Crossroads

 Crossroads

By Jonathan Franzen

This one sat on my shelf for several years. Dad gave it to me one year for Valentine's Day and, knowing
what I know about Franzen, I just couldn't bring myself to pick it up. For some reason, I decided to dig in this September.

Why is it called Crossroads? Because every character is at, wait for it, a crossroads in their life. Add to that fact that the patriarch of the family, Russ, is an associate minister at a Chicago-area church, and you get another layer. And then there is the fact that the youth program at the church is called, wait for it again, crossroads. It's a bit heavy handed.

I am writing this about three weeks after finishing the book, and I really don't feel like going into too much detail. How could I? The book is almost 600 pages! It alternates points of view. We hear from Russ, his drug-dealing son, his wife, another son, and a daughter. They're all pretty messed up. My favorite is the eldest son, whose name I don't recall at the moment. He's so self-righteous that he gives up his student deferment by dropping out of college and notifying the draft board of his decision. Thing is, the war is over. There isn't a draft anymore. And so the gesture, meant to be a kind of fuck-you to his father, who he deems irredeemable hypocrite, is, essentially, meaningless.

So it goes with the rest of them.

Russ' wife is perhaps the least believable characters. She was the daughter of privilege until the stock market crash in the 20s, which prompted her manic-depressive father to suicide. Farmed out to her uncle for raising, she, too, develops a mental illness. It manifests as an obsession with a married man, which leads to a need for an abortion, the need for which results in a stint of prostitution, which is followed by an institutionalization. She keeps it all secret, though, for some 30 years. Which seems a bit far-fetched.

The premise of the book and it's plot, I must say, are a bit ridiculous and unbelievable. And yet I made it almost 600 pages. How? There is something mesmerizing about Franzen's writing and his ability to get you inside the head of his characters that keeps you reading. I didn't love the book. But I certainly don't regret reading it.

Savages

 Savages

By Don Winslow

Another Anthony Jeselnik recommendation. It was very different from the rest of his list. As one Reddit

reviewer wrote: It was one star and five stars simultaneously.

Why one star? Because so much of it seemed pretty god-awful. The main characters are one dimensional and don't really evolve or change through the novel. And the premise is ridiculous: A couple of California weed growers try to take on a Mexican cartel and (kind of) succeed. It's set in Orange County. One of the main characters, O (for Ophelia) is a sex-crazed stoner with unlimited funds and appetites. She is best friends-with-benefits of Chon, an ex-Seal who did several stints in Afghanistan, and Ben, the genius grower. They were happily making millions off their product when the cartel decides it wants to take some. The author also makes some weird stylistic choices, like every now and again moving into movie-script mode, changing "chapters" every page or so, using line breaks like a poet, and trying a bit too hard to make the book seem "hard boiled".

Why Five? Because I couldn't put it down. I ripped through it. The pacing and action is pretty much non-stop. I've read online that maybe some of his other books are better; perhaps I'll check out another one when I need something engrossing and quick. 

Something We Said

 Something We Said: Richard Pryor, a Notorious Word, and Me

By Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor

I first heard the author, who is Richard Pryor's daughter, on Fresh Air. I am glad I picked up the book.

First of all: Being Richard Pryor's daughter sounds like it was a pretty wild experience. I am somewhat familiar with Pryor's work, mainly through his collaborations with Mel Brooks, but knew very little about him outside of that. He was a complicated figure to say the least. He was raised in a Chicago-area brothel. It was a violent, traumatic upbringing that seems pretty clearly connected to some of his "hang ups", as he described them, later in life. The first was his relationship to women. He was never with one very long, and fathered children by lots of them. To his credit, he seemed willing to maintain relationships with the mothers of his children, but infidelity and conflict were constants in his love life. The second, of course, was drugs. Cocaine and alcohol were a big part of his life until the infamous night that he lit himself on fire -- whether intentionally or as a result of a free-basing accident I still don't know -- and, in the painful aftermath, went sober.

All of this turmoil makes you wonder how he was able to maintain enough time and energy for his pretty significant creative output.

But that's not what this book is about. It's about the author's complicated relationship to her father and, to a lesser extent her mother, particularly in light of his pioneering use of what we now can call the N-word. Using it -- the full IT -- was a mainstay of his comedy; it was part of what made him groundbreaking and edgy. During the first part of his career, Pryor's use of it was a kind of re-appropriation, a way to harness the power of the word and use it as a way to fight against racism rather than gird it up. That changed, though, after a trip to Africa, where he realized that, despite being surrounded by black people, the N-word was absent. He disavowed it, explaining that using it, even in the context of re-appropriation, still somehow reinforced America's peculiar racial hierarchy.

