BILLY SUMMERS by Stephen King

Stephen King is a master of suspense, and this book exudes it, despite its overly familiar plot devices—a book within a book and a hired assassin planning to retire after one last lucrative hit.  King is obviously aware of the triteness of his subject matter, even going so far as to describe the one-last-hit-job plot as its own subgenre of noir fiction.  Still, he pulls this novel off as seemingly as effortlessly as ever, with characters that I enjoyed getting to know over the course of 500+ pages and only the barest hint of the supernatural.  Billy Summers is the stereotypical hit man in question who goes through aliases and disguises at a lickety-split pace and poses as a writer.  The book-within-a book is Billy’s autobiography, but I rushed through Billy’s backstory in order to return to his current situation in which he bonds with neighbors, especially children, agonizing over how disappointed they are going to be when they find out his vocation.  The hit in question takes place relatively early in the novel, but Billy suspects that his usual disappearing act after a hit is actually going to be more final.  In other words, this will be his final hit, because his employers will ensure that he doesn’t live to do another.  What’s really nifty about this book, though, is that Billy’s post-hit life takes an unforeseen trajectory, due to a good Samaritan act on his part.  Such humanity is not something we would expect of a hitman, but Billy kills only bad guys, of course, although the length of his victim list leaves Billy with no doubt that he, too, is a bad guy.

A LITTLE LIFE by Hanya Yanagihara

After I finished his book, I was stunned to discover that the author is a woman.  Her focus is on four male characters who meet in college and become lifelong friends; the female characters are basically bystanders.  Two of the male characters, Willem and especially Jude, receive by far the most attention, but all four men become very successful, albeit with a few bumps along the way as they weave in and out of one other’s lives.  Jude is tortured, enigmatic, brilliant, and self-loathing to an extreme, due to an abusive childhood for which he feels so much shame that he refuses to discuss it.  The book becomes very dark about halfway through, not only because we begin to get glimpses of Jude’s past, but also because he becomes susceptible to a predatory character as an adult.  His friend JB finds himself in a very similar situation earlier in the book, and both Jude’s and JB’s lives spiral out of control, until their friends basically stage interventions in both cases.  This book is very long and very immersive, but the degree to which Jude inspires devotion from his friends and mentors is not well explained.  In other words, he does not come across as supremely lovable, and loving him requires Herculean energy.  It’s not that he is a demanding person, but his physical and emotional issues render him very high maintenance.  Overall, the other three most consequential characters are well drawn, although Malcolm gets short shrift, and Willem comes off as a saint—not a word we normally associate with an actor.  One of my favorite takeaways from this book is JB’s statement that striving for success is like running, whereas maintaining success is like running in place, which is not very satisfying nor very motivating and helps explain why so many artists fizzle later in life.

DOCTOR DEALER by Mark Bowden

Larry Lavin was a smart and charming guy who came to be a massive cocaine dealer while attending the University of Pennsylvania.  After college he indulged in a hedonistic lifestyle, full of wild parties and trashed hotel rooms, but his kingpin status never seemed to interfere with his dental practice.  However, good help in the cocaine business was always hard to find, especially when the employees were dipping into the product a little too much.  Plus, the ineptitude of Larry’s guys who did not partake is almost unfathomable as is Larry’s trust in patently untrustworthy characters.  His long-suffering wife pleaded with him for years to get out of the drug business, to no avail.  There was always one more reason to stick it out a little longer.  This story is immersive in a weird way, but the writing is atrocious.  I get that this book was written in the 1980s, but “ahold” was not a word then, either.  At times, the breezy writing style is tolerable, but the level of detail is ridiculous.  The author describes what types of fish were in Larry’s home aquarium and the layout of homes Larry didn’t even buy.  Who cares?  And this unnecessary trivia makes me wonder about the accuracy of other minutiae, such as what Larry was wearing on any given day.  Spare me.

THE LATECOMER by Jean Hanff Korelitz

The Oppenheimer triplets despise one another, for reasons that I never understood.  Their family is extremely wealthy, but true affection is in short supply.  In fact, Sally and Lewyn both decide to attend their father’s alma mater, Cornell, but they both refuse to acknowledge to anyone that they have a sibling on campus.  The third triplet is Harrison, a know-it-all who opts for a very untraditional two-year school for men before his eventual matriculation at Harvard.  As these three flee the nest, their mother discovers her husband’s infidelity and uses it as leverage to get him to agree to having another child.  This one will be carried by a surrogate, but all four children were conceived in vitro at the same time.  The fourth child, Phoebe, is the most normal, despite being raised solely by her mother, who has basically checked out emotionally.  This family is a walking billboard for the adage that money doesn’t buy happiness.  This book, for me, was something of a chore until about halfway through, when all hell breaks loose, due to a dirty deed by Sally that, of course, backfires. The triplets are the epitome of unlikeable characters at this point, but their three-way train-wreck of a quarrel on their 19^th birthday is the sort of disaster that we can’t help watching.  The author juggles the myriad family secrets quite deftly so that we are much better informed than the characters themselves.  It’s like being a fly on the wall in anticipation of the inevitable brawl.  The author does hide one shocker from us until the very end, but I didn’t think this revelation was nearly as big a deal as the other happenings she meted out that caused me to gasp.

