THE LAZARUS PROJECT by Aleksandar Hemon

Vladimir Brik, a Bosnian native living in the U.S. with his neurosurgeon wife, has decided to write a book about Lazarus Averbuch, a young Jewish man who was killed under suspicious circumstances a century earlier.  Brik uses grant money to research Averbuch’s history in the Balkans, accompanied by an acquaintance from Brik’s Sarajevo days, Rora, a photographer.  The timeline here is fluid, to say the least, as the storyline oscillates between Averbuch’s story and Brik’s travels, which sometimes involve border crossings in cars with reckless drivers who frown on seatbelts.  At times, I got bogged down in the unfamiliar history of the breakup of Yugoslavia, and my attention span waned.  Hemon, however, is quite the wordsmith, especially given that English is not his first language.  For example, here are a couple of my favorite passages.  On page 229, we have the sentence, “Her hair seemed to be ponytailed to the point of pain.”  I love this visual and always admire an author who can convert a noun to a verb with such a vivid result.  Then on page 263, Hemon writes, “The bathroom walls were daubed over with various venereal diseases; the lines between the tiles brimmed with unspeakable ecosystems.”  The image may be yucky, but the metaphors are marvelous.

MOTHERS AND SONS by Adam Haslett

Peter Fischer is a lonely gay immigration lawyer who specializes in asylum cases, many of which involve persecution for sexual orientation.  Until now, Peter has avoided cases involving gay immigrants, possibly because they force him to dredge up his own past.  His relationship with his lesbian mother, a former priest who now co-owns a women’s retreat in Vermont, is strained.  Theirs is just one of several mother/son relationships that support the book title.  We also have Vasel, Peter’s first gay client, whose mother helped get him out of Albania but whom Vasel cannot ask for a letter confirming his homosexuality.  Another client is Sandra, whose son Felipe is terrified that she will be deported back to Honduras and leave him alone in the U.S.  Last but not least is Peter’s sister, Liz, whose 4-year-old son, Charlie, whom she adores, is still not completely potty-trained.  Despite the peaceful tone of this book, its subject matter is anything but peaceful.  I would say that it is an uncomfortable, squirm-inducing read with several violent backstories.  I also found it baffling at times.  How can a traumatized teenager whose mother is a priest not receive any sort of counseling?

THE MANIAC by Benjamin Labatut

I had to put my thinking cap on to read this book.  It centers around the life of John von Neumann, a brilliant physicist and mathematician who worked on the Manhatttan Project and who also co-wrote a book with major implications for the field of economics.  Each chapter in this novel features a different von Neumann acquaintance who sheds light on the man’s personality and intellectual gifts.    The title of the book could be a sort of double entendre, given that von Neumann could be very obsessive about his theories, but he also developed a computer whose acronym was MANIAC.  This book is not as enjoyable as When We Cease to Understand the World, but the last few chapters rescue the rest of the book, although they have little to do with von Neumann.  The last section, entitled “LEE or The Delusions of Artificial Intelligence,” focuses on computer programs written to play chess, and, more importantly, the Chinese game of Go.  The chapters in which an AI program called AlphaGo challenges the best Go player in the world, Lee Sedol, to a 5-game match are fascinating, even to someone like myself who knows nothing about Go.  We get a glimpse into the emotional psyche of Lee Sedol in this last section to about the same degree as we witnessed von Neumann’s reaction to his own successes and frustrations, even though the latter’s story occupies the majority of the book.

