Y/N by Esther Yi

Sometimes I read a book, and I think, “Really?”  This is one of those books.  This is not the worst book I’ve ever read, but it’s way down there.  I don’t even know how to classify this book, because it’s so nonsensical.  Borderline fantasy, maybe.  The unnamed first-person narrator is a twenty-something woman living in Berlin. She becomes obsessed with Moon (“mooning” over him), a member of a Korean boy band called the pack of boys.  She writes a fictional story about him, using the placeholder Y/N, so that the reader can insert “Your Name” for the person in a relationship with Moon. When Moon decides to step back from the band in real life, the narrator travels to Seoul on a quest to find him.  She eventually tracks him to a convalescent home called the Sanctuary where she sees a boy who looks like Moon.  Here’s her thought process, from page 154:

“In fact, his resemblance possibly proved he wasn’t Moon.  Similarity precluded equivalence:  If the boy were Moon, I’d never say he looked like Moon, just like I’d never say that I looked like myself.”

This odd deductive logic is my favorite passage in the book, but it’s a good example of how weird the whole thing is.  On the plus side, the cover art is stunning, but you know what they say:  You can’t judge a book by . . . .

TREMOR by Teju Cole

My idea of a novel includes characters and a plot, but this novel really has only one character and no plot.  Tunde is a Nigerian-American professor and photographer who travels to Mali for a speaking engagement.  Chapter Five contains the entire text of the speech, and perhaps the audio version of this book gives it justice.  In written form, it is meandering and not exactly dazzling, just like the rest of this book.  Chapter Six is a series of first-person vignettes narrated by denizens of Lagos, Nigeria.  (One review suggested that these are Tunde’s interviewees.)  All that aside, I have two major complaints about this book.  First of all, there is a huge amount of discourse on African art and music, most of which was meaningless to me as a non-connoisseur.  Secondly, the narrative changes unexpectedly from third-person to first-person, with a few second-person references in which the “you” is never identified, at least as far as I could tell.  The change to first-person confused me to the point that I wasn’t really sure if the narrator was Tunde, but I assumed that it was.  Then on page 235, four pages from the end, in the middle of all of this first-person prose, we have a sentence that starts with “Tunde is making aviation cocktails with Sean’s help.”  Never mind that I have no idea what an aviation cocktail is.  My real question is whether or not Tunde is now referring to himself in third person, and if Tunde is not talking about himself, who is?  Needlessly frustrating.

OUR SHARE OF NIGHT by Mariana Enriquez

When I think of horror stories, I think of Stephen King, but this book is not on a par with his stuff at all.  In fact, it is Dull with a capital D and totally lacks suspense.  Maybe some of its punch was lost in translation, but I doubt it.  The first part of the book is about Juan Peterson, whose parents sold him as a child to the Order—a privileged group of sorcerers.  Juan is a medium who can summon the Darkness—a supernatural presence which supposedly has the power to grant immortality.  The Darkness, however, gets hungry, and the members of the Order are happy to supply the Darkness with human sacrifices.  Yep.  Also, anyone who ventures too close to the Darkness is likely to lose a limb.  Summoning the Darkness takes its toll on Juan’s fragile physical health, and the Order wants his son Gaspar to take over his duties.  Juan does everything in his power to protect Gaspar from becoming the Order’s puppet, and sometimes his protection techniques are violently abusive, causing Gaspar to be quite conflicted about his relationship with his father.  The dynamic between Gaspar and Juan was, for me, what gave the novel some heart, but otherwise it’s just a long and unpleasant slog through cemeteries, mass graves, and houses that are bigger on the inside than on the outside.

BLACKOUTS by Justin Torres

This is my first exposure to erasure poetry, which I had never even heard of until now.  Chunks of an existing text—in this case, a real study of homosexuals from the 1930s called Sex Variants—are blacked out, so that the visible text forms something new.  Photos abound in this book, including those of the erasure poetry, which were definitely above my pay grade.  Suffice it to say that the non-traditional format of this book rendered it too cerebral for me.  Basically, an unnamed gay narrator is trading stories with an elderly gay man named Juan, who is dying.  These two men met in a mental institution, and now they are swapping stories, sometimes describing events as if describing a movie—a clever way to set the scene more vividly.  The book is a mixture of fact and fiction and may be semi-autobiographical, but one of my chief beefs is that I found it difficult to decipher who was talking—Juan or the narrator, whom Juan calls “nene.”  There are pages and pages of dialog with no identification as to who is saying what, except that occasionally the speaker addresses Juan or nene, so that we know that the other character is speaking.  There is some fascinating history here, particularly with regard to homosexuality as a mental health condition, but if this book was a test, I failed.

