THE LEFTOVERS by Tom Perrotta

A number of persons, not necessarily all virtuous, have been scooped up into heaven by The Rapture.  At least, that's what everyone assumes when family and friends suddenly just evaporate into thin air on Oct. 14.  The town of Mapleton has its own list of unlikely vanishers, including Nora's husband Doug, who was having an affair with a much younger woman.  In fact, Nora's kids vaporized also, and she has suffered probably the biggest loss of loved ones in Mapleton.  However, Nora's not the only one having trouble coping.  Laurie, whose family has remained intact, becomes so unmoored by the event that she abandons her life to join the Guilty Remnant, a bizarre cult that requires all members to smoke, stalk their former neighbors, relinquish all tokens of their previous lives, and make martyrs of themselves or their fellow members.  In fact, most everyone has lost their rudder, not knowing when/if they, "the leftovers," will disappear as well.  Rather than relish and enjoy each day as a gift, many of Mapleton's residents have basically given up or joined some fanatical group in order to find some sort of safe harbor.  Laurie's son, Tom, has become a follower of Holy Wayne, who has a string of teenage wives, while Laurie's teenage daughter, Jill, has veered off course, under the not-so-watchful eye of her father, Kevin, mayor of Mapleton.  Kevin and the barely functioning Nora strike up a tentative relationship, but really everyone is avoiding committed relationships, given that one or both parties could suddenly go poof.  Life is uncertain anyway, though, and maybe that's Perrotta's point.  Enjoy what you've got while you've got it; attitudes of gloom and doom just make matters worse.  I loved the ending, which provides a glimmer of hope that not everyone will go off the deep end.

TAFT by Ann Patchett

John Nickel manages a bar on Beale Street in Memphis and has a thing for his new waitress, Fay Taft.  There are two big problems:  1) She's a teenager, and  2) She's white and he's black.  The race difference wouldn't seem to be that big a deal these days, even in Memphis (my hometown).  However, Fay, her troubled brother Carl, and Fay's mother are living with old-money relatives, and John knows that they would take a dim view of an older black boyfriend who runs a bar.  These various issues seem only to intensify the attraction between the two, but in some ways John is also father figure to both Fay and Carl, whose father has recently died, leaving the family destitute and forced to move from the hills of East Tennessee to live with the aforementioned relatives.  I couldn't quite grasp what it is about Fay and Carl that motivates John to protect them in ways that are not healthy for any of the parties involved.  One possible clue is the fact that John himself is father to 9-year-old Franklin, who now lives in Miami with his mother, Marion, whom John never married.  This is a sticking point with both parties, as she was ready to marry when he wasn't and vice versa.  Now he has developed a friendly relationship with her parents, still in Memphis, and a possibly more-than-friendly relationship with her sister Ruth.  Add to these Wallace, Cyndi, and Rose, who all work in the bar, and you have a nice ensemble of characters to keep the pot boiling.  The author, from Nashville herself, nails the dichotomy, or trichotomy, really, that is the state of Tennessee, with the mountain people at one end and the delta people at the other, and the less extreme valley people in the middle.  I've read that the author thinks that the title of this novel hurts its market potential, and I think she's right about that.  It's a shame this novel hasn't come to the attention of more readers.

LINCOLN by Gore Vidal

Gore Vidal just passed away, and I realized that I had never read one of his books.  I had a copy of Lincoln and decided that now was the time to tackle it.  Historical fiction has the advantage (or disadvantage, in some cases) of a known outcome.  We know who's going to win the Civil War, but getting there seems almost impossible, given the Union's paucity of capable generals, the infighting among political leaders competing for Lincoln's job, the leakage of military plans to the Confederacy, and the bogus intelligence about the size of the Southern forces from obviously unreliable sources.  The book is overly long, but then there's a lot going on, including the plot by local Confederate sympathizers to kidnap or assassinate Lincoln.  The White House residents are aware that they may have to evacuate at any moment, given their proximity to the seceded state of Virginia.  Lincoln's wife's extravagance and migraines add to Lincoln's woes that include attempts to depose him for incompetence.  Eventually his foes in Congress and in his own Cabinet realize that Lincoln is the consummate politician who is wily enough to outsmart them and powerful enough to push them out of his way.  Some of his plans never come to fruition, due to his untimely death.  His ideas of reimbursing the slaveowners and relocating the slaves to Central America were not popular with his colleagues, but I couldn't help but wonder if the Reconstruction era could have been even more chaotic if he had lived.  One thing that I found disconcerting was that the author switched subjects or perspectives rather abruptly, and I had quite a bit of difficulty keeping the long list of characters straight.  No matter.  This book reads like a novel and reminds us that issues such as the size of the national debt and the separation of church and state are not new.  Imagine our current problems compounded by war on our own soil.  This book gives a glimpse of what was truly a turbulent time.