RETURN TO VALETTO by Dominic Smith

Hugh Fisher, a bereaved historian, returns to the Italian village of Valetto where his mother, Hazel Serafino, grew up, but the town now boasts only ten inhabitants.  Four of those are his three aunts and his grandmother, whose one hundredth birthday is approaching.  The family property includes a small cottage, which Hugh inherited from his mother but has now been claimed by Elisa, a chef from Milan. Elisa’s family apparently sheltered Hugh’s grandfather, who deserted his wife and four daughters to join the Resistance during WWII.  Elisa’s arrival on the scene solves at least one mystery—that of the whereabouts of Hugh’s grandfather after he disappeared.  Another mystery crops up when Hugh discovers that Elisa is the daughter of a woman who lived for a time as a refugee with the Serafino family.  Elisa’s mother and Hugh’s mother became great friends as children, but Hugh was never aware that refugee children lived with the Serafinos and has trouble coming to terms with why his mother never mentioned this fact.  Hugh soon finds that there is a lot more about his mother that he does not know, including an event whose details have been suppressed for decades and that only Elisa’s mother can shed light on.  All of the mysteries make for a good solid foundation, but the middle of the book drags, and the pace is almost as lethargic as the town of Valetto.  Ultimately, this is a family story about abandonment and regret, but it is not depressing.  I laughed at what Hugh’s grandmother says on page 37:  “I don’t recommend living a day over eighty-five.  Everything after that is like reading a novel you never liked for the second time.”  Oh my goodness, I hope not, but first, I have to get to eighty-five.

THE MOST by Jessica Anthony

Even at fewer than 150 pages, this book does not exactly zip along.  It takes place over the course of one day in 1957, and the main character, Kathleen, spends the entire time in her apartment complex’s swimming pool.  Of course, there is plenty of reflection on her part as to why she’s lingering in the pool.  We also learn about her husband Virgil’s past, and neither wife nor husband is an ideal marriage partner.  In fact, it’s a wonder this marriage has not already been dissolved.  Virgil’s father, oddly enough, is the catalyst that may lead to some soul-baring sharing of past indiscretions.  Now, about the tennis.  Kathleen is a former standout college tennis player who talked herself out of going pro when she had the opportunity.  My problem, though, is that the tennis terminology used here is messed up, especially on page 82.  Players don’t volley from the baseline.  A volley is a type of shot where the ball is hit in the air before it bounces, and it is used primarily at the net.  Players rally from the baseline, meaning that they exchange a series of shots.  Maybe the author meant the service line instead of the baseline, or maybe the players really did volley from the baseline, meaning that the ball never bounced, but that would be weird.  Plus, a slice doesn’t “soar.”  It is an underspin shot, so that it moves slowly.  Sorry to get bogged down in tennis jargon, but this kind of stuff annoys me, just like bad grammar and misspelled words, neither of which are a problem in this book.  The writing here is good, and there’s sort of a magic word, like “Rosebud” in the movie Citizen Kane.  Clever.

ORBITAL by Samantha Harvey

Here we glimpse 24 hours inside an orbiting space station on the day of the first moon landing since the Apollo project.  The six characters—four astronauts and two cosmonauts—are in need of a plot in order to keep this reader engaged and awake.  I liked the message of this book a lot more than the book itself, as the author indulges in quite a bit of philosophizing about Planet Earth as this vessel goes around and around.  Monotonous?  Maybe, but the six characters seem to be eternally in awe, seeing Earth from 250 miles away as what should be a borderless utopia.  However, they also witness the effects of pollution and climate change brought on by Earth’s human inhabitants but don’t seem to dwell on our shortcomings.  The book reminds us that everyone who has ever walked on the moon was an American—a fact that one of the Russian cosmonauts laments.  I was also surprised, though I shouldn’t have been, at how steep a toll weightlessness takes on the human body.  No amount of exercise can compensate for the absence of gravity on a body that is supposed to bear its own weight.

