THE RABBIT HUTCH by Tess Gunty

Vacca Vale is a fictitious Indiana city that was once a thriving industrial metropolis.  Now it is dying, and developers plan to demolish a sizeable greenspace.  The title of the book refers to an affordable housing apartment complex in which most of the characters reside.  There are rabbits in the story as well, not to mention in the somewhat disturbing epigraph.  Blandine is an exceptionally bright and beautiful young woman who has aged out of the foster system, as have her three male teenaged roommates whose moral compasses are seriously skewed.  Blandine’s personal mission is to stop the developers by peppering them with voodoo dolls and whatnot.  One oddball character who sweeps in from California is the son of a famous but now deceased actress.  He likes to paint his almost naked body with the liquid from glow sticks and then barge into the home of someone with whom he has a bone to pick.  At first, I found the storyline depressing and not exactly cohesive, but then I laughed out loud occasionally.  Overall, though, I would say that this book is a bit dark—about a depressed city and its unfortunate denizens.  In a long and seemingly unrelated section of the book, gifted high school student Tiffany becomes romantically involved with a 42-year-old married teacher.  Her connection to the Rabbit Hutch comes not so much as a surprise as a confirmation of what the author has led us to suspect.  Here’s my favorite passage from that section:

“It’s clear to her that he would be happier in a coastal city.  It’s clear to him that she would be happier in a different species.”

I hope that species is not rabbits.

HELL OF A BOOK by Jason Mott

The “Hell” part of this book’s title is certainly appropriate, and the subject matter is very timely.  Jason Mott makes crystal clear the life-and-death hazards of being a Black man, or even a Black boy for that matter, in this country.  Even white people like myself are now aware that parents of Black boys must have “the Talk” with their sons about possible confrontations with the police.  These days armed citizens are just as much as threat, as they have been known to gun down Black men out for a run or Black teenagers who ring the wrong doorbell.  This novel was invaluable to me from an educational standpoint in reinforcing the dangers that Black citizens have to navigate, but I was not wild about the two (or three?) confusing storylines here.  “Soot” is the nickname that a bully gives a young boy whose skin color is particularly dark.  Soot’s third-person narrative alternates with the first-person narrative of an unnamed author whose first novel is wildly successful.  Because he is Black, the author is expected to be somewhat of a civil rights advocate—a role which he resists—during his whirlwind book tour.  My problem with this book is that Soot and the author could be the same person, or Soot could be the same child as The Kid, whom the author encounters from time to time but no one else can see.  The author knows that he has difficulty distinguishing the real from the imagined, but then Soot develops a similar problem.  And as for The Kid being invisible to other people, Soot believes that it is possible to make himself invisible.  In other words, the boundaries between these three characters’ stories are fuzzy, and I was somewhat put off by these blurred lines.  In any case, if you can look past this indecipherable overlap within the novel, there’s a vital message there.

INTERIOR CHINATOWN by Charles Yu

The format of this book—a TV script—was very off-putting for me.  Plus, the author blurs the line between real life and Hollywood make-believe to the point that I was very confused.  Despite all that, he drives home the image of the Asian American stereotype, both in real life and in movies/TV shows, and the bigotry that stems from that stereotype.  Willis Wu apparently makes a living playing the role of “generic Asian man” in a cop TV series, but that label applies to his real life as well.   Several compelling truths emerge from his story.  For one thing, his great aspiration is to elevate himself to “Kung Fu Guy” in the show, and his father was in a fact a kung fu master in his day.  The fact that Willis still lives in poverty is a testament to the reality of how little he earns from these bit parts, especially since his character is always destined to die, and then he has to “stay dead” for six weeks before he can play another “generic Asian man.”   Another character in the novel is Older Brother, and I could not determine if this were some mythical successful Asian American actor or a real person in Willis’s life.  Older Brother reappears late in the novel as a lawyer who abandoned acting altogether, although Willis sees him as having achieved the ultimate pinnacle of success as “Kung Fu Guy.”  The heart of the matter is that Willis is propagating his own stereotype, even though he has to look in the mirror to remind himself that he does not look like other Americans, Black or white.

