators in video game design just got on my nerves.  I also found it odd that Sam does most of the speaking engagements whenever publicity for a newly launched product is required; he seems to relate better to strangers than to friends and co-workers.  My favorite character was Marx, Sam’s college roommate who joins Sam and Sadie’s company, Unfair Games, as a producer, but there’s just not enough of him spread across the pages.  I also loved Simon and Ant, who join the company much later, but they are basically NPCs (non-player characters, in video game jargon).  Every time I picked up this book I hoped to read about anyone but Sam or Sadie.  Near the end of the book, however, is a section that follows a player (or players) through a game called Pioneers.  Characters in this game interact in a more empathetic and heartfelt way than the human characters in the novel, although, of course, the players inhabiting the characters in Pioneers are human.  Plus, for non-gamers like myself, the game sequence gives more insight into how such games work and why they are popular.  This novel needed more stuff like this, although Pioneers did not really appear to be fun.  My takeaway is that video games provide an outlet for some people to shed their insecurities and interact with other people in an alternate universe.  I’m  not judging here but rather offering a not necessarily valid conclusion.