BAD SUMMER PEOPLE by Emma Rosenblum

A young boy discovers a dead body in the intriguing opening to this book, but the rest was a disappointment.  The title should be Bad Shallow People, although “bad” is really too nice a word for these despicable rich folks with no conscience.  Cheating with one’s husband’s best friend and cooking the books at the tennis club are mild compared to the other dirty deeds performed here.  By the end I realized that these awful people were even more unscrupulous than I thought.  I know this book is supposed to be funny and satirical, but it did not strike me as either.  The characters are almost all mean-spirited, and their actions just become increasingly outrageous as the book progresses.  The references to the competitiveness at the tennis tournament struck a chord with me, as a tennis player, but the rest was just not my thing. I was surprised that a twenty-year-old could work as a bartender in New York, but he is one of the few who is mostly innocent of any wrongdoing.  Even a woman not on Fire Island, where the action takes place, concocts a false sexual harassment accusation against a co-worker, jeopardizing his job.  Retribution here is way worse than the crime being avenged, so that everyone has to watch their step—sometimes quite literally.

THE CURSE OF PIETRO HOUDINI by Derek B. Miller

The appeal of this book eludes me.  It is a picaresque adventure story, but the uninspired writing style and molasses-like pace did not deliver.  The book starts out in first-person, narrated by a 14-year-old girl whom Pietro Houdini takes under his wing and assigns the name of Massimo—a boy’s name.  Massimo’s parents have been killed in a WWII bombing, and Massimo follows Pietro to an abbey for refuge.  When Massimo embraces his identity as a boy, the narration changes to third-person.  Then Massimo becomes a girl again but with another false name, and the narration remains third-person.  Guess what the final narration and identity change is?  Is this a stylistic choice or a metaphoric choice or what?  For me, it’s just kind of a mess.  As for the writing style, I would say that it is written for a12-year-old, except that it contains subject matter not appropriate for a juvenile.  Honestly, I would prefer to read a novel intended for a young audience than to read one intended for adults that has such a simplistic writing style.  The book does contain some humor and some historic information, but I was still glad when it was over.

COMPANION PIECE by Ali Smith

This book is out of my league.  I have read several reviews, which helped somewhat.  I know that there are two stories here, centuries apart, and they both involve a variety of locks—Covid lockdown, being locked in a room, being locked in the stocks, and a female blacksmith named Ann Shaklock.  A young girl, who will eventually become an excellent blacksmith herself, when told about Pandora’s box on page 192, says, “There was not a good enough lock on that box.”  Now, what does it all mean?  I have no idea.  The modern-day story takes place during the early days of the Covid pandemic.  It begins with the narrator, Sandy, getting a call from a college acquaintance, Martina, asking for her help in deciphering the meaning of words she heard from a mysterious voice:  “Curlew or curfew.  You choose.”  Then Martina’s twin daughters seek out Sandy and basically become squatters in Sandy’s home. These daughters are Covid deniers, forcing Sandy to move into her father’s house while he is in the hospital so that she can avoid contracting the disease from the twins.  Then we abandon this story and move on to the story of the talented young blacksmith, who is branded as a vagabond.  This second story involves both a curlew—a bird that is a companion of the young blacksmith—and a curfew that has been imposed due to the Black Plague.  The choice then is between being free as a bird or having a time constraint?  I think we would all choose freedom, but sometimes freedom, especially during a pandemic, may endanger other people.  Is that the point?  Probably not.

CHECKOUT 19 by Claire-Louise Bennett

I do not understand why the New York Times named this one of the ten best books of 2022.  It basically has only one character—the female narrator—and no plot.  This book is mostly a litany of books and authors that the narrator has read and some nebulous stories that she has written.  For reasons I cannot fathom the author sometimes switches from first person to third person, making me wonder if both are the same character but always deducing that they are.  We get sidelong glances into her life with few real specifics until near the end when she describes two rather significant horrifying events.  There are several scenes with a guy named Dale, whom the narrator does not claim as a boyfriend “but often behaved just as if he were.”  His actions made me wonder why on earth she would spend any time with him, boyfriend or not.  To top it all off, paragraph breaks are at a minimum, so that I can flip to almost any page, and nonstop words occupy both sides.  For me, this book was a chore to read with no reward for my effort.