Liz, as she is known, traces not only her father's use of the word, but her very personal experience with it. She switches between vignettes about her childhood, her first days teaching at Smith College, and the historical progression of the word and its meaning. All of it is powerful. She does a great job of highlighting what are, now, shameful moments and explaining what she learned and how she grew from them. As a teacher, I was particularly struck by her initial reaction to and subsequent reflection on the first time she heard a student -- and a white student at that -- use it in her classroom; it was a quotation from Richard Pryor's role in Blazing Saddles. In the moment, she basically did nothing. But it set her on a path of figuring out how to do better. I am not black, have never been called the N-word -- but I still can identify with this.

I was also fascinated by the historical "Interludes". I learned a lot about the N-word -- such as the fact that the "N-word" as a way to refer to it became popular as a result of the prosecutor's use of it during the OJ Simpson trial. Huh?! And that there is a historical record of black people re-appropriating the word as far back as the 1800s. I'm hoping to use some of these in my class next year. 

Anyway -- a great, thought-provoking read.

Magnificence

 Magnificence

By Lydia Millet

The last in the trio of books featuring T., a development tycoon who, in the last book, found a change of

heart in the jungle of Belize. That novel was told from the point of view of Hal, the husband of T.'s secretaries, Susan, who agrees to go find T. as a way to escape his discovery that his wife was having an affair. It ends with him bleeding on the sidewalk after being stabbed during a robbery. Will he make it?

No, he will not. And so this book is written from the point of view of Susan, his wife. Turns out, she'd been having lots of affairs. While Hal responded to the accident that left his daughter, Casey, paralyzed by fretting over her, Susan responded with adultery. Hal's death put her in a tailspin. She is, she decides, a murderer; Hal never would have gone to Belize if he hadn't found her out. She is lost, and listless.

Until, one day, she receives a call from a lawyer. Her great uncle has died, and left her a large estate in Pasadena. There is no money, but a trust has been set up to pay for it's upkeep. When she arrives, it is larger than the even imagined. And, strangely, stuffed with taxidermy; heads are everywhere.

She does some research, and finds that her uncle loved to hunt, and, in fact, headed a hunting organization. With little else to do, she throws herself into the house, reorganizing the stuffed animals based on plans of famous natural history museums. It too will be a museum, she decides. There is a chance I am wrong, but it seems to me that her uncle's hunting in some ways matched Susan's infidelities; she, too, was seeking trophies of a kind, and Hal's death has her organizing them in her head.

There is not much of a propulsive plot in this book. A minor conflict arises in the form of Susan's cousins, who are jealous of her inheritance and sue to overturn the uncle's will. It seems obvious from the reader's point of view that she will prevail, but there is tension nevertheless. In addition, this threat spurs Susan to learn even more about the house, and a new mystery arises. The original plans contained a large basement, yet Susan has seen no evidence of it.

A search leads her to a manhole. It doesn't belong to the city. A backhoe is hired to remove the lid, and when Susan descends into the cavern it uncovers, she finds even more animals. At first, it just seems like overflow from the main "collection". But there are strange dates, and then she connects the dots: they are all extinct. There is even a room dedicated to a dodo skeleton. And then, farther on, a different room. It's contents? The remains of humans who were the last of their tribes. 

What does it all mean? I don't know, but it speaks to human's odd relationship to endangered species. We are fascinated by them, hyper focused on their potential demise to the point, perhaps, of ignoring the animals right nearby, who, if we aren't careful, will also end up on the list.

I've really enjoyed delving into Millet. I hope she writes another book.

Ruthie Fear

 Ruthie Fear

By Maxim Lukutoff

Sickel gave this to me during our visit to the cabin this summer. He'd meant to mail it, and inside was a
note that said: "This book is crazy!" Obviously, I was intrigued.

To be honest, I didn't find it all that crazy -- for most of it. It is the story of the titular character, Ruthie Fear, who lives in a trailer in the Bitterroot Valley of Montana with her father, Rutherford. One of the main themes of the book is the gentrification of the area by outsiders while longtime residents see their lives upended. This particularly grates on Rutherford, who simmers not-so-silently with rage. They were technically poor, but with all the public land around, they were rich -- until the really rich started taking that land away. Rutherford is particularly incensed when a country music star moves into the valley and starts baiting ducks near a public pond. Why? Because it is illegal to shoot baited ducks. 

We watch Ruthie struggle in the valley to find a life of meaning and, it seems, upward mobility. She is torn, both loving and despising the insularity of Montana mountain life. She briefly attempts to flee to Las Vegas, inspired by a poster of the city her father brought back from his only trip out of Montana. But she can't quite make it, and winds up robbing a tourist for bus fare back.

It's all pretty ordinary, if disturbing. Except. One day when she was seven years old, Ruthie saw a creature. It had no head, spindly "insect" legs, and a kidney-shaped body covered with feathers. Rutherford believed it to be a figment of her imagination, but Ruthie held fast. She build a blind so she could see it again. But it never appeared. 

Until. One morning she was duck hunting, and there it was. And then there was another. And another. Gun shots rang out through the valley. Hundreds of the creatures had appeared, and been killed. They brought them to the local dump, where the fire warden was waiting for approval to light the pile of carcasses up. But when he did, they gave off a noxious smoke that killed everyone whose nostrils it entered. All along, it had been posited that the valley would be better off with fewer people. And now there were.

