As the Crow Flies

 As the Crow Flies

By Craig Johnson

I picked up this Walt Longmire mystery somewhere in our travels out west this summer.  Maybe Iowa?

Figured it'd be a good read while in that country, and I was certainly right. This Longmire adventure takes place on the reservation just across the Montana/Wyoming border -- out of Walt's jurisdiction, but within sight of the Big Horn Mountains.

This might be only my second Longmire book, but already there are tropes to recognize. His daughter always plays a role, making Walt feel guilty about being hyper-focused on his work but ultimately validating his commitment to justice. In this case, Walt is inexplicably charged with finding a wedding venue for his pregnant daughter, who is traveling from her new home in Philadelphia to marry the brother of his deputy. Given that his daughter is from the area, it is unclear to me why Walt is given this job, but what do I know? 

Then there is Henry Standing Bear, Walt's best friend, who has some pretty stereotypical superpowers, mainly being able to sneak up unseen on anyone at any time. He always comes to the rescue, and does several times here.

In this particular version of events, a young woman falls from some cliffs near a potential wedding venue. Is it suicide or murder? Since it happens in the first chapter of the book -- definitely murder. Though Walt is technically unable to work the case, he becomes embroiled when it becomes clear that neither the newly-minted tribal chief, who is suffering mentally from her time in Iraq, nor the FBI are up to the job. He mentors the young tribal officer, gets the FBI off her back, and, of course, solves the case. 

A great summer read. Perhaps the beginning of a tradition? 

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

 Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

By Gabrielle Zevin

For the first one hundred pages or so of this novel, all I could think of was Kavalier and Clay, Michael

Chabon's novel about a partnership in the golden age of comic books. Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is also about a creative partnership during a "golden age" of sorts 50 or so years later, when it was possible for two unkowns in their early 20s to develop a blockbuster video game. Despite its widespread acclaim, I didn't care much for Kavalier and Clay, and abandoned it after 150 pages or so. For a while, I thought I'd do the same with Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow.

But there was something different about Zevin's novel. Perhaps it was just the circumstances in which I picked it up -- at the beginning of summer vacation when it feels like work will never come again and there is oodles of time to read. But I was pretty quickly immersed in the story, which focuses on the relationship between Sadie Green and Sam Masur, who became friends in an LA hospital (Sadie there because her sister had cancer; same recovering from a car wreck that killed his mother) when they bonded over games. It is a tumultuous friendship from the beginning. Someone suggests to Sadie, who is going for her bot mitzvah, log her hours with Sam as "community service", and she does. While she goes far beyond her required hours, totaling something like 600, when Sam finds out he feels betrayed and doesn't speak to Sadie for 6 years after.

That changes at a Boston train terminal, where Sam, now a Harvard student, spots Sadie, who is attending MIT, and rekindles a connection. Sadie is enrolled in a game-making class, and hands Sam some of her work. He is enthralled and becomes convinced that they can make a great game together. And they do. It makes them rich, helps them launch a company, and leads to more and more games. It also leads to more and more conflict. Sam and Sadie engage in on-again, off-again feuds that ends, many years and a significant tragedy later, in a kind of frenemy detente.

The novel explores many themes: The way(s) games mimic reality, and vice versa; the nature of grief, loss, and trauma; adulthood; and cultural appropriation. But most of all, it's an exploration of different types of love. There is love of games and art and pop culture, to be sure; at the center of the book, though, is love between people -- especially the love between Sadie and Sam, a love that is consummated through game play rather than romance or sex. 

It sounds boring. But it was really, really good.

A few complaints. I felt like the love between Sadie and Sam was never established well enough. There was lots of TELLING the reader that the two loved each other, but not enough showing it. For most of the novel, the two were at each other's throats about something, and the reader was just expected to take the love between them for granted. In addition, the characters were Seinfeldian in their unlikability. You become so intimate with each character's inner life that you root for them, but their inability to communicate effectively and kindly was maddening. Finally, I wish the author had done more with the gaming theme. The book is organized around the games the characters make. This felt like an opportunity to play with the narration a bit so that it somehow mimicked the games. The author did this a bit, but there could have been more.

The Poisonwood Bible

 The Poisonwood Bible

By Barbara Kingsolver

I came across this book in the little free library at the Plymouth Schoolhouse; it was one of the few texts

there that seemed worth reading, so I thought I'd pick it up.

The book tells the story of an American family who, at the insistence of the father, fly to the Belgian Congo to do missionary work. It is a doomed mission. The father, a preacher before World War II, emerged from the conflict a zealot, convinced that he needed to make up for his fortuitous injury that helped him miss the Bataan Death March in which nearly all of his fellow soldiers died. 

The rest of the family, a woman and four girls, are less dedicated. They all react to the relocation in different ways, and take turns narrating chapters. My favorites were Rachel, a vapid teacher whose writing was filled with humorous malapropisms, and Ada, a selective mute with a disability, who copes with her place in the world with word play and Emily Dickinson. 

The patriarch is stereotypically dismissive of the culture he finds in his new home. He, for instance, doesn't bother to learn that the native language is tonal -- the meaning of words changes based on how they are said. Which is how the book gets its name. The father, thinking he is trying to say something else, inadvertently calls his holy book "poisonwood", which is symbolic of the challenges he faces in converting the Congolese people.

