BOOTH by Karen Joy Fowler

Sometimes I find historical fiction to be well-researched but poorly written.  This novel, although overly long, is both well-researched and written well enough.  The focus is on the Booth family and their ten children, several of whom die young from smallpox and cholera.  John Wilkes is one of the youngest Booth children and adored by all, despite some pretty despicable behavior, long before he assassinates Lincoln.  His father is a renowned Shakespearean actor, often performing drunk, and several of his sons, including John, follow in his footsteps, as both an actor and a drunk.  Even their spinster sister has a drinking problem, although she seems able to keep hers hidden by mostly staying home with their mother.  Speaking of their mother, she is not even legally married to their father, who abandoned his first wife and son but cannot really shake them off.  Although the author tried not to make John Wilkes the centerpiece here, I could not help but look for him on every page, anticipating the horrendous act for which he is known.  This novel does provide some context but does not attempt to make him out to be a good guy who made a bad mistake.  On the contrary, in his warped mind, he is performing a service to the country.  I found it puzzling that John Wilkes was such a proponent of slavery, while all of the other members of his family disagreed with his stance but chose to overlook it.  The various members of his family play the blame game—blaming a brother for throwing John out of the house, blaming his co-conspirators, blaming themselves for not having seen it coming, blaming Lincoln for going to the theater.

PROPERTIES OF THIRST by Marianne Wiggins

The heart of this story is Schiff, an American Jewish lawyer from the Department of the Interior.  He has been assigned the unpleasant task of setting up the Manzanar Internment Camp in California shortly after the attack on Pearl Harbor.  Members of the filthy rich Rhodes family, whose land near the camp is being appropriated for a landing strip, are the supporting characters.  The patriarch is Rocky Rhodes (!), who is in a constant battle with the Los Angeles Water Department, who have helped themselves to the snow runoff in his valley.  Sunny Rhodes, Rocky’s daughter, owns a restaurant in town, and sparks fly between her and Schiff, although she is engaged to someone else.  What really lights up the page, though, is the dialog between Schiff and anyone else, and scenes that don’t involve Schiff are somewhat dry.  Fortunately, such scenes are infrequent.  This book stretches to over 500 pages, but I would have gladly followed Schiff for 500 more, especially since we are left with loose ends galore.  There is so much to savor here, though.  It has love, conflict, oppression, compassion, heartbreak, suspense—all wrapped in splendid prose.  The Japanese internment camp may be the reason that all these characters come together, but it is not really the centerpiece of the novel.  That honor belongs to the landscape and the characters, who do everything they can to lessen the severe hardship of the people whose lives have been upended by an event that they neither invited nor condoned.

THE LAST WHITE MAN by Mohsin Hamid

This slim novel is a parable that is a cross between Kafka’s The Metamorphosis and Saramago’s Blindness.  It also brings to mind John Howard Griffin’s memoir, Black Like Me.  Here we have a young white man named Anders who wakes up one day and discovers that he is now Black.  Furthermore, he does not look like his former self, but he has the same memories, preferences, aptitudes, body type, habits, etc., that he had before.  His father is wary of this Black man in his midst, but Anders’s friend Oona takes his new look in stride.  Then more and more people have the same experience of becoming Black and having to adapt to being treated differently, and not just by white people.  This is empathy on a whole new level and literally walking in the shoes of an oppressed ethnicity.  At first there is some unrest, but then that tapers off, and nothing much happens.  At some point during this transformation process for all white people, distinguishing between who used to be white and who has always been Black becomes nearly impossible. My take on this book is that the author is telling us that racial bigotry based on skin color makes no sense, and, of course, he is right.  If everyone were Black, that prejudice would disappear, but other biases might become more widespread.  Anyway, this book definitely provides food for thought in the what-if department.

LEAVING by Roxana Robinson

Do not read this book.  Seriously.  It’s tedious at times with a lot of hand-wringing and some heavy-handed justice being dealt.  The premise is a love story between two sixty-somethings, and I felt like I was reading a letter in a newspaper advice column.  Sarah and Warren were young lovers who split up due to a couple of misunderstandings on Sarah’s part.  They then went their separate ways and married other people.  Sarah is now divorced with two well-adjusted adult children, whereas Warren is married with a grown daughter.  When Warren decides to leave his wife, his daughter becomes outraged and completely cuts him off from all communication.  Really?  His wife and daughter both insist that he is destroying the family by choosing to live his own life.  I found all this drama absurd, and, yes, I know it happens, but it’s still absurd for a man to be held hostage by his daughter who is no longer part of his household.  Sarah’s daughter’s assessment of both Warren and his daughter is spot-on, even though she has never met either of them.  If you’re looking for characters who attain some level of redemption, skip this one.  It’s depressing but not a tear-jerker.  One section that is very tense—life and death--is the best part, and I can’t complain about the writing.

SECOND PLACE by Rachel Cusk

The title refers to a rustic guest cabin on the same property as the narrator’s main house.  The fiftyish narrator, known to us simply as M, offers the cabin to a formerly renowned artist, known to us as L. L’s work had a life-changing effect on M in her younger days, but his relevance to the art world has since faded.  He shows up with a beautiful young woman named Brett, who turns out to be quite wealthy and adept at a number of tasks.  The narrator is stunned and disappointed that L brought along a girlfriend, and we have to wonder what exactly was M’s motivation in inviting him.  She is married to Tony, who is a salt-of-the-earth guy whose portrait L wants to paint.  M fumes that she is not to be the subject of one of L’s paintings, but it soon becomes obvious that L intensely dislikes M, especially as she humiliates herself trying to gain his favor.  I’m not sure who comes across worse in this novel, L or M, as L behaves like an entitled brat, and M is making a royal mess of her life, as she has apparently done in the past.  M seems to be aware that L is a snobbish, cruel boor but still yearns for his attention and approval, despite the fact that her husband is a much better man.  This novel is small in terms of number of pages but weighty in content, I suppose, and contains a lot of abstract philosophizing that I did not understand.  Sometimes the sentences just did not make sense to me and threatened to put me to sleep.  And what’s with all the annoying exclamation points?  Wake-up calls, maybe?  At times, I felt as though I were reading an email written in all caps.