The creatures were obviously a metaphor for something. The author certainly seems unsympathetic to the Big Sky-ification of Montana. What, exactly, they stand for I'm not quite sure. But this was a good read, propulsive till the end.

Ghost Lights

 Ghost Lights

By Lydia Millet

I'm not sure if the reference to 2001: A Space Odyssey was intentional, but the main character of this

installment of Millet's cycle, Hal, is definitely on autopilot. He works for the IRS and, even after a decades-long career there, is still a true believer. He is happy to be a cog: in the governmental machine, in his marriage, in life in general. Especially since the accident, on a snowy Colorado night, that left his daughter, Casey, paralyzed. That loss, in which he had no direct role, is all Hal seems to have room for in his brain. 

But then the machine turns against him. He returns home early from work one day to find his wife's co-worker, Robert, leaving his house. Huh. He finds said wife, Susan, showering. And in the folds of the rumpled bed, a shiny piece of metal packaging. His heart races. Could it be...? No. Yes? No? Yes. He follows her to the office the next day and witnesses it: she is having an affair. 

Autopilot off. He is due at a dinner party at Casey's house, and decides to have a few drinks beforehand, something quite uncharacteristic. When talk turns to Susan's boss, T. -- who we met in How the Dead Dream -- Hal stays out of character. Someone needs to go to Belize to find T., Susan insists. I will do it, Hal insists back. It's no problem. The true believer has months of vacation time accrued.

Down Hal goes. Finding T., who against all odds is not dead, is actually easier than anticipated. All he had to do was ask for Marlo, the foreman on T.'s now-destroyed island resort project. But Hal doesn't know that. So he accidentally enlists the help of a German couple with two tow-heads. The patriarch, Hans, is all business and somehow calls in the U.S. Coast Guard to search the area where T. was last seen. The matriarch, Gretel, takes a shining to Hal that results in some inebriated, late-night beach sex. 

One morning, Hal, sleeping on the pool chaise, is woken by Marlo, who takes him to the island. T. is there, feral, with a new perspective on life. The pursuit of money for money's sake, he avows, is silly. He is bearded. He is dressed in rags. He is, after speaking with the brother of the guide who died on his jungle journey, taken into custody.

Hal freaks out. He goes to the embassy and finds cynical help, who insist there is nothing to worry about. T. insists there is nothing to worry about. Hal is not so sure. Still, things are looking up. He has confronted Susan on the phone; there will be a future for their marriage. He has confronted his autopilot tendencies; he will be different upon return. 

The machine, though, will not compute. Just as he feels like he has made some peace with the world, an unnoticed boy, who Hal tries to make room for on the sidewalk, stabs him, takes his wallet, and leaves him for dead. Will he die? It certainly seems so. But I thought T. would die, too.

Hal's final thoughts are on the nature of Jesus, and the way that the lives of the rich are antithetical to who he was. He meditates on the way the many suffer and die for the few when it was actually supposed to be the other way around. Though not rich by American standards, he is a bit astonished to realize that he is, in fact, one of the few. Not as much as T., though. Does he die for T.'s sins?

How the Dead Dream

 How the Dead Dream

By Lydia Millet

After reading A Children's Bible I thought I'd go down a bit of a Lydia Millet rabbit hole. This book is the
first in a trilogy of sorts with a similar story line.

This book focuses on T., which, we learn later in the book, is short for Thomas. It's a fitting nickname for a character focused on efficiency in all aspects of his life. Everything he does is meant to move toward an end goal of wealth. Even in college, his "friendships" with wealthier frat brothers are in the interest of potential business connections.

For a long while, T.'s life plan seems to be working out. His lifetime pursuit of trading for profit works well in New York and then in Los Angeles, where he breaks into real estate. His relationships with people, and the earth, remain purely transactional. 

But then his mother shows up. His father, she says, is missing. No note, no phone call, no ideas about where he could be. At the same time, he begins to fall in love -- real love -- with a woman named Beth. He sees a future in which they are partners and he is no longer alone. As in A Children's Bible, though, cracks appear in the Edenic plan. 

T. finds his father -- slinging drinks at a gay bar in Florida. His whole life, up until that point, was a lie, he says. His father files for divorce, which sends his mother into a tailspin. Then Beth suffers a heart attack, which leads to a car crash, which leads to her death. All of a sudden, T. feels what it is like to lose. Always alone in the world, he now begins to feel lonely.

For comfort, he begins to seek out endangered species in zoos, imagining them to be feeling what he is feeling: the last of their kind, lonely. He takes lessons in picking locks and finds himself napping with them at night. He takes an interest in the endangered kangaroo rats displaced by his mega development in the desert outside L.A. 