SAM by Allegra Goodman

The first half of this book made me anxious, but I stuck with it, and I’m glad I did.  The title character is a petulant child, and she is the chief anxiety producer.  Her single mother, Courtney, is a saint—working two jobs to make sure that her two children have better opportunities than she had.  Sam’s ability to climb door frames inspires her ne’er-do-well father to take her to a climbing gym, and thus begins Sam’s love/hate relationship with climbing.  The narrative recounts Sam’s life until she is about nineteen or so, making this a true coming-of-age novel.  As difficult as she is as a child, she is worse as a teenager, making some very wrong-headed decisions.  The second half of the book becomes much more palatable, as she falls in with a group of twenty-something-year-old rock climbers.  She may not be their peer age-wise, but she is the best climber, and she seems to be making progress toward figuring out what she wants in life.  Lapses in judgment still plague her, though, as does regret regarding her relationship with her father.  The fact that her mother maintains her sanity through all of Sam’s screw-ups is what gave me hope that Sam would find her way to adulthood with her own sanity intact.  Failures can be learning experiences, and Sam has plenty of those on which to build.  Climbing is almost too obvious a metaphor here.  When Sam falls, she dusts herself off and launches herself right back up the boulder.

THE OTHER SIDE OF THE ISLAND by Allegra Goodman

I did not realize until after I had finished this book that it was intended for a young audience.  No matter.  Also, it’s even more relevant now than it was when it came out seventeen years ago.  Climate change is an increasingly bigger problem, and kudos to Allegra Goodman for writing about it in language accessible to all.  Honor is a 10-year-old girl in a dystopian society, and her parents are not conforming to the will of Earth Mother, a corporate entity that makes the rules.  The school system is molding the students into Stepford children, who are punished for any infraction that defies or questions the government’s restrictions.  Everyone knows that non-compliant parents will be “disappeared,” and their children will become orphans who have to board at the school.  Honor is terrified that her parents will meet this fate if they don’t start behaving in the manner expected of them.  This reversal of who is rebelling—the parent rather than the child—begs the question of whether or not safety is in obedience or in refusing to be subject to the constraints of a repressive society.

WELLNESS by Nathan Hill

I am giving this book four stars, but I may have more negatives than positives to say about it.  On the positive side, the opening chapter and the ending are marvelous.  However, the middle sections sink into the tedium of a marriage that has lost its luster with a tantrum-prone child who refuses to eat anything but mac and cheese.  The wife/mother, Elizabeth, is a behavioral scientist of sorts who administers a psychological test to Jack on their first date—unbeknownst to Jack.  She also tries a behavioral modification experiment on her son, but she realizes that the test is flawed when her son explains why he failed.  I found this kind of stuff fascinating.  Also, in an effort to spice up their marriage, Elizabeth convinces Jack to attend an event where spouse-swapping may occur.  This possibility perked up my interest, but the whole scene fizzles.  Even more annoying are multiple chapters describing various algorithms ostensibly used by facebook.  Ugh.  A major tragedy that took place during Jack’s childhood is not revealed until very late in the book, and I didn’t really understand the reason for this delay.  Plus, I don’t know if Jack ever tells Elizabeth about it.  Both Jack and Elizabeth are estranged from their parents who are seriously flawed—envious of their own children.  Jack reunites briefly with his father over social media, trying unsuccessfully to deter his father from buying into conspiracy theories.  Given their lack of good relationship role models, it’s a wonder Jack and Elizabeth’s marriage is not a bigger mess than it is.

FAIRY TALE by Stephen King

“The past is history.  The future is a mystery.”  I had never heard this saying before reading this book, but I plan to quote it often.  Seventeen-year-old Charlie Reade loses his mother to an accident and then is basically losing his father to alcoholism.  He attributes his father’s eventual recovery to a bargain Charlie made in a prayer and then goes out of his way to perform good deeds, including befriending and taking care of his grumpy, reclusive neighbor, Mr. Bowditch.  The reason for the title does not become apparent until about two hundred pages in.  Then Charlie embarks on a magical but dangerous adventure in an effort to rejuvenate Bowditch’s dog.  OK, I think we need a more pressing motive here, but then Charlie finds a kingdom in need of a superhero.  Whether or not Charlie fits the bill remains to be seen, but the author goes wild with the fairy tale references, plus some homage to the movies Star Wars and Gladiator.  I actually found the first part of the book more engaging and something of a feel-good story while Charlie was repaying the gratitude he felt for his father’s sobriety.  The fantasy that follows is a swashbuckling kind of thrill ride but also very predictable.

