NOW IS NOT THE TIME TO PANIC by Kevin Wilson

Two bored, awkward teenagers pool their writing and artistic talents to create a poster with a cryptic message and mysterious drawings.  Then they clandestinely plaster hundreds of copies all over their small Tennessee town.  Twenty years later a journalist finds out who was responsible.  That’s the whole plot in a nutshell, and it’s just not enough to carry an entire novel.  Frankie, who comes up with the words on the poster, which become sort of a mantra for her, considers her and Zeke’s summer stunt to be the most important event in her life.  The mystery of who caused the “Coalfield Panic of 1996” is heightened by the fact that Frankie and Zeke are such unlikely candidates. The town’s residents attribute the poster’s words to various sources, such as the Bible, a rock song’s lyrics, a satanic incantation, a mini-manifesto, or some obscure passage from a famous author.  I really enjoyed Kevin Wilson’s Perfect Little World and Nothing to See Here, but this novel just seemed a little thin to me.  I kept expecting something monumental to happen, but it never did, although a few people who are not even characters in the novel reach a tragic end due to the town’s obsession with the posters, leading to some guilty feelings on the part of the perpetrators.  My favorite character is Frankie’s single mother, who is so unflappable, even when she catches Frankie and Zeke making out on the couch.  She harbors a secret that she reveals to Frankie late in the novel, and my reaction was, “Of course!”  Still, this minor revelation is not nearly enough to save this novel, but I’ll bet most readers can readily recite the two beguiling sentences on the poster by the time they finish the book.

WANDERING STARS by Tommy Orange

The word planet is derived from the Greek word for wandering star, as the planets were seen to wander across the night sky against the background of stationary stars.  This book opens with a character named Jude Star and then wanders on to his son Charles and other progeny.  Actually, the book doesn’t really wander; it’s pretty sequential, but the relationships to previous characters are a little hard to follow.  Suffice it to say that alcoholism is rampant throughout this family.  Orvil eventually becomes the main character, as he and his friend Sean wander into drug addiction, aided and abetted by Sean’s father who makes and supplies their drugs.  All of these characters are at least partially Native American.  They have fled massacres and survived bullet wounds and occupied Alcatraz, but the substance abuse stories are the hardest for me to read, and they just go on for too long.

LESSONS by Ian McEwan

The two defining chapters in Roland Baines’s life involve women, and we learn of them early in the book.  First, he has an affair at fourteen with his piano teacher.  Propelled by the Cuban Missile Crisis into this unfortunate relationship, Roland fears the world will be obliterated before he has experienced sex with a woman.  The second major event in his life is his wife’s abandonment of him and their infant son in order to focus on a literary career.  She deems collateral damage to be unavoidable.  Roland himself is a man of many talents, none of which he nurtures.  Time and again he fails to act but merely reacts, as world events such as Chernobyl and Covid-19 provide a backdrop for his inertia.  The contrast here is between his inaction and his wife’s pursuit of her art at the expense of everything else, including love.  Roland, on the other hand, excels at music, poetry, and tennis but eschews all of them for reasons unknown, perhaps lack of ambition, but he still has devoted friends and family, including his in-laws.  For me, this book never elicited any emotional response and did not keep me engaged.  The few surprises, such as Roland’s parents’ history, do not really change the trajectory of Roland’s life in any measurable way.   Ultimately, I think the point is that Roland is content with the life he has and that being a star in some capacity is not a ticket to happiness or fulfillment.  However, such a life does not make for a great read.

BLACK DOGS by Ian McEwan

I am not sure you can actually write a memoir for someone else, but that seems to be the premise here.  The first-person narrator not only proceeds to write someone else’s memoir, but he confesses that after his parents died and he went to live with his adult sister’s family, he often hijacked his friends parents, intentionally showing up at their homes while their son was away.  The same thing occurs with his attachment to his wife’s parents, and he periodically interviews his mother-in-law, June, to compose a book about her life, alongside her mostly estranged husband, Bernard.  Both June and Bernard embraced communism after WWII, but a terrifying incident involving two black dogs during their honeymoon sent June down a different path.  A couple of other acts of violence are committed in this book—one in Berlin after the wall comes down and one in a restaurant where a father viciously strikes his son.  The narrator witnesses both of these latter events, but June’s experience with the black dogs is not fully clear to the reader until very late in the book.  Until that point, although we know the impact that this encounter had on her life, the dogs are merely symbolic of evil.  June eventually shares her belief that evil that resides in all of us, and another anecdote regarding black dogs indicates that they are also an avatar for the Gestapo.  The thing that struck me most about this book is that, although we in the U.S. rarely think about WWII, Europe is still wary in its aftermath.

