DISAPPEARING EARTH by Julia Phillips

This novel opens with the abduction of two young girls, age 8 and 11, but the subsequent chapters are just as compelling, the most gripping of which involves the disappearance of a beloved dog.  The setting is a remote Russian peninsula where various characters lament the dissolution of the Soviet Union, deeming the past to have afforded a measure of security as a welcome byproduct of its rigidity.   Each chapter is a separate story of a woman who lives on the peninsula, and the ties that bind them are revealed near the end of the book.  Unfortunately, I lost track of a few of them, but others stand out in my memory.  One is about a college student torn between two very different men.  Another is about a woman who fantasizes about having sex with migrant workers as an antidote to her humdrum life as a wife and mother.  One woman flees to her hometown because her otherwise decent boyfriend has allowed their home to be flooded with icy water due to broken pipes.  All of these women experience loneliness and grow frustrated by their lives’ limitations.  Particularly exasperating is the lack of urgency that one would expect on the part of the police with regard to a third missing girl—a teenager with an unsavory reputation.  One of the chapters is devoted to a young woman who witnesses the abduction of the younger girls but does not realize at the time what is happening.  The police hound her for a more explicit description of the man who lures the girls into his car, and then they ultimately discount her story entirely.  Amidst so much sorrow and ineptitude lies a sense of community, and I am reminded of the words we have heard so often during the pandemic:  We are all in this together.  However, some of us are in deeper and more tragically than others.

THE NICKEL BOYS by Colson Whitehead

The author has changed the name of the place, but this novel is based on an actual boys’ reform school in Florida that finally closed in 2011.  Set in the Jim Crow era, this book exposes the horrific cruelty and corruption that prevailed at this school.  Behavioral infractions met with scores of lashes that often resulted in months in the infirmary or even death.  Food and supplies that the state provided were sold to local businesses, with school administrators pocketing the profits.  This book reminded me of Unbroken in its explicit renderings of torture, but at its heart it is the story of one teenager, Elwood Curtis.  His crime is for stealing a car in which he was just an unwitting hitchhiker, on his way to a college prep class.  Not only has Elwood never been in trouble, he is a model citizen, raised by his grandmother and inspired by Martin Luther King Jr’s speeches.  Even at the reformatory, Elwood strives to live by MLK’s words and holds fast to the belief that love and justice will ultimately win out.  However, as we’ve seen in recent months, evil seems to beget more evil, and those who perpetrated the horrors in this book are egged on and riled up by similarly minded men.  This book stirred up my emotions, particularly rage and horrified disbelief, just as the insurrectionists did on January 6.  If people are charging into the Capitol with Confederate flags and African-American boys are being dispatched with shotguns in the 21^st century, we still have a very long way to go toward any semblance of racial equality.  I am particularly outraged that the school administrators committed countless brutal murders and got away with it.  The twist at the end was a well-disguised surprise for me, but it did not improve my opinion of some of my fellow Floridians.

THE INTUITIONIST by Colson Whitehead

In this novel there are two competing factions of elevator inspectors—the Empiricists and the Intuitionists.  The Empiricists examine the machinery visually, whereas the Intuitionists draw conclusions based on their experience in the elevator when it is in motion.  This really is a strange world the author has concocted here, with these groups which seem like political parties, influenced by corporations and infiltrated by the mob.  Lila Mae Watson is the only black inspector, and she is in the Intuitionist camp.  She has a perfect record until one day an elevator that she has just inspected crashes in a freefall.  Now the intrigue begins.  Is she being framed by the Empiricists, who currently rule the department, or did she make a catastrophic mistake?  Fortunately, the elevator was unoccupied when it crashed.  Also, a newspaper article describing a black box that will revolutionize “vertical vehicles” is quashed at the last minute, as are the fingers of the journalist.  Lila Mae goes down several rabbit holes in an effort to mend her reputation as well as to find the blueprint for the black box.  This book is supposed to be an allegory about racism, and I get that the Empiricists are a metaphor for people who judge others by their color.  However, I am sure that there is a lot I am missing here, including the implications of elevators rising and falling.  The accelerated pace at which I read this book probably contributed to my not catching everything.  Not that this was a page-turner.  On the contrary, I was just eager to move on to something else.  The downside of rushing through this book is that I paid a price in having to reread some sections in which I missed a critical piece of information.