JUST KIDS by Patti Smith

Patti Smith’s music was mostly not mainstream enough to appear on my radar, but this memoir garnered a lot of attention and accolades when it came out.  Her rags-to-riches story is amazing, as she traverses NYC in the 1970s, initially working in bookstores to pay the rent.  As a struggling artist and poet, alongside artist Robert Mapplethorpe, she namedrops Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Todd Rundgren and William S. Burroughs, to list a few.  Robert aspires to a higher social class, but sometimes Patti reaps the rewards of his endeavors.  She and Robert are lovers and then roommates after he acknowledges his homosexuality.  Patti then has other famous lovers, including Allen Lanier of Blue Oyster Cult and Sam Shepard.  As another reviewer noted, Mapplethorpe does not leap off the page as charismatically as he should, since his and Patti’s relationship is the thread that ties the entire book together.  When Robert gets low on funds, he takes to hustling, inspired to a degree by the movie Midnight Cowboy.  Finally, his photography earns him the attention he deserves, some of which derives from the controversial eroticism of his work.  Patti herself, on the other hand, has a spirit that drew me in and motivated me to listen to some of her music.  One of my favorite moments is when she cuts her hair in the style of Keith Richards’, to match her androgynous looks.  In fact, Allen Ginsberg buys her lunch at an automat, apparently because he thinks she is a man.  Unfortunately, the celebrity sightings and memorable anecdotes were not enough to carry this book for me.

THE FRIEND by Sigrid Nunez

The friend in the title could be a Great Dane named Apollo, or it could be the narrator’s writer friend—a man who has recently committed suicide.  The dog belonged to the writer until the writer’s death, and now our female narrator, a self-proclaimed cat person, reluctantly takes ownership of Apollo, despite the fact that the lease on her tiny apartment prohibits dogs.  She and Apollo bond over their shared grief, and they become virtually inseparable, initially because Apollo becomes destructive on the one occasion where the narrator leaves him alone for too long.  Call me crazy, but I loved the image of the 180-lb dog lying in bed with her on his own pillow.  The narrator also shares with the reader quite a few fascinating opinions about writers, including what they write and why they write.  She herself teaches writing and has abandoned writing a book about human trafficking.  The narrator peppers her musings on writing with a fair amount of cynicism regarding fiction today, especially when quoting her deceased friend.  She offers a scathing criticism of James Patterson’s claim that anyone can write a bestseller and his selling of videos that promise the viewer the ability to do just that, as if he didn’t already have an obscene amount of money.  This book is funny at times, but mostly it is incredibly touching, and I had to remind myself constantly that it was fiction and not a memoir.  One chapter threw me for a loop until I realized that it was basically a detour into magical thinking, ending in sort of a guilt trip.  At least, that’s how I interpreted it.   This is so much more than a dog book, and yet it addresses so beautifully why we accept the constant violence against humans, in movies and in real life, but cannot bear the mistreatment of animals. 

TRUST EXERCISE by Susan Choi

The third and final section of this book baffled me so much that I had to call into question everything that I had read before that.  Suffice it to say that the first section is not what it seems, and this novel brings the concept of an unreliable narrator to a whole new height.  The first section’s narrative follows Sarah, a theatre major at a performing arts high school, but her acting chops are such that she performs backstage tasks during all of the school’s performances.  Her failed romance with fellow student David catches the attention of Mr. Kingsley, the magnetic theatre instructor, who begins pairing the two up for trust exercises, bringing both of them to a new level of uncomfortable awkwardness in each other’s company.  Then a visiting troupe of English actors arrives to perform a production of Candide, and their relationships with the students become the focal point of the story.  The second section takes place fifteen years later and involves many of the same characters—sort of.  Reading this book is definitely a trust exercise in and of itself, as nothing in the novel, except perhaps the final section, can be taken at face value.  I found this level of unreliable narration both intriguing and frustrating at the same time.   I’m really sorry that my book club isn’t reading it, because it definitely lends itself to a rousing discussion and possibly some conclusions that I may have overlooked as possibilities.