MALIBU RISING by Taylor Jenkins Reid

History does tend to repeat itself, especially where families are concerned.  Mick Riva abandons his wife and children, multiple times, after he becomes a superstar singer.  His glamorous daughter Nina’s husband, Brandon, has just left her after he becomes a champion tennis player.  See the pattern?  Nina, after dropping out of high school to raise her three younger siblings, has become famous herself as a modern-day surfing pin-up girl.  Nina’s brother Jay is a world-famous surfer, and their brother Hud is a very successful and well-known photographer.  Their youngest sibling, Kit, is the best surfer of them all but hasn’t achieved the recognition that the other three enjoy.  Are there too many celebrities in this novel?  Most definitely.  And, by the way, Brandon left Nina for the #1 women’s tennis player.  Of course, Nina struggled to make ends meet before her career took off, but the family-owned restaurant helped put food on the table.  This is definitely a beach read, as the title suggests, with the biggest conflict being a falling out between the two brothers when one is sleeping with the other’s ex-girlfriend.  Other than that, errant husbands keep returning after their dalliances have run their course, one character turns out to be gay, and Nina’s annual party gets way out of hand, with guests—a mishmash of famous names and fictitious ones-- literally swinging from the chandelier.  The novel moves along at a good pace, and the author writes assuredly about sand and surf, but there just isn’t much substance here nor any reason to care about the outcome.

SHUGGIE BAIN by Douglas Stuart

The title character of this bleak, semi-autobiographical novel is a gay boy growing up with an alcoholic mother in Glasgow, and to describe it as dreary and depressing is a huge understatement.   The mother, Agnes, apparently resembles Elizabeth Taylor, but there is nothing beautiful about her behavior toward her three children.  Shuggie is the youngest and therefore the most dependent on Agnes, but, in reality, she is dependent on him emotionally, and he serves as an accomplice to her addiction at times.  Unfortunately, not even his unconditional love can sustain her.  Her needs interfere with his schooling, as he is habitually truant, and her craving for alcohol trumps his health and well-being every time.  A brief period of sobriety is cut short in the most cruel way, and, for me, this event is the most devastating one in the novel.  It is really the last straw, as far as her older children are concerned, as well as for me as a reader.  This book is at least 150 pages too long, I think, because Agnes’s family just becomes increasingly despondent as her problem rages on, unabated, page after page, with no hope on the horizon.  Plus, the dialog is full of Scottish dialect, which perhaps adds to the book’s authenticity but increases the thankless challenge of reading it.  The language did become marginally easier to decipher as I became more accustomed to it, but I would have gotten the picture with a lot fewer pages.

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.

BLACK LEOPARD, RED WOLF by Marlon James

Yikes, reading this book was a chore.  This book is The Lord of the Rings on steroids, or maybe testosterone, complete with a wicked enchanted forest, but not nearly as engrossing or entertaining.  Tracker plays the Strider role here but without the charisma, and the quest is the search for a mysterious boy.  Violence abounds, along with shape-shifting characters, including the Leopard in the title who transforms himself into a man and back again.  Characters morph into other characters, and their behavior and personalities fluctuate as well; they are sometimes good guys and sometimes bad.  And don’t even get me started on the women, who are all witches, sorceresses, or otherwise despicable creatures, such as hyenas.  There is quite a bit of perfunctory sex, sometimes consensual, sometimes not, but almost all of it takes place between male characters.  In fact, the only really likeable character is Sadogo, a big-hearted oaf with a murderous past.  The mingi are cursed children—albinos, conjoined twins, a boy with no limbs—whom Tracker tries to save from all the evil entities, and they are pretty cool as well.  However, all the misogyny aside, the choppy sentences, constant savagery, pronouns with ambiguous antecedents, the zigzagging timeline, and a vast cast of characters whose names vary and whose allegiances are fluid, make this novel very difficult to follow and even more difficult to enjoy.  I am totally mystified as to why this book has garnered so much praise.

On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong

This is a book in search of a plot.  From its inauspicious beginning onward, I just wanted to get it over with.  The book’s format is that of a letter from the Vietnamese-American narrator to his illiterate mother, and that letter is rife with poetry, as the author is himself a poet.  However, I am a fan of fiction—not poetry.  Plus, I found nothing to endear me to the narrator other than the fact that he is abused by his mentally ill mother.  He discovers at an early age that he is gay and strikes up a relationship with Trevor, whose home life is just as awful as the narrator’s.  If ever there were a book with a central theme of identity, this is it, but actually I felt that Trevor and the narrator’s mother were both more compelling characters than the narrator.  Plus, the storyline, such as it is, is profoundly grim, with rare moments of beauty or joy, such as scaling a fence next to the freeway to pick wildflowers.  I mean, really, that’s about as joyful as it gets.  The most disturbing aspect of this novel is the story of Trevor’s opioid addiction that stemmed from a sprained ankle.  The narrator lambasts Purdue Pharma for destroying this boy’s life, and I’m with him on this point.  The upside is that, since the author voices his rage in a novel, I actually read it.  Not that I haven’t read or heard about the opioid crisis in the news, but the author here puts a face, albeit fictional, to the many innocent victims.  And I can’t even bear to mention what happens to the macaque in the misguided interest of male virility.  This book drives home the stark reality of how humanity can often be all too inhumane.

