HARLEM SHUFFLE by Colson Whitehead

Ray Carney is mostly an honest entrepreneur who owns a home furnishing store in Harlem in the early 1970s.  However, he does occasionally deal in stolen merchandise but only on a small scale, at least according to him.  However, his beloved cousin Freddie is a small-time crook and constant liability who sometimes involves Carney in his capers, with or without Carney’s consent.  Over the course of this novel, Freddie becomes involved in a burglary of a hotel’s safe deposit boxes, aligns himself with a drug dealer, and double-crosses a mobster.  Carney finds it tough to maintain his respectability as a businessman when he gets embroiled in Freddie’s various escapades, especially when the cops interrupt a meeting he has with a rep for a high-end furniture manufacturer.  Carney also engineers a caper of his own in order to get revenge against a banker who failed to deliver on a $500 bribe.  Although the writing is terrific, the pace of this novel is snail-like, despite the action-packed plot, not all of which I totally grasped.  The scene in the book that I can’t stop reading, because it is just too funny and vivid, takes place in a laundromat.  I won’t quote all the witticisms on pages 225-226, but these two sentences elicited a huge guffaw from me:

“The manager of the laundromat was a scrawny man in a saggy undershirt painted with sweat stains.  Launderer, heal thyself.”

I also learned about dorveille, or “dorvay” as Carney likes to spell it, is a period of wakefulness between two half-cycles of sleep.  Apparently, centuries ago, people slept in two shorter shifts rather than in one continuous 8-hour stretch.  Makes sense to me, except for the going to bed at dusk, although during Daylight Saving Time that might work out OK.

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.

HOW MUCH OF THESE HILLS IS GOLD by C Pam Zhang

The first part of this book reminded me so much of Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying.  Two orphaned children in the western U.S. are transporting their father’s rapidly decomposing body to an as yet undetermined burial place, as appendages drop off along the way.  They are abandoning their hardscrabble life in a mining community in the late 1800s for an uncertain future after Lucy fails to keep secret the family’s stash of gold bullion.  Lucy is twelve, and her sister Sam is nine, but partly due to their father’s urging after losing a newborn son, Sam(antha) passes as a boy.  Eventually, Lucy eschews life on the road, and their paths diverge, at least for a while, as both are looking for a place to call home.  The defining characteristic of these two kids is that they are Chinese-Americans, born in this country but forever treated differently because they look different.  Their quest for a sense of belonging is virtually unattainable, and their suffering, especially Lucy’s, has been augmented by physical abuse at the hands of their father after the loss of their mother.  We also learn the history of Lucy and Sam’s parents, and it is not pretty.  In fact, their story is so horrific, due to a catastrophe of their own making, that it’s a wonder they maintain any semblance of sanity afterward.  Although the pace of this novel definitely accelerates at about the halfway point, it still did not move me.  Plus, several stones in the plot are left unturned, such as whether Lucy finds out about her parents’ past, and we are left wondering about what happened to the kids’ mother.  I needed more closure on these two points, and the ending raises even more unanswered questions, so that the book feels unfinished. 

STILL LIFE by Sarah Winman

Love comes in many forms, as does family.  In this case, we have a family of unrelated people, mostly—mostly people and mostly unrelated.  A London bar serves as the gestation point for most of this family, but a move to Florence, Italy, for some of the characters causes the scope of this family to expand.  Ulysses Temper (and, yes, there is a minor character named Penelope) is the main character who moves to Italy with his ex-wife’s daughter, Alys.  Ulysses and Alys, also known as “kid,” are not related by blood, but his parental instincts are much stronger than those of Alys’s mother, Peg.  Peg is the character who disappointed me the most.  She is supposed to be beautiful and adored by all, but she does not generate any charisma on the page.  What’s to love about a mother who sends her seven-year-old daughter off to live in Italy, even if their relationship is problematic?  Peg eventually marries the abusive Ted, but her victimhood does not make her more appealing.  However, all of the other characters are very warm and fuzzy, including Claude, a parrot who manages to make an astute comment on many situations, and Cress, a lonely soul who finds romance late in life.  Granted, Claude’s remarks, along with Cress’s prognostications and a number of unlikely coincidences, cause the novel to dip into the realm of magical realism from time to time.  No matter.  This novel is largely an ode to Florence and to close friendships that transcend age and geographical proximity.  The lack of serious conflict among the cast of characters also verges on the improbable, but their bond is an illustration of what can be, if not necessarily what is.

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.

HAPPY & YOU KNOW IT by Laura Hankin

Who even knew there was such a thing as a playgroup musician?  Claire is one, having been dumped by her band that is now hugely popular without her.  She may be struggling to make ends meet, but she is performing kids’ songs for wealthy moms and their children.  These women may seem to have it all together, but they have marital struggles as well as financial struggles of their own, and their secrets spill out one by one.  Claire becomes privy to these secrets and wrestles with her conscience about what to do about them.  One particular eye opener has ramifications beyond this one cozy playgroup, and these women’s response is not exactly humanitarian.  Claire becomes more and more involved with these women, who include her in various other activities, but at times she seems to be the only one with a conscience.  Still, this book has a very frivolous vibe, and, although the playgroup has at least half a dozen women, the author really only explores the personal lives of three of them.  Whitney is the beautiful host with an apathetic husband and a burgeoning social media presence.  Gwen comes from old money and owns a stunning brownstone, but her charming and handsome husband is a philanderer.  Finally, we have Amara, the only black woman in the group and in many ways the most enigmatic.  She befriends Claire and has communication issues with her husband, hiding the expense of boutique vitamins and quitting her job to become a full-time mom without discussing this intention with him.  All the moms are shallow and self-centered at times, but the author endows them all with love for their families.  They also seem to be unrealistically and inconsistently compassionate at times, so that their characters’ true personalities are a little out of focus.

SISTERS by Daisy Johnson

Two sisters, July and September, are close in age but complete opposites in personality; they operate almost like conjoined twins with September clearly in charge.  They flee Oxford with their mother, Sheela, for reasons to be explained later, to their father’s nearly derelict family vacation home.  Gradually we learn the backstory of this family.  July is basically her older sister’s devoted acolyte, playing games in which September requires that July perform acts of vandalism, among other naughty deeds, and September’s demands are the direct cause of July’s self-inflicted wounds.  September may be a cruel tyrant, but she also serves as July’s protector when July becomes a target for bullies and pranksters at school.  Where is their mother in all this?  Sheela basically checks out and leaves the girls to their own devices.  Ironically, despite her lapse in parenting, Sheela writes and illustrates children’s books in which her daughters are the main characters.  She seems aware of their unhealthy relationship but not to the degree that she is willing to do anything about it.  This book has an eerie, spooky feel to it, and the twist, which is extremely obvious, is a long time coming.  I spotted it a mile away, because the author dangles too many clues, and the creepy mood is one of them, along with July’s dreamlike narration in which the facts are a little fuzzy.  The author also foretells the conclusion in an earlier conversation between the two girls.  Even so, I felt that the ending could be interpreted in two ways, particularly given the events at a drunken beach party, but the foreshadowing caused me to lean in one particular direction.