YELLOWFACE by R.F. Kuang

My favorite novel involving plagiarism is Old School by Tobias Wolff, which took place long before social media became a thing.  This book has a lot in common with The Plot by Jean Hanff Korelitz, which did involve online harassment, and in both cases the character being harassed is guilty of plagiarism.  The Korelitz book is more of a mystery, but I think I would have appreciated this book more if it were not so similar.  In this book, June, a mediocre writer, steals the book draft of her dead friend, Athena, who is a celebrated Asian-American author.  June is vilified not only because she is suspected of plagiarism but also because, as a white woman, the resulting book about the Chinese Labour Corps in WWI is considered “inauthentic.”  Kuang gives a nod here to American Dirt, which was similarly criticized.  How much of June’s novel is her own work is not really clear, but the fact that she stole the idea and the plot causes her to vacillate between mind-numbing guilt and brazen indignation toward her accusers.  June rationalizes her actions in every way possible, even viewing the stolen novel as payback to Athena for stealing June’s personal story about a possible rape.  I enjoyed this book very much for the most part, but June’s constant hand-wringing and obsession with public perception of her book became tedious at times.  She occasionally falls into a state of deep depression but cannot stop herself from reading the online allegations and negative reviews.  Rarely, though, does she consider coming clean about the origins of the book.  Once the lie is out there, she can’t unsay it and chooses instead to dig in her heels.

ABSOLUTION by Alice McDermott

Alice McDermott’s novels are generally somewhat sedate, but this one takes place in Saigon during the early 1960s.  However, the young wives of American engineers and intelligence personnel are rarely in dangerous circumstances, especially if they stick to their villas, protected by walls and barbed wire.  Our first-person narrator, Patricia, soon comes under the influence of Charlene, a “dynamo” who is determined to spread a little cheer to the Vietnamese people, including a leper colony and the children’s ward of a hospital.  Whether the trinkets and Saigon Barbies she distributes are really worth the time and effort is questionable, and a gift she bestows at the end is beyond the pale.  Decades later back in the States, Charlene’s daughter and a kind young man named Dominic that Patricia knew in Saigon are neighbors in Maryland, and this coincidence seems unlikely and unnecessary.  His story is a compelling one, but I think it could have been conveyed via a different pathway.  Even more unlikely is the fact that my favorite line in the book is actually a quote from Stalin:  “If one man dies of hunger, that is a tragedy.  If millions die, that is a statistic.”  What a sad but true statement, and it applies to more types of fatalities than just hunger.

SOMEONE by Alice McDermott

Alice McDermott’s novels often seem to be about unexceptional people in unexceptional circumstances, but somehow she makes their story worthy of our attention with her lyrical prose and attention to detail.  Here we have Marie, who is neither attractive nor ambitious, and she is not particularly smart, getting her left and right mixed up with unfortunate consequences.  When her first suitor, Walter Hartnett (sometimes spelled Harnett in the hardbound version--an inconsistency which I found weird for such a respected author), talks about their getting married, she is all in.  Then he suddenly tells her that he is marrying someone else, and her world is shaken.  She eventually moves on, gets a job, gets married, and raises a family. Ho hum, right?  Not so fast.  The birth of her first child is quite a nightmare, and her job at a funeral home is a surprisingly good fit.  The surrounding characters have even more drama to offer, especially her handsome older brother who abruptly leaves the priesthood--and the “someone” who eventually becomes her husband.