He next has his eyes on an island in Belize, where he hires a guide to take him into jaguar country. The odds of seeing one, he knows, are very, very low. But just to be in their presence is enough. But then, more loss. His guide has a heart attack, and T. is now very, very alone. He attempts to find his own way out of the jungle. At the end of the book, though, it doesn't look good for him.

Up next: Ghost Lights.

A Children's Bible

 A Children's Bible 

By Lydia Millet

Another recommendation from the Anthony Jeselnik book club. 

It starts off dreamily: "Once we lived in a summer country." The "we" here is a group of several families vacationing in a mansion built by a robber baron by the sea. The kids, including the narrator, Evie, have free run of the place and are turning more and more feral by the moment. But soon cracks appear in the Edenic vision.

The kids aren't given freedom -- they're neglected. The parents, who never have names, engage in a pattern of "hair of the dog", "drink and conversation", dinner, and then boozing for real. They disgust the kids, most of whom seem to be in their late teens with the exception of Evie's brother, Jack and a friend (whose name I forget but who only speaks through signs). Then more cracks. The troupe of kids decide to camp out on the beach for the night. There, they meet the scions of an Uber wealthy family sailing their yacht up the coast. They smoke weed and party -- but also talk about survival compounds. The book feels contemporary, but it's either a few decades in the future or a bit of an alternate reality. Are there "preppers" out there? Sure. But they are fringe elements at the moment. 

And then the thing falls apart. A storm hits. Jack and his companion, who have recently been given "A Children's Bible" take on the role of modern-day Noah's and gather any and all animals they can. They store them in a tree house, where they ride out the storm. The parents don't notice. Instead, they take Ecstasy and have an orgy. The teens clamor to the tree house. The storm is bad; it ruins the house and, it seems, the surrounding countryside. 

One day, a man named Burl appears. He's been paddling for days, and is glad to find respite. When the waters recede, he joins the teens in an effort to escape to one of the family's Rye, NY, compound. They don't make it, instead holing up on a different compound somewhere in Pennsylvania. For a moment, it seems like they have found another, truer Eden, one bereft of their bothersome parents. But cracks appear again, this time in the form of an armed, roving gang drunk with power and motivated to horde as much food as they can. Things are, after all, bad out there.

In the end, the kids are fine. The parents, though, they somehow disappear into the ether.

It is, it seems, a metaphor for the impending climate crisis. The older generation, which may or may not include me, parties on as the earth falls apart, giving into their hedonistic tendencies while leaving the inevitable destruction to their kids. 

I really liked this book. The description above sounds intense, but there were moments of levity and humor. It was, in a way, absurdist. One of the blurbs on the back compared Millet to Vonnegut, and I think it's an apt comparison. I'd never heard of her, and I've decided to dig deeper and check out some of her other novels. 

The Department of Speculation

 The Department of Speculation

By Jenny Offill

This was part of the Anthony Jeselnik book club. The book is a series of vignettes exploring the
dissolution of a relationship. You don't even know the character's names, but you do know that the husband has an affair that blows up the relationship and the wife is trying to figure out what to do. It was funny at times, heartbreaking at others. But, in this middle age of mine, it was tough to read. Don't let this happen to me!

The Three Body Problem

 The Three Body Problem

By Cixin Liu

My friend Zach loaned me this book after a party at his house. I think I was talking about trying to read
some science fiction, and he recommended this. It won all sorts of awards, including the Hugo Award. Apparently, it was the first translated book to do so.

The basic plot is that, in the backdrop of the Cultural Revolution, the Chinese government set up a secret base with a radio telescope to search for alien life. One day, it receives a message from near the star Alpha Centauri. The scientist who receives the message, Ye Wenjie, tries to keep it under wraps. Then she receives a second message, warning her not to reply to the first one. Doing so, it says, will allow the alien civilization to find earth and conquer it. Wenjie, who just saw her father beaten to death by the Red Guard among other horrors of the Cultural Revolution, has lost faith in humanity. So she replies in the hopes that the invading aliens will not just conquer but also reform human civilization.

Wenjie does not keep her secret to herself. She befriends an heir to an oil company fortune who is spending his time reforesting clear cut sections of the woods in the hopes of saving endangered songbirds. He, too, has lost faith in humanity and welcomes the idea of an alien force not just conquering but destroying humanity in the hopes that it will save other life forms on earth. 

The two form a movement devoted to aiding the aliens, known as the Trisolarians because their planet has three suns (which dooms them to eventual destruction). One of their strategies is to foil human scientists so they cannot develop the technology to repel the invading aliens when the time comes, which, even with the Trisolarians' advanced science, is still 450 years in the future.

Enter Wang Miao. He is a scientist working on nanotechnology that could allow humans to venture farther into space than ever before. He is recruited by a group of generals from multiple nations who have learned of the alien plot and are working to stop it. Wang enters a game called the Three Body Problem, which simulates the Trisolarian's solar system. There are three suns, whose erratic orbit cause unpredictable periods of calm and of either fiery destruction or chilling cold. The point of the game is to help the civilization develop a model to predict these periods. Ultimately, it proves impossible. 