THE INNOCENT by Ian McEwan

Leonard is an Englishman in his mid-twenties who was living with his parents when he was reassigned to a top secret project in Berlin.  It’s the 1950s, and the Berlin Wall has not been constructed yet.  A British/American team is tunneling under East Berlin with some sophisticated communications equipment so that they can eavesdrop on the Russians.  Leonard is naïve in many ways, including romance, shows signs of poor judgment, and is easily manipulated.  He falls in love with a divorced German woman, Maria, whose ex-husband still beats her up from time to time.  This fact alone would seem to be a red flag, but Leonard is no saint, either, imagining that Maria would enjoy being sexually assaulted.  What??  He is well aware that the Russians often raped civilian women as they swept into Germany after WWII.  Leonard’s wrong-headedness is not a matter of being innocent at all and totally defies logic.  In other words, Leonard is not the most lovable protagonist, and his behavior becomes even more appalling as the novel progresses.  In fact, he’s something of a bumbling idiot, but McEwan is known for his clueless characters who just seem to dig themselves into a deeper and deeper hole.  This and other underground tunnel metaphors abound, including the dark nature of this novel.

THE CHILD IN TIME by Ian McEwan

Stephen Lewis, a children’s book author, is in the checkout line with his 3-year-old daughter, Kate, when she suddenly disappears—presumably abducted.  As you might expect, Stephen’s marriage to Julie starts to crumble and they separate.  In the meantime, his friend Charles, a well-known politician, and his wife, Thelma, a physicist, have moved out of the city.  Charles has abandoned his career in an attempt to reclaim his childhood by climbing up and down a tree barefoot.  Stephen now distances himself from his friend, who is clearly mentally ill, while Stephen’s only real responsibility is participating in the work of a committee that is preparing a report on raising children.  The plot obviously focuses on children, specifically a missing child and the grief that ensues, but the title also mentions time, which is Thelma’s specialty and what her husband is trying to reverse.  In fact, there is a momentary glimpse into the past in which Stephen witnesses a rendezvous between his parents before his birth.  This book perhaps invites a second reading, as one reviewer implied that possibly a rogue time traveler smuggled Kate into another time period.  Hmmm.  I don’t think I buy that, and of course I have no idea what the author intended.  The bottom line is that her grieving parents are trying to find their way without her.  And, as bleak as this novel is, the ending makes reading it worthwhile.

AFTERLIVES by Abdulrazak Gurnah

In the early 1900s in East Africa, two young African men join the German army’s fight against the British.  Ilyas has a young sister under his protection but returns her to a life of physical abuse so that he can join the German colonial army in its fight.  The big question may be why, but the bigger question concerns his fate.  The other man is Hamza, who has never met Ilyas, but falls in love with his sister, Ayfia, after he has returned to his village after the war and she has been rescued by the man whom becomes Hamza’s work supervisor.  Both Ilyas and Hamza owe their literacy to the Germans, but Hamza suffers serious injuries that were not sustained in battle.  Ultimately, we have a love story set against a backdrop of European colonialism—first Germany’s and then Britain’s—in East Africa.  More importantly, I think, is the sense of community that surrounds these characters.  Some of their elders are obviously cruel, but others are willing to accept and assist someone like Hamza in need of a leg up.  Despite taciturn and even hostile exteriors, many people, including a pastor and a German officer, help Hamza become an asset to the community.  For anyone not familiar with the geography of East Africa or the impact of WWI on that part of the world, the historical aspect of this novel may be confusing.  However, the family saga is not.  It is easy to follow, and I found myself getting caught up in the lives of these characters, who like Hamza and Afiya, hope to catch a break after enduring so much adversity.