SHADOW COUNTRY by Peter Matthiessen

Too many characters and too many pages.  That’s my assessment of this ponderous 2008 National Book Award winner.  Each chapter of Book I has a first-person narrator, and I could not keep them or their families or their location in southwest Florida straight, even with the map provided.  The story takes place primarily in an area called the Ten Thousand Islands between the late 1800s and early 1900s.  The main character is Edgar Watson, an imposing but affable man who may also have committed and gotten away with several murders.  He’s a crack shot, and everyone wants to stay on his good side.  I had a hard time just trying to keep up with his wives, mistresses, and offspring.  Book II is a little easier to follow, with third person narration.  Lucius, Watson’s son, is on a mission to set the record straight by penning a biography of his father.  The third and final section is Edgar Watson’s first person narrative in which he defends some of his more heinous actions and shrugs off the rest.  A strange but lethal combination of heartbreak and ambition is his undoing, along with a penchant for hiring known murderers as foremen.  He is unjustly accused of several murders early in life but then seems bent on living up to his undeserved reputation.  He’s smart, resilient, and full of life, but this book is not lively at all.  It paints a bleak picture of life in that area at that time, complete with rampant racism, senseless eradication of wildlife, unbridled violence in the name of progress, and widespread alcoholism.  I appreciate the realism and the writing style, but the novel just crawls along at a snail’s (or alligator’s) pace.

THE GOOD LORD BIRD by James McBride

Most of this novel is buildup to John Brown’s historic raid on the Harper’s Ferry armory in 1859.  Some reviewers have made this book sound entertaining, but for me it was anything but.  Henry Shackleford is the young narrator—a slave whose father dies in a barroom skirmish initiated by John Brown, who mistakes Henry for a girl.  For the next 300+ pages, Henry, always in a dress but gender-neutrally nicknamed Onion, accompanies John Brown in his Midwestern crusade to recruit an army of abolitionists.  Then nothing much happens, until Onion goes to Virginia to help prepare for the raid and “hive” the slaves into Brown’s rebellion.  If ever there was a book with too much dialog and not enough action, this is it.  As a history lesson, it has value, but the arduous task of reading it was a tedious undertaking.  I think I could have read the beginning and the end and not missed anything.  The most interesting aspect of this novel to me was the choice of a boy in a dress as the narrator.  This case of mistaken gender, which morphs into more of a ruse, allows the narrator to view most of the action without actually participating.  Then my question is why didn’t the author just make the narrator a girl, but perhaps he felt more comfortable with a male narrator who never actually has to wield a weapon.  The bottom line is that the editor of this book should have recommended shaving about 200 pages from the finished product. 

SING, UNBURIED, SING by Jesmyn Ward

Jojo is a 13-year-old boy whose black mother, Leonie, is a druggie and whose white father, Michael, is in prison.  He lives with his grandparents in coastal Mississippi, along with his toddler sister, Kayla, but his unreliable mother pops in and out.  When Leonie learns that Michael is about to be released, she and her equally messed up friend Misty take the kids to Parchman to pick him up.  We know that this trip is going to be disastrous and just read with our fingers crossed that Jojo and Kayla survive.  There are two things that I did not like about this book.  First and foremost, it is, as you can imagine, immeasurably depressing.  To say that Leonie is a bad mother is an understatement, as she is both neglectful and abusive.  She only has eyes for Michael, and neither has any business being a parent.  The other aspect that did not appeal to me is the magical realism.  Two dead people are visible to some of the characters.  One is Given, Leonie’s brother, who was killed by Michael’s cousin.  Leonie has never recovered from his loss and seems to care more about him than her children, who are very much alive.  The other ghost is Richie, a boy who knew Jojo’s grandfather in prison and wants to get to the heart of what happened there.  I just really did not understand the significance of these ghosts and why they were necessary to the story.  There is some other voodoo (my word, not the author’s) going on, such as lucky talismans and graveyard stones, and I was OK with those, since they seemed to be perhaps indicative of the culture.  The ghosts, though, for me, detracted from the seriousness of the story and lent it an air of mythology that turned me off.   They even have full-on conversations with living characters.  Perhaps I would have been more accepting of silent ghosts.  In any case, I found her earlier novel, Salvage the Bones, to be a much better read.

THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD by Colson Whitehead

Prepare to be horrified while reading this book, but then slavery WAS horrifying.  Cora is a young slave on a Georgia plantation and is still angry at her mother for running off when Cora was 10.  When another slave urges Cora to join him in an escape attempt, she finally agrees.  She suffers mightily while on the run and even catches herself wishing she were back on the plantation from time to time.  Although the Underground Railroad was not literally a system of trains running in dark tunnels underneath the earth, that’s exactly what it is in this book.  The trains don’t have set schedules, and the passengers don’t necessarily know where they’re headed.  Cora finds that she can never become complacent, because peace and safety are always short-lived, since she is, and always will be, a runaway.  This era reminds me so much of the Holocaust, where the runaway and the persons trying to hide the runaway are all punished, often by a grisly death, when a hideout is discovered.  I particularly liked how the author supplied the backstory for other characters, even after we knew they had met some terrible fate.  Cora’s mother’s story is particularly surprising.  If you’re looking for a book about redemption or even one with happy endings for everybody, this is not the book for you.  The evil characters in the book are not going to suddenly become abolitionists.  Instead they keep popping up, relentlessly bent on destroying the black population or collecting a reward, more and more venomous each time we encounter them.  There are some good people in the book, including a few whites who are sympathetic to the slaves’ cause.  For Cora to survive, she will require a lot of luck, particularly with regard to timing and to the people she meets, and a lot of courage.  She certainly has the latter, but her luck waxes and wanes as she tries to negotiate the minefield that the South was during this period.

LORD OF MISRULE by Jaimy Gordon

Before reading this book, all I knew about horses and horse racing I learned from the novel Seabiscuit.  Now I know a little about claiming races and what it was like to be involved in West Virginia claiming races in the 1970s, because the author immerses the reader in this milieu quite effectively.  Keeping up was a bit challenging for me, as the author tells the story from the perspective of several characters but all in third person, except the chapters devoted to Tommy Hansel, which are in second person.  Plus, there are no quotation marks so that it is difficult to discern what is dialog and what is just in the head of the character.  The chapters are grouped into sections, each named for a horse who will be racing in that section.  First we meet Medicine Ed, an old groom who dabbles in alchemy and potions.  His observations are the keenest and most reliable throughout.  Maggie is a young woman who formerly wrote food articles but now works for Tommy, a newcomer who is trying to make a quick buck with four horses.  He and Maggie are lovers, but Joe Dale Bigg, a vile and dangerous gangster/trainer, has his eye on Maggie as well.  Two-Tie, who literally wears two bow ties, is the local “financier,” i.e., loan shark, who happens to be Maggie’s uncle.  His mission is to protect Maggie, with some help from Medicine Ed, but her safety is anything but assured in this world of rough and tumble outlaws and wackos.  This book has it all—sex, violence, adventure, suspense--and the sadness that is the life of some of the horses, racing into old age.  The horses are characters unto themselves, each with his own unique personality, buffeted from one owner to another, like unfortunate pawns in a vengeful chess match.  I liked the unusual format and subject matter, but I couldn’t develop any real empathy for the human characters.  I was, however, caught up in their lifestyle that was so alien to me, but I didn’t bond with them.