THE LYING LIFE OF ADULTS by Elena Ferrante

In a moment of pique, Giovanna's father says that Giovanna's face has become like that of his estranged sister, Vittoria.  Having never met the much maligned Vittoria, Giovanna becomes curious and ultimately meets her aunt, who is weirdly attached to the wife and children of her dead lover.  Vittoria asserts that there are two sides to the argument that caused animosity between her and her brother, but Vittoria is certainly a force to be reckoned with, and may be a catalyst to upsetting Giovanna’s family harmony.  This book is a tale of undulating loyalties, as Giovanna discards and then reclaims friends with typical teenaged vacillation.  One symbol of these ever-changing liaisons is a bracelet whose history is complicated and whose ownership changes so frequently that it becomes a character in its own right, like a traveling garden gnome.  The most intriguing relationship in the novel is the three-way relationship between Giovanna, her friend Giuliana, and Giuliana’s erudite and charismatic fiancé, Roberto.  Giuliana may be beautiful, but she is no match intellectually for Roberto’s educated friends, whereas the much younger Giovanna is enthralled by their cerebral discussions.  I was reluctant to read this book because I really did not care for Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend.  However, for me, this is a much better read.  Giovanna sheds one identity after another in an effort to find her true self, transitioning from acquiescent daughter to a rebellious one who dresses only in black and neglects her studies.  She eventually outgrows this phase, thanks largely to her admiration for Roberto, but she is only sixteen when the book ends, and I’m sure she has personal transformations still on the horizon.

PIRANESI by Susanna Clarke

Piranesi is a sweet and innocent young man who inhabits a world of fifteen people, thirteen of whom are dead.  The only other living person he has ever seen is an older man whom he calls simply The Other and with whom he meets for an hour twice a week.  During his waking hours, Piranesi wanders the many—perhaps infinite—vestibules and staircases of the huge structure that constitute his entire world, which The Other calls the Labyrinth.  Piranesi communes with birds, does not appear to have any concept of loneliness, and survives by burning dried seaweed and eating fish that float in with the massive tides that periodically, and quite violently, flood the lower floors.  The Other, however, obviously has other resources for food and clothing not available to Piranesi, who is so naïve that he doesn’t even question the source of The Other’s bounty.  When another living human appears in the Labyrinth, Piranesi begins to reevaluate everything that he believes to be true.  This disruption is particularly striking because the author has done such a remarkable job of creating a calm and serene atmosphere up to this point; Piranesi’s contentment feels perfectly natural.  When cracks begin to form in his perception of reality, the novel really picks up speed.  I don’t read many fantasy novels and even fewer that I actually like.  This is a notable exception.

THE KING AT THE EDGE OF THE WORLD by Arthur Phillips

Dr. Mahmoud Ezzedine arrives at Elizabeth I’s court as part of a Turkish diplomatic retinue in the late 1500s.  He springs into action when a baron has an epileptic seizure in the presence of the queen.  When the Turkish dignitaries return to Constantinople, Dr. Ezzedine is left behind as a gift to the queen, because one of the high-ranking Turks covets the good doctor’s wife.  Ezzedine is then regifted to the epileptic baron, converts from a Muslim to a Protestant, at least in theory, and changes his name to Matthew Thatcher.  (Another character changes names as well in order to keep his identity a secret, causing some minor confusion for this reader.)  Ultimately, though, Thatcher becomes a spy in a covert plot to determine whether or not King James VI of Scotland has truly converted from Catholicism. If he is now a Protestant and not just masquerading as one, he can succeed Elizabeth as King of England.  Thatcher arrives in Edinburgh with the assignment of learning what is in the king’s heart but succeeds only in becoming the king’s chess opponent—the perfect occupation for Thatcher, since he is a pawn himself.  The plan that he ultimately has to execute is diabolical with potentially dire consequences, but the doctor has been promised that if it succeeds, he can return to Constantinople, where his wife and young son may or may not be still awaiting his return after a decade.  I love how this novel inserts a bit of intrigue into what is historically a foregone conclusion with a jaw-dropping twist.  However, the less-than-breakneck pace of the novel draws attention to Ezzedine/Thatcher’s infinite patience but challenges the patience of the reader.