THE MIDNIGHT LIBRARY by Matt Haig

Nora Seed is in her mid-thirties, and she is depressed.  Instead of seeking out a good therapist, she tries to kill herself.  In limbo between life and death, she lands in the Midnight Library, where she can review her “book of regrets” and try out some different paths through life that would have resulted from having made different choices.  The outcome of this book is painfully predictable, and the highlights are when Nora has to improvise her way through lives for which she is frightfully unprepared.  The prose is choppy, and it’s basically a fictional self-help book—too preachy, too moralizing, too heavy-handed with the life lessons, and too flippant with regard to attempted suicide.  Perhaps this book can inspire a reader to give pause to some minor self-reflection, like a Mitch Albom or Fredrik Backman book might, but it’s also just as poorly written and unappetizing as books by those guys.  Speaking of heavy-handed, Nora Seed’s real life is called her “root” life.  Root?  Seed?  Really?  It fails in the originality department, too.  In this book, Nora meets a man who experiments with thousands of different lives and calls it “sliding.”  Remember the Gwyneth Paltrow movie Sliding Doors, which explores two different fates?   I don’t mind reading a little fantasy now and then, or even some magical realism, but when Nora encounters several seemingly intelligent people who admit to believing in parallel universes, I just threw up my hands in exasperation.  Nora is obviously not the only character who needs a good therapist.  This book is way overrated.

ANXIOUS PEOPLE by Fredrik Backman

I hate to pan any book with a central theme of suicide, but the writing style of this book seems intended for a sixth grade audience.  The prose is choppy, and the plot, aside from the suicide ten years earlier, is silly, sappy, juvenile, repetitive, and replete with slapstick humor.  I totally fail to grasp why this author is so popular.  The main action takes place during an apartment viewing in which a not-very-threatening bank robber shows up after a failed heist.  During the course of this “hostage” situation, a man in a rabbit head appears, pizza is delivered, and fireworks are requested in lieu of a ransom.  The timeline seesaws between the apartment viewing and the aftermath in which a father and son police team interview the hostages in an effort to locate the bank robber, who has inexplicably disappeared.  Along the way we discover the personal problems of the apartment viewers—an elderly woman, a retired couple, a lesbian couple, and a wealthy banker--as well as why they are attending the viewing.  The book title applies to every character, including the banker’s therapist, and all of them sound like the type of people whose troubles appear in advice columns.  This book has elements in common with a cozy mystery, but those books, though equally convoluted and G-rated, are not generally this wacky.  If you want to read something humorous, go with Jonathan Tropper instead.  Don’t waste your time on something this frivolous and asinine.

FRESHWATER by Akwaeke Emezi

This book is truly weird, and I do not mean that in a good way.  The book is about a young woman named Ada who moves from Nigeria to the U.S. at 16 to go to college.  She is mostly cut off from family and friends, and her body is inhabited by “gods,” including one in particular that leads her body into a number of sexual encounters.  The gods also serve as narrators, and I was never sure if Ada had a multiple personality disorder or whether she was possessed.  Either way, the book left me wondering if Ada had a soul apart from the demons.  She certainly has no trouble finding lovers, but otherwise, this novel does not have much of a plot, and Ada’s character, as I said, is difficult to distinguish from those of the gods residing in her mind.  I wish I had something good to say about this book, other than the fact that the writing is good if you can overlook the grammatical errors.  Near the end we find that some events in Ada’s childhood may have contributed to her mental distress, but I felt that the author added this information more as an excuse and an afterthought than as a substantive contributor to Ada’s issues.  If, in fact, the voices in Ada’s head are actually related to mental illness, I don’t think the cause is necessarily that cut and dried, nor is the resolution ever achieved.  Basically, I did not understand this book, and therefore I was unable to glean any kind of meaning, education, admiration, or pleasure from it.