IN THE LAND OF THE LIVING by Austin Ratner

Isidore Auberon is a good man who dies too young, leaving behind two young sons and a heartbroken wife.  Leo is the older of the sons and the main subject of this novel.  He is much more bereft than his younger brother Mack, who basically has no memory of his father.  This disparity between the two boys’ grief drives a wedge between them.  Leo struggles with his anger, while striving to live up to his father’s legacy.  I felt that the author tried a little too hard at times to be literary and instead managed to overdramatize Leo’s angst with wordy prose.  Leo is not a particularly likeable character, but he is all we have here, as Mack is not fully fleshed out.  In fact, Mack disappears frequently, just to avoid Leo’s company.   Their mother remarries, and, although Philip is a loving stepfather to the boys, he lacks interest is some activities that Leo and Mac have come to enjoy, such as baseball.  Following his stellar academic performance in high school, Leo enrolls at Yale, treading a convoluted path to get there that sours the whole experience for him.  Honestly, it’s hard to root for a guy who keeps sabotaging his relationships and has allowed grief to define his entire life.  Mack eventually reaches out to Leo and invites him to join him on a road trip in an effort to repair the division between them and restore the camaraderie of their early childhood.  This book just did not command my attention, and the author fails to share with us certain important aspects of Leo’s adult life.  Did he graduate from Yale?  If not, where?  He went to med school, but did he become a doctor?  On finishing this book, I felt that these omissions had some sort of artistic purpose that left me frustrated and disappointed.

HOMELAND ELEGIES by Ayad Akhtar

Ayad Akhtar blurs the line here between memoir and fiction, and I have no idea which parts of this novel are true.  The writing is superb, and Akhtar gives us a peak into the soul of an American Muslim—born in Staten Island to Pakistani parents—in a post 9/11 Trump world.  Ironically, his father, who once served as Trump’s cardiologist, is a Trump voter and supporter, at least until Trump makes his Charlottesville comments.  The author narrates the book in first person in an almost stream-of-consciousness style, flitting from one spellbinding anecdote to another.  He struggles financially as a writer until he meets and becomes friends with a hedge fund manager who makes the author a millionaire, thanks to some unethical but barely legal investments.  If you are looking for a plot-driven book, this novel is not for you, but the stories are captivating in a dark sort of way, including the author’s bout with syphilis and his father’s malpractice lawsuit.  At its heart, though, this is the story of a man who has never lived anywhere outside the U.S. but is treated as a foreigner because of his skin tone and an unusual name.  He feels like an American less and less, because others don’t perceive him as one.  The “homeland” in the title is definitely the U.S., a country which he loves but which does not universally love him back.  This book makes me feel very WASPish and not in a good way.

THE SECRETS WE KEPT by Lara Prescott

I read Doctor Zhivago in preparation for reading this novel about author Boris Pasternak.  However, that step really was not necessary.  I did not love Pasternak’s novel, and I enjoyed this one more, but the author tried to do too much here.  I can’t enumerate all of the first-person narrators, including the first-person plural narrator that represented the typing pool at the CIA during the late 1950s.  And while the narration is all over the map, the plot boils down to two storylines.  One is obviously about Pasternak in his Russian dacha and his mistress Olga, who suffers three years in the Gulag on his behalf.  The other story, which is much more engrossing, concerns efforts on the part of other countries to bring Pasternak’s novel into print, while Russian authorities banned it.  Not only was the novel published in translations in Europe, but U.S. agents surreptitiously distributed copies in the original Russian to Russian visitors at the World’s Fair in Brussels.  This particular storyline was fascinating, and I especially enjoyed the chapters in which a not-so-speedy typist, born in the U.S. to Russian parents, is recruited and trained for espionage.  Kate Atkinson’s Transcription is also about a woman in a clerical job becoming a clandestine agent, and it is still by far the better read.

DOCTOR ZHIVAGO by Boris Pasternak

What’s with Russian authors and characters committing suicide by throwing themselves in front of a train?  In this case, the suicide is that of the title character’s father.  The son, obviously, goes on to become a doctor but has lots of other adventures against the backdrop of the Bolshevik Revolution.  The civil war was extremely confusing to me, trying to keep up with who was fighting for which side, but the Russian names were even more confusing.  Plus, sometimes a character has more than one nickname, and none of these names are remotely similar.  Case in point:  “This was Zlydarikha or Kubarikha, a soldier’s wife who was a cattle healer, a veterinarian, and also, secretly, a witch.”  All that aside, Dr. Zhivago’s first name is Yurii, and he marries his childhood friend Tonia.  However, while serving as a medic during WWI, he meets Lara, a beautiful nurse.  Their relationship is the basis for what is considered to be a great love story, but, actually, their time together is relatively short, interrupted for a while when Yurii is captured by a faction of the Red Army to serve as their medic.  The passion of their relationship certainly does not jump off the page, and that could be due to the era in which the book was written or to flaws in the translation.  I think that the David Lean movie or the miniseries with Keira Knightly would be more up my alley.