THE ROUND HOUSE by Louise Erdrich

Thirteen-year-old Joe lives on a North Dakota reservation, and his world is rocked when his mother, Geraldine, is beaten and raped.  She retreats into depression and silence, exasperating Joe and his father, a tribal judge, since they need for her to identify her assailant.  The attack took place near the ceremonial Round House, but Geraldine does not know the exact location, leading to a jurisdictional quagmire that makes prosecution futile.  Once the attacker's identity is known, Joe starts to take matters into his own hands, to free his family from the fear of further violence.  I enjoyed the first half of this book immensely.  It was suspenseful, and I was able to maintain hope that this family could return to something close to normalcy.  However, the second half I found to be very dark, with an unsettling revelation and yet another tragedy, leaving Joe to sort out his regrets and sorrows.  The reader knows from the get-go that Joe goes on to study law himself, but I would have liked the book not to end as it did.  I don't know if his family is irreparably broken, but one thing I do know:  Joe had to grow up before his time.  There's even a scene near the end where he becomes infuriated at his parents for their innocence in the midst of his own consternation, to the point that he sees them as "the oblivious children" and himself as the perturbed adult.  (I have to see this role reversal as temporary or perhaps even wildly skewed, given the event that follows.)  My biggest beef with this book is that I never really grasped the motive for the attack in the first place.  I know this book is a vehicle for the author to protest the fact that few white rapists of Native American women ever go to trial, but I thought she could have done a better job of setting up the premise for Geraldine having been targeted.

SALVAGE THE BONES by Jesmyn Ward

Esch, a pregnant teenager, lives with her 3 brothers and alcoholic father in the Mississippi Gulf area, and a storm's a-brewin'.  One of the brothers, Skeetah, owns a female pitbull, China, that he loves dearly, but he is just as enamored with the money she can bring in as a fighter.  Her first litter of puppies represents an additional source of income, and Skeetah becomes desperate to save all of the dogs when one dies of an unknown cause.  In the meantime, the family's father tries valiantly to lead the whole crew in making preparations for the hurricane that is on its way.  On the one hand, it's hard to imagine how things could get much worse, but their desperate scramble to survive the disaster is one of the most gripping pieces of writing that I've read in a while.  Esch sprinkles her narration of all this with tales from Greek mythology and compares her own situation to Medea's.  I know these passages are supposed to lend a mystical aura to the story, but, really, this family's struggle is dramatic enough.  The more interesting and appropriate parallel, I think, is between Esch and the dog China, both having to adapt to the idea of motherhood.  Furthermore, Esch's mother died bearing the last of Esch's three brothers, and this tragedy haunts them all.  Esch and China both live in a man's world, doing the bidding of the male figures that surround them.  Esch, caught up in her infatuation with her baby's father, who won't even look at her, needs to face her future realistically.  China has even fewer options but seems to be of more concern, at least to Skeetah, than Esch, who withholds the fact of her pregnancy as long as possible.  The real authority, though, lies with a storm named Katrina.

THE NEWS FROM PARAGUAY by Lily Tuck

This could have been a juicy, rousing historical novel, but it's not. Instead, it flits among a zillion characters, most of whom are not sufficiently fleshed out to render them memorable. The only ones I could really keep up with were Franco Lopez, who becomes Paraguay's diabolical dictator in the mid-1800s, his Irish pseudo-wife Ella Lynch, Franco's fat sisters Rafaela and Inocencia, and Franco and Ella's son Pancho. Their other sons (four?) were as indistinguishable as Franco's brothers, various military personnel, diplomats, and Ella's ladies-in-waiting. Reading this book ranks right up there with watching paint dry. Blinded by the gold National Book Award sticker on the cover, I had high expectations. Plus, I thought it would augment my next-to-non-existent body of knowledge about Paraguay. Now I at least know that Paraguay was warring with Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay at the same time that the U.S. was engaged in civil war. However, that nugget of information does not nearly suffice to make this a worthwhile read. I might have enjoyed a more straightforward fictional portrait of Ella. She certainly invites comparisons with that other influential South American woman, Eva Peron, in that she's aligned herself with a powerful man and shows some pluck. At one point, Ella accompanies Franco and Pancho to the front, and, in the midst of sweltering heat and muddy, swamp terrain, asks herself why she doesn't just return to Europe. Good question.