CHILD OF MY HEART by Alice McDermott

Fifteen-year-old Theresa is an only child of middle-class parents who live in the Hamptons in the hope that their beautiful daughter will land a wealthy husband.  She has been ushered into adulthood a bit too fast, having become a popular babysitter and dog-walker almost as soon as her age reached double-digits.  During the summer in which this novel takes place she has also taken on care of her 8-year-old cousin, Daisy, who accompanies Theresa as she walks from house to house and performs her duties.  One of Theresa’s charges is Flora, a toddler, who is routinely left on the porch in her stroller for Theresa to pick up, take to the beach, provide lunch, bathe, and entertain.  More alluring than Flora, though, is her father, a successful artist in his 70s.  Two aspects of Theresa’s life drive this novel:  the not-so-subtle advances Flora’s father makes toward Theresa and the worrisome bruises on Daisy’s body that beg for medical attention.  Theresa’s responses to both of these situations are problematic.  In both cases, I felt that she made the wrong decisions and that she was a foolish teenager, but then I had to rethink my opinions and ask myself if perhaps her choices were not so unwise.  There are arguments to be made on both sides, and I love how the author does not provide consequences or pass judgment but just allows us readers to draw our own conclusions.

AT WEDDINGS AND WAKES by Alice McDermott

Sometimes I like books with good characters but scant plot, and sometimes I don’t.  In this case, I enjoyed the book for its lyrical writing and vivid sense of place.  Three children—Margaret, Bobby, and Maryanne—accompany their mother, Lucy, twice a week to visit her three unmarried sisters and her stepmother, Momma.  Momma raised all four of her sister’s girls and married her sister’s husband after her sister died in childbirth.  The author treats Lucy’s three children as sort of a collective entity that is observing and listening to the interactions among the adult women, eagerly awaiting the arrival of their father to rescue them.  Despite the languid pace of this novel, I was never bored and chose just to savor every word.  The tragedies of the past haunt this family, but their story is not really morbid.  Then we have the occasional anecdote, such as the story of Momma arriving in the U.S. from Ireland literally penniless because she spent all of her money on chocolate during the voyage.  My only problem with this book is that sometimes I had to remind myself which generation was which, as the author fuses the past with the present at times, and we even get a brief glimpse of the future in which the three children are adults.

THE BEE STING by Paul Murray

I found this book to be absorbing at times and aggravating at times.  The Barnes family is a fairly affluent family until they fall on hard times.  Then family secrets start to emerge, and each family member struggles with a different problem that they, for whatever reason, refuse to share with the very people who could help them.  Dickie, the father/husband, is running his father’s car dealership, and some would say he is running it into the ground, as customers discover that someone in his shop is stealing their catalytic converters.  Cass, the daughter, plans to attend Trinity College but doesn’t act like it with her excessive drinking.  PJ, the son, is being bullied and shaken down for money he doesn’t have.  Finally, we have Imelda, the beautiful wife/mother, who comes from poverty and an abusive father.  Each family member’s story is heartbreaking in its own way, and Imelda’s rather lengthy story just about drove me crazy, since it has zero punctuation marks.  These are just not the kind of people I would normally want to spend 600+ pages with, as they felt a little too real, and not in a good way.  However, except for Imelda’s sections, which actually I finally became more or less accustomed to, this book is very readable, although it is, I think, overly and unnecessarily long.  The author keeps the reader guessing about a lot of things, and that uncertainty propels the individual storylines ultimately toward a convergence.  This was not a book that I was eager to get back to, but it was a book that I couldn’t stop thinking about.

MOONLIGHT MILE by Dennis Lehane

This novel may lack some of Lehane’s usual bite, but, hey, it’s the last of the Angela Gennaro/Patrick Kenzie novels, and I’m willing to cut the author some slack.  Angie and Patrick are now married with a four-year-old daughter, when the girl from Gone, Baby, Gone reenters the picture, or not, as she has actually gone missing again more than a decade later.  Amanda McCready is now sixteen, sharp as a tack, and apparently does not suffer fools gladly, including her incompetent mother.  Patrick wants to make amends for having returned her to said mother in the first place and now must determine whether she has been kidnapped again or has simply taken off of her own accord.  The latter seems unlikely, since she needs to finish school in order to qualify for admission to an Ivy League university.  The real start of this novel is Amanda herself, absent or present, who overshadows Patrick and Angie with her guile and ability to bend others to her will.  Patrick and Angie are no slouches, but Patrick unwittingly challenges Russian Mafiosi, who, of course, threaten harm to his daughter.  Where is my favorite Lehane character—Patrick’s very capable sidekick, Bubba--in all this?  He takes a backseat as babysitter, and I did not like him in that role at all, even if he is the one person who can do the job effectively.  Anyway, I will miss our two intrepid investigators.