This novel, which is the first in a trilogy, ends with the Trisolarians developing some kind of electron technology that will allow them to reach earth, Wenjie captured and her co-conspirator dead. Is earth doomed? I guess you have to read on to find out.

I can't say I loved this book. I appreciated the plot, but some of the science was over my head. Multiple dimensions folded within a single proton? Huh? I guess I'm not super excited to pick up the next book.

Swamplandia!

 Swampladia!

By Karen Russell

I picked this up a few weeks ago because it is set in the brackish swamp near the Everglades, which we

were about to visit over April break.

The book tells the story of the Bigtree family who operate a theme park, Swamplandia!, on an island, or hammock, in the Everglades area of Florida. Everything is going swimmingly until the star of the family, Hiolia, dies. She had been the main attraction of Swamplandia!; her act involved diving into a gator-filled pool and swimming around it unscathed. After her death, visitors stop coming, which is compounded by the opening of a nearby rival theme park, The World of Darkness. Or, just The World.

All of this pulls the rest of the Bigtree family -- Osceola, 16; Kiwi, 17; Ava, 13; and Chief, middle aged -- to the breaking point. Kiwi is the first to leave. He heads to the mainland to work at The World, both to scout its features but also to try to make some money that might get Swamplandia!'s creditors off the family's back. Next is the Chief, who goes on one of his semi-annual but mysterious business trips (which turns out to be emceeing at a depressing strip club). Osceola (Ossie), meanwhile, seems to have something of a psychotic break and begins spending her time with a Spiritualist book that, she believes, allows her to commune with the dead. She goes through a series of ghost boyfriends before deciding to elope with one of them, a former dredge boat worker who takes her deep into the swamp to a portal to the underworld that will allow them to marry. Ava, now alone, is distraught. She shares her story with an itinerant "bird man", whose "job" is to scare away buzzards from area businesses and homes. The bird man says he knows all about the underworld, and promises to take Ava there in an attempt to save Osceoloa.

The thing about the Bigtree family is that they've always lived in a fantasy world. Their last name, Bigtree, is, in fact, made up, designed to associate Swamplandia! with vague Native American roots. The Chief isn't a chief of anything. This idea is reinforced by a "museum" at the theme park that preserves various "artifacts" of the Bigtree story. They are, in fact, simply mementos from the family's life, trumped up to fill a kind of grand story.

And so it is easy to believe that Ava believes in this underworld, especially given the author's lovely description of the environment in which the Bigtree's live. It starts to make sense that there would be a portal to the underworld out there, and I was totally ready for this book to be about the magic that exists in the most special places in our world, in nature. It seemed like it would be, even more than 250 pages in.

But that was not to be. The Birdman is not who Ava thinks he is. As a reader, I wanted to see him like Ava did. Looking back, though, it was clear: this is a shady character. In a scene that shocked me, that seemed to rip me from the charming and, many times, funny, tale I had bought into, Ava is raped. It still turns my stomach thinking about it. Ava is very violently torn from her fantasy world. 

And so it goes with the other Bigtrees. Kiwi learns that he cannot single-handedly save the family's home. He learns, too, that his sense of himself as a scholar -- no schools at Swamplandia!, only homeschool -- is misguided. He has a lot to learn. Osceola's ghost leaves her, just in the nick of time, the noose that would serve as a "portal" swinging in the background when she is rescued. And the Chief accepts that he will have to become a mainlander after all. The silver lining: when the fantasy bubble is burst, the family realizes that they are far stronger together than they are apart.

This was certainly an engrossing book. I found the ending jarring, to say the least. The rape scene made me feel a little betrayed by the author and, after looking at some online reviews, others have felt similarly. I still wonder whether it was necessary. I wonder whether Ava could have gotten away and the story would have been the same. 

Buckeye

 Buckeye

By Patrick Ryan

Cal is born with one leg significantly shorter than the other, and so can't go off and fight in World War II.
Which, it turns out, is a blessing and a curse. He does his best to help out, joining the local defense patrol to keep a watch on the streets and skies of Bonhomie, OH, but, soon enough, he'll be one of the few men of a certain age left in town. His father is glad; he is not.

Still, it works out okay for him. He meets a girl, Becky, who soon becomes his wife. Becky's dad runs a local hardware store and offers him a job that is a good sight better than his work at a local cement factory. His father-in-law pays for a house. A child comes. Life is good.

But, then, trouble. Becky is...quirky, some might say. She reads. She works at a stationary store. She wears a beret. She says things. Oh, and she might be able to commune with the spirit world. What else can explain how she was able to locate the body of a man who went missing and wound up dead in his car on the side of the road? With war in full swing, Becky uses her gift to help the many people hoping to reconnect with their loved ones.

But Cal doesn't believe.

Which is fine, for a while, until one day, when Cal, at the behest of his father-in-law, runs out of town a quack author who is ostensibly writing a book about spirit mediums but apparently just wants to get into Becky's pants. Becky is not amused -- she can handle herself. And then it comes out: Cal really doesn't believe. The two move into separate bedrooms.