AUTUMN by Ali Smith

Elisabeth is a child when she meets her elderly neighbor Daniel Gluck.  He has written myriad song lyrics and introduces Elisabeth to art by describing paintings.  They become close friends, despite their age difference.  Fast forward 25 or so years, and Daniel is almost comatose in a hospital bed.  Elisabeth reads at his side and reflects on her childhood with Daniel as sort of a life guide.  This is a strange book, and it did not appeal to me. There is no plot whatsoever, and Daniel is the only character who is really developed, and even his portrait has major gaps.  He admires a little known artist named Pauline Boty, and I did not follow her story at all.  This book is largely about art, and it’s just way too artsy for me.  There are lots of references to trees and leaves, and they must have some connection to the title, but that connection escapes me.  At 102 years old, Daniel is well past the autumn of his life, so that metaphor doesn’t work, either.  One humorous and/or frustrating incident, or actually a series of incidents, is Elisabeth’s effort to get her expired passport renewed.  The clerks at the post office are hell-bent on finding something wrong with her photo each time she attempts to apply.  This recurring problem, plus the inordinate wait time involved, is funny, while at the same time a little too familiar in its bureaucratic nonsense.  The fact that she manages to circumvent this obstacle is cause for celebration, but it’s not enough to carry this novel.

THE WIFE by Meg Wolitzer

What a disappointment.   Joe Castleman and his wife Joan are on their way to Helsinki so that Joe can accept a literary prize that is a notch or so below the Nobel.   Joan is not exactly basking in the glow of her husband’s success and decides on the flight over that she is finally ready to divorce him.  He has cheated on her more times than she can count, and I have to ask, “What has taken her so long?”  She abandoned her life as a coed at Smith College to be with Joe, her married English professor who recognized that she had talent as a writer.  Unfortunately, Wolitzer telegraphs the wife’s long-held “secret” way too often and too obviously.  The “revelation” at the end is not a surprise at all and basically robs Joan of all respect from this reader.  I just have a problem with a smart woman subjugating herself to her husband as she did.  I get it that in the 1950s a woman’s career options were more limited than they are today, but still, for me, Joan is totally lacking in gumption.  Every time she has a chance to spill the beans, she chickens out, erasing any shred of credibility she ever had with her children and everyone else, except Joe’s devoted fans.  Wolitzer is an excellent writer, but in this case I found the storyline to be excruciatingly painful and frustrating. 

THE SAVAGE DETECTIVES by Roberto Bolaño

Arturo Belano, a stand-in for the author, and Ulises Lima are two poets who call themselves visceral realists but seem to make a living selling Acapulco Gold.  The original visceral realist was Cesarea Tinajero, who published a poem in the 1920s that was essentially a series of three line drawings.  Lima’s and Belano’s adventures are told through the voices of more narrators than I could possibly count or keep track of.  These narratives are like journal entries that span several decades (from the 1970s to the 1990s), and either Lima or Belano appears in most of them.  Ulises Lima disappears for a while in Managua, Nicaragua, while on a writers’ junket.  Belano, a Chilean, travels the world; we meet him in Barcelona, Tel Aviv, Mexico City, Paris, and Africa.  There’s a duel with swords on a beach in Spain, an ambush in Liberia, an interesting use of the counting of seconds with “one Mississippi,” etc., a murderous pimp, some muggings, weird odors, a magazine named Lee Harvey Oswald, and two narrators who speak from mental health facilities.  Belano and Lima are dismissive of famous Chilean poet Pablo Neruda and especially Mexican poet Octavio Paz, who also puts in an appearance in the book.  The first narrator, who doesn’t show up again until the last chapter, is a young man who stockpiles a bit of cash by betting on soccer pools using numbers that come to him in visions.  Given all that happens in this novel, it should not be boring, but it was for me, not to mention too wacky and disjointed.

THE GREAT AMERICAN NOVEL by Philip Roth

Philip Roth’s novels are hit or miss, and this one is a definite miss for me.  His great American novel is about the great American pastime—baseball.  Although I watch a lot of baseball, this book did not resonate with me at all.  It’s more of a satire than an homage, and the LOL moments are too few and far between.  It’s the story of a fictional third league, the Patriot League, which includes a team of misfits known as the Ruppert Mundys.  The Mundys are obliged to play all of their games away during the 1943 season, because the War Department has commandeered their ballpark.  The disadvantage of never having a home game is compounded by the fact that two of the team’s players are missing limbs, along with one too old to stay awake for nine innings, and one outfielder who frequently concusses himself by running into the wall.  Their star player is playing for free on the worst team in the league, because his father desperately wants to curb his son’s arrogance with a generous dose of humility.  Political correctness does not live here, as the author skewers everyone, regardless of religion, political leaning, gender, or disability.  I realize that it’s intended as a farce and not something you’re really going to sink your teeth into, but the whole thing is just too ridiculous and unpleasant.  I think this book would have been more entertaining if there were an underdog worth cheering on, but instead we just have a lot of losers, in more ways than one.