THE PASSENGER by Cormac McCarthy

This novel has two great opening scenes.  The first is a young woman’s suicide by hanging.  The second is a sunken plane full of dead passengers.  Despite this auspicious beginning, I would describe this book as uneven.  Some parts I would give five stars, rating this the author’s best read since The Road, and other parts merit only two stars.  The main character is Bobby Western, a salvage diver, and the woman who commits suicide is his brilliant and beautiful sister, Alicia, a mathematician.  These two characters are in love with each other.  Seriously.  Most of the chapters are Bobby’s, but some are Alicia’s, and these latter ones just annoyed me, partly because they are in italics and partly because they are peopled with characters who are products of her schizophrenia.  Bobby, on the other hand, is mostly a man of few words, and although there is some great dialog here, I found it difficult to keep up with who was saying what.  Especially challenging is a long conversation between Bobby and another man about quantum mechanics, and physics is not my long suit.  More intriguing is the fact that the IRS freezes all of Bobby’s assets, although probably not for owing back taxes.  Rather, his problem seems to stem from the fact that a passenger was missing from the cabin of the underwater plane.  If I thought the sequel, Stella Maris, would further address this sinister situation, I would read it, but apparently it is just about Alicia’s psychiatric treatment.

THE CROSSING by Cormac McCarthy

Fortunately, I remember some of my college Spanish, as this book contains a lot of it, and the author doesn’t always translate it.  Some of it I ignored, some of it I got the main idea from the context, and some of it I looked up.  The timeframe is not really clear until later in the book when the U.S. enters WWII.  The protagonist, a teenager named Billy, rides off from New Mexico to return an injured wolf to Mexico, leaving behind his parents and younger brother and taking with him the family’s only firearm.  Billy encounters all sorts of people, both good and bad, in the course of his travels.  Without the good people, he never would have survived all three of his forays into Mexico, but, if it weren’t for the bad people, he might not have had to return there at all.  Billy has skills that serve him well most of the time, but luck can be a fickle companion. This book reminded me a bit of Huckleberry Finn without the humor and with a horse as the means of travel instead of a raft.  Since this is a Cormac McCarthy novel, you know it is going to be Dark with a capital D.  The section that I found most riveting is one in which a very competent doctor is patching up a bullet wound, where the bullet went straight through.  In another section that held my attention, a passerby treats a horse’s knife wound with a strange brew and a poultice.  I guess I just liked the healing better than the bloodshed.

SUTTREE by Cormac McCarthy

Cornelius Suttree is living on a houseboat near Knoxville, Tennessee, in 1951.  He makes a living—if you want to call it that—fishing on the river with trotlines.  Suttree is a friend to everybody he meets and the ultimate good Samaritan, usually to the detriment of his own well-being.  Some of these so-called friends he meets in jail, or more specifically, the workhouse, where he is occasionally confined for passing out in an inebriated state in a public place.  One previously incarcerated friend is Harrogate, a teenager who has been caught defiling watermelons—you can guess what that entails--that don’t belong to him.  Suttree gets dragged into various capers, most of which are illegal, such as poisoning bats, robbing banks, and disposing of dead bodies.  He always protests getting involved in these schemes but eventually finds it easier to go along than to resist.  The cast of ne’er-do-well characters in Suttree’s life is voluminous, and I finally gave up trying to keep them straight.  Suttree’s mysterious past proves that he has not always been someone to rely on, but we get only the briefest glimpse of that.  I suppose you could say that this book is darkly humorous, with the emphasis on “darkly.” It reads like a cross between Tobacco Road and Huckleberry Finn, but, ironically, almost every sentence contains a word that I don’t recognize.  Did I look them all up?  No, or I would still be reading this book.