THE ECHO MAKER by Richard Powers

I've read some really good books lately, but this one is in a class by itself. Mark Schluter rolls his truck on a dark rural road in Nebraska and barely survives. As he starts to regain his faculties, one major problem remains: he thinks his sister Karin is an imposter. Her anguish drives her to seek out Gerald Weber, a celebrity neurologist/author. Also, Karin finds a mysterious note at Mark's bedside, and Mark becomes obsessed with finding its author. Then there's Barbara, the nurse's aide who bonds with Mark, attracts Weber and has an understanding of things way beyond the realm of her profession. There are several other plot lines surrounding the main Mark/Karin story, but they all feel intertwined and are equally compelling, so that I never felt myself wishing to get back to a different storyline. Weber has issues of his own, as he grapples with his conscience, after his latest book receives reviews accusing him of everything from being merely anecdotal to using other people's brain malfunctions for his own personal gain. Then there's the environmental controversy over the water supply for sandhill cranes who migrate through the area. Most intriguing of all, though, are the various anecdotes that Weber supplies about the various neurological disorders he's encountered and how we're really all at the mercy of the brain's intricate behavior. It doesn't take much of a misfire to render us weirdly incompetent. Our actions and emotions are all ruled by our brains, so that must be where our soul is, right? This question permeates the book and will forever intrigue me.

LET THE GREAT WORLD SPIN by Colum McCann

If you saw the documentary Man on Wire, then you know that Philippe Petit strung a cable between the towers of the World Trade Center in 1974 and walked, skipped, and hopped across in the wee hours of the morning. This day and event tie together the stories of several New Yorkers, and even an amusing group of California computer hackers. Petit broke a few laws to accomplish his feat, and Sol Soderberg, one of a diverse cast of narrators, is thrilled to be the lucky judge who will preside over Petit's case. Meanwhile, Sol's wife Claire is clandestinely hosting a support group for mothers who have lost sons in Vietnam. Her Park Avenue apartment sets her apart from the other members, but in some ways she is the most tragic character in the book, in her lonely, desperate attempt to bridge the gap between herself and Gloria, an African-American woman from the Bronx. Gloria's neighbors include Corrigan, a monk struggling with his celibacy vows, a mother/daughter pair of prostitutes, and Corrigan's brother, recently arrived from Ireland. In this case, Gloria is the one walking the tightrope as she careens between the poverty of her neighborhood and her new friend Claire's opulent life. This started out as a snoozer, but I became more wrapped up in it as the narrators' intertwining stories started to click. At the end I felt as though I had definitely spun full circle, but I thought that Lark & Termite was more deserving of the National Book Award.

WAITING by Ha Jin

The title of Ha Jin's Waiting succinctly expresses the book's theme. Lin Kong, a doctor in a city hospital in China, is ashamed of his unattractive wife Shuyu and her tiny deformed feet that were bound as a child. She and their daughter Hua live in the country, where Lin visits them every summer. Meanwhile, Lin has struck up a platonic but loving relationship with the head nurse Manna at the hospital. Each year when Lin returns home, Shuyu agrees to a divorce but then reneges in court. Finally, after 18 years, the law allows Lin to divorce her without her permission. Of course, by this time, the spark has gone out of his relationship with Manna. The irony of the title is that all three main characters are waiting for something, but once that something materializes, it's anti-climactic. The reader does a lot of waiting, too, for something tragic to happen, but when it does, it's a bit of a surprise. Still, like the characters, the reader realizes at the end that the waiting was the best part.