So when the woman who came into the basement of the hardware store to listen to the radio and kiss him on what turned out to be VE day reappears and seems to suggest that perhaps they could do more than kiss, Cal is in a rough enough place emotionally to accept. 

The woman, Margaret, has a husband overseas. But their marriage isn't what Margaret had hoped for. She's said yes to Felix's proposal because, frankly, she didn't know better. She'd grown up in an orphanage, and was looking for stable ground. Plus, Felix was handsome. That said, he seemed far less interested in sex than the men Margaret had been seeing casually, and his libido didn't seem to pick up in matrimony. Felix, it turned out, was gay, though she didn't know it. Two things filled her with dread: Felix dying and Felix returning home.

He does return home after his ship is torpedoed and the man he had fallen in love with dies. He comes back an even more broken and confused man than he was when he left. He is able to make love to Margaret on the first night of his homecoming. So the baby that comes could be his. But it isn't. Which is when the lies begin.

Felix is able to find peace through Becky, who is able to contact Augie, Felix's love, from beyond the grave. The message: live -- for both of them. But in connecting with Augie, Felix inadvertently introduces his son-not-son to Becky and Cal's son, Skip. So things become complicated. Especially when Margaret learns of Felix's affair and Felix learns of Margaret's affair and Margaret tells Becky about her affair -- and then Margaret, overwhelmed (or something else) leaves town. 

The news she leaves, and her departure itself, is like a bomb for the two families. But eventually they heal. And it is in the telling of this healing -- even after Skip dies in Vietnam and Tom, his half brother, distances himself from everyone after learning the truth -- that the beauty of this novel lies. It is sweet, and tender, and sad, and uplifting all at the same time. I loved it. 

Mother Night

 Mother Night

By Kurt Vonnegut

This is another entry in the Anthony Jeselnick book club. It's a new Vonnegut for me that I'd never heard
of.

Like all Vonnegut, it's an absurd tale. The main character, Howard Campbell Jr., was born in the United States but moved to Germany soon after with his family. By the time the Nazis took over, he had built a life there as a playwright and had married a German woman. So while his parents moved back to upstate New York, he stayed. Since his wife was a well-known actress and he a well-known author, his social circle included the upper echelon of Nazi leadership, and soon he was recruited as a propagandist.

But he was also recruited by the Americans, who convinced him to use well-timed pauses in his broadcasts to convey secret information to their leadership. He never knew what information he was passing along, and no one ever suspected his involvement. And, after the war, no one on the American side would acknowledge it, either. They kept him out of jail through behind-the-scenes maneuvering. Still, Nazi hunters still regarded him as an enemy that needed to be brought to justice.

They came knocking on his door one day after Howard's new friend, who himself was an agent of the Russians, learned of his true identity and tipped off a group of neo-Nazis, who published a celebration of news of Campbell's being alive and well, which, in turn, tipped off Nazi hunters. Fleeing for his life, he is embraced by a rag-tag but rich group of neo-Nazis, which include the "Black Fuhrer" and a former priest defrocked for his bigotry (and drunkenness).

It's all told as a memoir written in an Israeli jail as Campbell waits for his trial. So the whole book, we, the reader, are wondering: How did he get there? The twist -- spoiler alert -- it was Campbell who turned himself in. When he receives a letter from the American who recruited him as a spy saying he will testify at the trial and save him, Campbell holds himself accountable for his misdeeds with a rope.

Ah, Vonnegut. It was all so much more humorous than I related above. Somehow, he still seems so radical in his absurdity. We need another Vonnegut for these times.

The British are Coming

 The British are Coming

By Rick Atkinson

Dad gifted me this book on Valentine's Day to mark the semiquincentennial of the beginning of the
American Revolution. Which, of course, started in 1775. We actually went to Boston last year and saw a re-enactment of Paul Revere's row across the Charles to begin his famous ride north.

This is a detailed -- and I mean detailed -- account of the first two years of the war, beginning with Lexington and Concord and ending with American victories at Trenton and Princeton.

Those successes were badly needed. One of my takeaways from the book is just how tenuous the American situation was in those early years. I knew it, but forgot it. After Bunker Hill and an eventual successful siege of Boston, there was a long stretch of blunders that, in many instances, nearly crushed the army. There was disaster in Quebec and in New York. Meanwhile troops lived what seemed like awful lives with not enough food. No wonder many of them went back to their farms when their enlistments were up. 

Luckily for the Americans, the British were pretty blundery too. Howe had several chances to obliterate the rebellion, but just couldn't seem to make the decisive move that would do it. The arrogance of British officers led them to underestimate the colonists, with deadly results.

This is the first nonfiction book I've read in a while. My ability to keep with it, at 564 pages, owed much to Atkinson's writing. He does know how to turn a phrase. Not sure yet whether I'll pick up the next volume when 2027 rolls around.

