THE SON by Philipp Meyer

I would classify this book as a western but more in the vein of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian than Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove.  For me, it lacks heart.  Each chapter is devoted to one of three characters, all in the McCullough family but generations apart.  Eli is the patriarch who lives 100 years, including three years with the Comanches.  After a raiding party murders his mother and siblings, he becomes their captive.  A young member of their band wisely advises him to be less passive, enabling Eli to progress from slave to apprentice, learning to launch arrows from horseback.  His son Peter’s chapters are diary entries in which Peter describes his family’s vengeful assault on a Mexican neighbor’s home—an event which haunts Peter with guilt for the rest of his life.  Peter is the conscience of the family, but the rest of the McCulloughs view him as a pariah.  The third protagonist is Jeannie, Peter’s granddaughter, who transforms the family’s struggling cattle business into an oil empire.   What stands out about this novel is the stark realism.  The author does not pull any punches when describing “how the West was won.”  That victory cost thousands of lives on all sides and decimated countless native American populations.  If the thought of reading about scalping makes you squeamish, skip this book.  However, my favorite passage in the novel is about a different aspect of human behavior that is still true today:  “The poor man prefers to associate, in mind if not in body, with the rich and successful.  He rarely allows himself to consider that his poverty and his neighbor’s riches are inextricably linked….”  It’s baffling to me that people in poverty cozy up to rich people without grasping that those riches are often gained at poor people’s expense.

11/22/63 by Stephen King

Now seemed like a good time to read a really long book, and I’m so glad I chose this one.  I laughed, I cried, and I lay in bed thinking about it even after I had put it down for the night.  It’s a time-travel adventure and a beautiful love story all bundled into one.  The premise is that Jake Epping, a 35-year-old teacher in 2011, time-travels to September, 1958, and plans to hang out in the past until he can change the course of history by preventing JFK’s assassination.  Those five years make up the bulk of the story, and, oh, what a story it is.  With about 80 pages remaining to read, I imagined three or four ways in which Stephen King could wrap up this novel, but none of my scenarios matched what he came up with.  The novel is full of danger, violence, heroics, and edge-of-your-seat suspense.  It’s also packed with what-if scenarios and moral dilemmas, particularly as Jake has to grapple with how his actions, or decisions not to act, will impact, not only his mission, but the future in general.  Jake also wants to verify that Oswald acted alone.  In other words, he can’t take out Oswald and then discover that someone else did the deed.  The heart and soul of the book, though, is a love story that develops while Jake is in Texas keeping an eye on Lee Harvey Oswald.  Sadie and Jake click right away, but Jake’s secrecy is a constant source of conflict.  Not only does he not want to get her involved in his perilous plans, but he knows the truth would require a huge leap of faith on her part.  The most unbelievable thing about this book is that it took me so long to decide to read it.

NORMAL PEOPLE by Sally Rooney

This book is not a page-turner per se, but I found it to be completely addictive.  It’s a classic story of two teenagers who don’t move in the same social circles but become close anyway.  The girl, Marianne, comes from a wealthy family but is basically a brainy wallflower.  Connell is also very bright, as well as very popular and athletic, but his mother is Marianne’s family’s housekeeper.  Marianne comes from a dysfunctional family whose unimaginable torments render her emotionally handicapped in her ability to sustain a loving relationship with Connell.  He, on the other hand, was born to a 17-year-old unwed mother, who nonetheless is a perceptive and loving parent.   Connell and Marianne have a falling out after he has already decided to go to the same college she is attending.  At Trinity they have a role reversal; she blossoms, while he is out of his comfort zone.  Their relationship ebbs and flows throughout college, often depending on which one is in another relationship and which one is in need of being rescued.  Sometimes I just wanted to give them both a good shake.  This storyline may sound melodramatic, but I found myself very invested in these two people, who struggle to find their way in the world, sometimes together and sometimes not.  They both make some horrific choices and fail repeatedly to express themselves to one another honestly.  I found myself more drawn to Connell, partly because I found Marianne difficult to nail down, despite the fact that her story fills more pages.  The timeline is straightforward, and the writing, particularly the dialog, just drew me in.

THE PASSAGE by Justin Cronin

I have read a number of post-apocalyptic novels, and this one does not break any new ground.  It borrows from The Stand (mental telepathy and derelict machinery), The Dog Stars (tracking radio signals), and The Road (storehouses of expired canned goods), plus a dash of The Handmaid’s Tale and Game of Thrones.  Yes, there’s a wall to keep out the vampires in this case, rather than zombies, and a team of Watchers to guard the wall.  Also, this book is painfully long, and I didn’t find it compelling at all until about page 500.  The early pages seem to be just setting the stage for the journeys, adventures, and battles to come.  A manmade virus intended for making people heal more easily and live longer falls into the hands of the military, who envision an invincible army.  Death row criminals are used as guinea pigs, and, of course, things go horribly wrong, resulting in a growing population of vampires and a diminishing supply of humans and animals for them to prey on.  One group of humans has formed a colony that is surviving but running out of battery power to keep the lights on at night and therefore the vampires at bay.  A girl named Amy seems to have the ability to fend them off to some degree and joins a small expedition that leaves the colony in search of other survivors.  This is where the real adventure begins.  This author is not as bold as George R. R. Martin about killing off important characters, but a few do get taken to the dark side, and one that I kept expecting to reappear never does.  Perhaps the author is saving him for a later book in the trilogy.  The whole thing is basically preposterous, but I didn’t expect realism from this book.  The writing is good enough, but I don’t know if I’ll make it through the series.

SWEETBITTER by Stephanie Danler

This novel chronicles a year in the life of 22-year-old Tess, whose name is not revealed until she is voted by her fellow employees as the person you’d most like to get stuck in an elevator with.  Without even enough cash to pay highway tolls, Tess arrives in New York and lands a job as a backwaiter at a tony restaurant.  As the “new girl,” she struggles to find her niche there among the more seasoned staff and develops a crush on Jake, the handsome and elusive bartender, whose relationship with Tess’s mentor, Simone, dates back to childhood and may or may not be sexual.  Burning the candle at both ends, Tess finds herself in a vicious cycle of drugs and alcohol, and I’m not sure how she is alert enough at work to learn about French wine regions.  This is what I would call an ensemble novel, and it’s the first one I’ve read since Joshua Ferris’s Then We Came to the End in which the characters all work together.  It’s not about family per se, but then sometimes the workplace becomes a surrogate family.  From the beginning we know that Tess does not have a plan for her future.  She’s basically treading water, but then the author makes the point that restaurant workers are mostly young and eventually move on.  Simone is particularly an enigma.  She’s in her 30s, for one thing, but she takes Tess under her wing while warning her to stay away from Jake.  Tess is naïve but a quick study, except when it comes to matters of the heart.  Tess grew up without a mother, and Simone fills that void to a degree.  Simone may have already honed her maternal skills with Jake, but she becomes Henry Higgins to Tess’s Eliza Doolittle, and then the question is whether the student’s skills will surpass those of the professor.