BELONG TO ME by Marisa de los Santos

Bad things happen to good people, and in this book all the characters are likeable.  Cancer can happen to anyone, and it's devastating.  However, Elizabeth's disease helps bring together two women—Cornelia, the petite newcomer, and Piper, Elizabeth's judgmental best friend.  There's also a surprising blast from the past that is sort of a mixed bag.  Any way you slice it, though, the cast of characters is delightful.  Cornelia is married to handsome oncologist Teo, and Cornelia's new friend Lake has a smart and congenial teenage son Dev, who has a new love interest in Clare, who visits Cornelia and Teo from time to time.  Cornelia and Teo would like to have a child of their own, now that they're permanently situated in suburbia.  Besides the cancer and a few spats due to misunderstandings, the worst thing that happens is that Dev's teacher in his previous school stifled his academic aspirations with a nasty putdown.  Lake, though, responds in the best way possible by moving Dev to a new locale, near Philadelphia, where our story takes place.  Dev suspects that the move has something to do with his father, whom he has never met.  Clare stirs the pot by encouraging Dev to try to identify and locate his father.  The result is that the kids get more than they bargained for.  Too bland a read?  Not at all.  The writing is lovely, and the lives of these nice people have enough bumps in the road to make us want to find out how they cope.

THE DESCENDANTS by Kaui Hart Hemmings

I haven't seen the movie, but I can see why this book was made into one.  Matt King is a mostly inattentive father whose wife is now in the hospital from a boat racing accident.  We learn a lot about Joanie from Matt's and his daughters' reminiscences, and I expect readers either love her or hate her.  I fall into the latter category.  She's a department store model, obsessed with her looks, who competes with her daughters, drinks late into the night in bars, and engages in high risk activities.  One of them is an affair, reported by the older daughter, Alex, to her clueless father, who now starts to wonder what he should have done differently to keep his wife from straying.  His 10-year-old daughter, Scottie, is sending hurtful texts to a classmate, and Alex, found drunk and out past curfew at her boarding school are clearly out of control as well.  It's hard to ascertain whether Joanie is a good mom and the girls are just acting up due to her absence and uncertain prognosis, or if this behavior is the norm.  We suspect the latter, given that Alex's substance abuse is the reason she's in boarding school in the first place.  Matt definitely has his hands full and doesn't know where to start.  Plus, he's hurt and angry about his wife's affair.  In walks Sid, a friend of Alex's, who obviously has issues of his own, but he serves as sort of an impartial moderator—a role for which he is probably ill-equipped, given that he has been banished from his mother's house.  He's a trip, though, and unknowingly spreads comic relief all over the pages.  A series of darkly hilarious events unfold, as Matt grapples with how to approach his wife's lover with the news that Joanie is being taken off life support.  The scene in which he finally does have that uncomfortable conversation, making the man squirm, is just splendid and seems to be the pivotal moment in which Matt takes control and shows us what he's made of.

THE REVISIONISTS by Thomas Mullen

How about a futuristic novel that takes place in the present?  Our narrator, Zed, has time-traveled from the future to present-day New York, where his mission is to make sure that the historical agitators ("hags") do not alter the course of history.  The hags have tried to prevent the Holocaust, the 9/11 tragedy, and now the Great Conflagration—presumably a nuclear event.  Zed's employers want to ensure that the peace and prosperity that follow the Great Conflagration remain intact.  Now Zed's gadget for identifying hags has gone on the fritz, and he meets a fellow employee with instructions that conflict with his own.  Zed belatedly starts to suspect that his employers are not the good guys.  Caught in this web of intrigue are Leo (a former CIA operative), Tasha (a corporate attorney who secretly leaks a corporate greed scandal), and Sari (an Indonesian woman in the employ of a Korean diplomat and his cruel wife).  The author weaves a pretty good plot here, but the characters are stilted, and the various tragedies each has endured somehow fail to arouse sympathy.  I found the final outcome puzzling, and I can't even blame the time-travel aspect for my confusion.  Leo's anonymous client is a shady company called Enhanced Awareness, who also employed Troy Jones, whose identity Zed is using in the present.  I never quite got what that company's evil mission was or what its relationship to Zed's employer was.  One reviewer assumed that Zed was from another planet.  What??  I didn't think that at all.  Apparently I'm not the only reader whose awareness could use a little enhancement.

THE FIFTH WITNESS by Michael Connelly

Mickey Haller is back, in this sequel to The Lincoln Lawyer.  He's now representing people who are in the process of losing their homes to foreclosure, although I'm not sure how they can afford an attorney if they can't pay their mortgage.  Oh, well.  One of his former clients has now been charged with brutally murdering a bank executive, causing Haller to dive back into criminal law.  In this instance, movie rights are expected to cover Haller's fee when the case incites a media circus.  The bulk of the novel follows Lisa Trammel's trial, with lots of bumps and surprises along the way, all of which Haller twists to his and his client's advantage.  With conclusive DNA evidence on the murder weapon and the defendant's shoes, and an eyewitness who places Lisa near the scene of the crime, Haller pursues another angle—the victim's personal financial difficulties and a shady foreclosure processing company—in order to prove that his client was framed.  Most puzzling of all is how a 5'3" woman could bludgeon a standing 6'2" man on the top of the head—an anomaly that the prosecution fails to address.  The plot lacks the nail-biting timing of The Lincoln Lawyer, and the outcome and aftermath of the trial are a little predictable.  Even so, I still really enjoyed the ride, and the book's finale is very satisfying, with things playing out perfectly for Lisa Trammel and for Haller's career.  After all, what's Haller's overriding personal objective?  To get his ex-wife and daughter back.  I hope there's more to come.