Paradais

 Paradais

By Fernanda Melchor

Well, that was an intense one. I can across the title as part of comedian Anthony Jeselnik's book club,
which he launched this year. He's a pretty dark comic; this is a pretty dark tale.

It takes place in Mexico on the grounds of a gated community called Paradais -- Paradise, though the day laborers who work there can't pronounce it. It tells of the connection between the haves, who live in the community, and the have-nots, who work at the place.

Representing the latter is a teenager named Polo. He has dropped out of school and wants desperately to drop out of the life that has followed. He hates his work as a gardener at Paradais as well as the residents there. And yet he forms a "friendship" with who he refers to as Fatboy so often that I can't actually remember his name. Fatboy is rich. He lives with his grandparents, away from his abusive, lawyer father. Polo and Fatboy take to bouts of drinking after Polo's shift. Not only does Polo love drinking, he desperately wants to avoid arriving at home while his mother and cousin are up.

That's because his cousin is pregnant. For the first two thirds of the book, we are led to believe that the father could be anyone; "everyone" knows she sleeps around. But then we learn that it is probably Polo's, though he won't admit it was his "fault" because his cousin kept following him around and "begging" for it. Polo is searching for any way out. He tries to contact his older cousin, Milton, who has been abducted by the local drug cartel, asking him to vouch for him in the group, but he receives only sermons about how that life is no life for anyone.

Fatboy's problems are more internal. He is addicted to porn, as well as to one of his neighbors, the glamorous wife of a television personality. During their drinking sessions, he goes on and on and on about what he wants to "do" to this woman. And then one day, a plan forms. The family, Fatboy discovers, does not lock their house. So why don't they go in there and kill the husband. Fatboy can rape the wife while Polo robs them of their riches. It is unclear exactly what Polo thinks of this plan. But, nevertheless, he finds himself at Walmart buying face masks, condoms, and "kidnapper's" (ie duct) tape.

Next thing you know, they are in the house. The husband is dead. The children are bound and gagged. Polo is sampling the high-end booze, and Fatboy is desperately trying to get it up so he can fulfill his fantasy. He ends up with fatal knife wounds that don't kill him until he is able to shoot the wife. It is a grisly scene, and Polo runs, swimming the river that separates the gated community from the real community Polo lives in. The river is symbolic for Polo: it's the one place that holds positive memories for him. He used to fish the river with his grandfather, had spoken of building a boat together one day.

Polo goes to sleep. Wakes up. Heads back to work like every day. Everything is normal. No one has noticed -- because no one behind the gate can fathom that their paradise could be lost. Turns out, it was gone way before they knew it.

The God of the Woods

 The God of the Woods

By Liz Moore

I heard this author on Fresh Air. She sounded good, so I picked up the book.

It tells the story of a wealthy family, the Van Laars, who have established an estate in the Adirondacks.

Attached to it is an unconventional summer camp, named after Ralph Waldo Emerson, designed to teach young people to love, respect, and -- and survive -- nature. One of the hallmarks is a survival week, where campers are taken to the woods and left to fend for themselves.

All is not well with the Van Laars. Alice Van Laar married her husband, Peter (Peter III, actually, since the name has been passed down through generations) at the age of 18, and is way in over her head. It is curious why Peter asked for her hand when, afterwards, he seems so annoyed with her. Perhaps he thought he could mold her into the woman he wanted to marry? No such luck. Alice is miserable except for one bright spot -- her son, Bear. He is, by all accounts a wonderful child, and Alice throws herself into him. So it is beyond catastrophic when, one day, Bear disappears. Despite mobilizing the whole surrounding town and state police, he stays missing.

And then, fourteen years later, it happens again. This time, it is the Van Laars daughter, Barbara, who goes missing. Alice does not share the same maternal bond with Barbara that she did with Bear; there is, really, no bond at all. She is a shell of a human, addicted to some sort of pill her doctor prescribed her during a stay at an institution following Bear's disappearance. She could hear him speak, she said. And Peter doesn't have the time of day; she is, after all, a girl, and so won't do the chief duty of his offspring: take over the family banking business.

Still, there is an outcry. There is mobilization. There are interviews. In them untangles quite the web of lies meant to uphold the appearance of upper-class respectability. It is infuriating as a reader to see Barbara's disappearance almost pinned on one of the "help" -- must as Bear's was in the 1960s. 

Then, a breakthrough. The New York State Police's first female investigator somehow develops a level of trust with an escaped sexual predator, one that encourages him to open up about the whereabouts of young Bear, or his remains anyway. They find them. Then the truth comes out. Alice Van Laar, drunk, capsized a rowboat with Bear in it. He drowned. But in order to keep up appearances, her husband and father-in-law conspired to pin the deed on a groundskeeper. Alice, kept drugged up, never finds out the truth. 

Meanwhile, it turns out Barbara is just fine. She had developed an escape plan with the camp's director and ends up alone on an island cabin. The investigator, Judy, knows the truth, but also knows enough to keep it to herself.

That's really just a small synopsis of the book. It's lengthy and spans several decades. The author did a wonderful job of bringing this world to life. The narration switches between many characters. Sometimes, I find this hard to follow, but in this book I had no trouble keeping up. Embedded in the story are other themes, primarily an investigation of the role of women in society, high and low, at the time. A wonderful, page-turning read.

Heart the Lover

 Heart the Lover

By Lily King

My reaction to the first part of this book was: Ugh. It is set in the late 1980s in a Pennsylvania college,
where there develops something of a love triangle between characters named Jordan (the girl) and two best friends, Sam and Yash. It is an angsty time for all of them as they fall into and out of love with one another. There comes a time when Jordan and Yash are on the cusp of a future together. Jordan moves back from Paris to New York, thinking she is going to meet Yash there. But he never shows. Never even calls. 

The "ugh" is because it recalled similar times of my own, thinking I had met "the one", only to have that fall through, and generally feeling like a happy life partnership -- like the one I have now -- was an impossibility. I didn't like that feeling, and didn't particularly care for the process that got me to where I am today.

Erin, who read this book before me, had her own ugh, which was similar to the reviewer on NPR. It recalled for her the misogyny baked into higher education, where males are seen as the true possessors of knowledge and women objects who should bow before their knowledge. I saw this only when it was pointed out to me, perhaps proof of its existence.

But I made it through that first part. And that's when the novel picked up for me. It fast forwards several decades to when Jordan, whose actual name is Casey, is in her 40s, married in Maine, with a house and two kids. Her old flame, Yash, drops by on his way through a tour up the state's coast. Reading this part felt like home. Like I was reading about my own life. 

I hope I wasn't, because there is, of course, a twist. Casey's son develops a brain tumor, and domestic bliss turns into a nightmare of waiting for a surgery that may give him a new lease on life, kill him, or, worse, turn him into a vegetable. Meanwhile, Yash, too, is suffering from cancer. Casey visits him at his hospital deathbed. They hash some things out, and Casey reveals that she'd been 5 months pregnant when Yash stood her up in New York. She is, briefly, torn out of her life and into the past. 

It's no less excruciating than the beginning of the novel, and yet: it's middle aged. I don't often think of myself that way, but, since I identified so strongly with that portion of the novel, perhaps I should.

South of the Border, West of the Sun

 South of the Border, West of the Sun

By Haruki Murakami

It's been a while since I've read a Murakami book, and Erin happened upon this one at the library. So I was

excited to pick it up.

This one features a very classic Murakami man. Self-centered, in a dead-end job, haunted by past women in his life. In this case it Shimimoto, who he bonded with in elementary school because they were both only children, apparently a rarity in those days. He was close with her until his family moved and they lost touch. 

As an adult, the man is adrift working as a textbook editor until he meets the woman who becomes his wife. Her father is a wealthy businessman, and backs his opening of two very successful bars/jazz clubs. All is going well: two kids, plenty of money. Then Shimimoto, drawn by the press coverage of the bars, shows up. And all of a sudden the guy can't stop thinking about her; he loves her. He takes a strange journey with her to a river, in which she dumps the ashes of her stillborn baby. The two carry on a platonic affair until, one night, it is consummated. 

In the morning, though, Shiminoto is nowhere to be found. She is gone without a trace. There is a suggestion that perhaps she was merely a figment of the man's imagination. Either way, he is distraught, and all but confesses to his wife, who is beyond understanding, telling him she will stay or go -- whatever he wants. Eventually, he stays.

It's hard to read this as anything other than some weird fantasy. Maybe Murakami wants to be able to sleep around without consequence? Maybe I'm missing something? I don't know, but this book didn't live up to my expectations. The main problem was that magical realism never really crept in. It never got truly weird. Which is what I look for in Murakami. Ah well.

Murder in Constantinople

 Murder in Constantinople

By A.E. Goldin

Set in the 1850s, this book follows the adventures of Ben Canaan, a Jewish resident of England -- at the
time, one couldn't be fully British and Jewish -- who, after accidentally crossing a local gangster, suggests he lay low half a world away in Constantinople, where he hopes to solve the mystery of a long-lost love whose picture mysteriously appeared in the suit of a high-ranking official hoping to secure his tailor-father's services. 

That was a long sentence. Too long, some might say.

Constantinople had a reputation at the time of being a dangerous city and Ben, having nowhere else to turn, finds himself at a local synagogue. The rabbi there offers him a few rooms. But things soon turn sticky, and Ben is thrust into the center of a plot to take down the Sultan, who then led the Ottoman Empire. He risks his life many times, but is able, with the help of some new friends, to foil the plan and ensure the continuity of an important British ally in a war against the Russians. The Crimean War, I believe.

To be honest, the book felt stilted and full of tropes. The plot was good enough to keep me reading, but I don't plan to pick up any of its sequels. The most interesting part was the exploration of the Jewish community at the time and its place in society.