Things take a turn for the worse for the family when an independence movement, led by Patrice Lumumba, successfully frees the Congo from Belgian rule. Though other local missionaries plead for the family to leave, the father, haunted by his wartime past, refuses. The family is cut off from their meager stipend, which still made them the richest people in their village, and, as the father takes long walks working on sermons few people will hear and fewer will understand, the women of the family are more or less left to figure out how to survive on their own. Eventually, they flee. Or three of them do. Leah falls in love with a local teacher, whose participation in the independence movement becomes problematic when a US-backed coup leads to the murder of Lumumba and the rise of a despot bent on enriching himself and silencing his rivals.

Overall, the book was interesting -- but far too long.    

I Have Some Questions for You

 I Have Some Questions for You

By Rebecca Makkai

This was an immersive, couldn't-put-it-down read that explores the intersection of all sorts of 

contemporary issues: #metoo, predatory prep school teachers, podcasts, true crime obsession, racism, and cancel culture. It's a lot.

The way the book reads is reminiscent of Serial, which examined the case of Adnan Syed and ultimately resulted in his release. Its narrator is Bode Kane, a professional podcaster who normally dedicates her airtime to the abuse of Hollywood starlets of the past but who becomes obsessed with the murder of Thalia Kieth, her onetime roommate at an exclusive prep school in the woods of New Hampshire called Granby. Kane returns to Granby during a two-week break in regular classes to teach a course on podcasting and helps steer one of her students to Thalia's murder. This amateur first attempt spawns a full-blown podcast that results in a new hearing for Omar, a black athletic trainer on whom the murder was, it seems, unjustly pinned. 

At the same time as she is mentoring her students, though, Kane herself becomes embroiled in controversy when her former husband, Jerome, is accused of abusing an art-world neophyte just as his career was starting to take off. Though her life's work is exposing the abuse of women actors and her current project is finding justice for a murdered young woman, Bode defends Jerome -- because even the accused admits that everything in the relationship had been consensual. So what, Bode questions publicly, is the actual abuse? 

Meanwhile, Bode begins to suspect, strongly, that her one-time choral teacher was sexually involved with Thalia, and might be responsible for her murder. But these encounters were also "consensual". So where is the line? Who deserves to be cancelled? Obviously, a teacher-predator -- and Bode quite deliberately sics a devoted online following on the former teacher in the hopes that he will, in fact, be cancelled. 

Is the author suggesting that the line between bad relationships and abuse is actually very clear if only we opened our eyes and looked for it? Or is she saying that these things are more complicated than they seem? Is she implying that #metoo and cancel culture have gone too far? Or that a little collateral damage is okay if it keeps our society bending toward justice?

Interesting questions, all, and they are wrapped up in an addictive plot. Great book. 

Galapagos

 Galapagos

By Kurt Vonnegut

Was in the mood for some wry absurdism, so I picked up a Vonnegut book I'd never read before. It's a

meditation of sorts on evolution. We often think, of course, that we humans are the most highly evolved species, what with our big brains and whatnot. But in Galapagos, Vonnegut, writing as a wandering spirit 1 million years in the future, these big brains are actually the evolutionary mutation that brings about our downfall. It is the cause of a financial crisis, unnecessarily made by big brains, that wipes out all of humanity -- except for a small colony of humans that accidentally ends up shipwrecked on a deserted Galapagos island. There they evolve away from these big brains and back into animals whose sole focus is on survival. It is a simpler way of life -- though, as the narrator points out, no human in a million years would have the capacity to reflect on that.

It was good to revisit Vonnegut, like seeing an old friend after some time. It didn't quite pack the humorous punch as some of his other books, but a good read nonetheless.

Signal Fires

 Signal Fires

By Dani Shapiro

This was the second of my father's annual Valentine's Day book gift. Perhaps I'm projecting here, but it

seems like a major theme of the book is finding peace during middle age. The main characters of this novel have a harder time than most. In the opening scene, two of the main characters, brother-and-sister duo Theo and Sarah, are in a car that crashes and kills a friend. Inexplicably, the family decides to never speak of the incident again, leaving the trauma to fester for decades. It manifests itself in unproductive ways. Sarah turns to alcohol, Theo up and leaves the country without telling anyone, and Mimi, the mom, develops early-onset Alzheimers. They are all eventually saved, if that is the right word for it, when their story intertwines with new neighbors across the street, the youngest of which, Waldo, is a precocious 10-year-old with a genius level IQ and an obsession with stars, the "signal fires" of the title. 

Waldo's ruminations on stars and the atoms that make them up point toward another theme: the connection between all things. We are, after all, as CSNY pointed out, star dust. Waldo continually reminds us that everything is connected, and, at times, is even able to see the past, present, and future all mixed up at once. This is what happens when he, by chance, is with Mimi when she passes away. It's an idea emphasized by the organization of the novel, which jumps back and forth in time, and includes heavy doses of foreshadowing in the sections on the past.

In this sense, the author seems to be making a claim -- or maybe grasping at? -- of immortality, that we never really die. While I found the story engaging and very well written, it is the heavy-handed way in which the author presents this idea that will make this book forgettable. It seems more like an attempt to comfort herself than an actual story; judging by the book jacket, Dani Shapiro is also in middle age and, one would suspect, grappling with questions of mortality. In her book, everything ends happily -- even death! -- and all loose ends are tied up. I wish the book had sought to raise questions more than provide answers.

Trust

 Trust

By Hernan Diaz

The title of this novel is a play on the two themes explored throughout. On the one hand, it is a reference

to money, apt considering the book revolves around the rise of a financier who predicts the stock market plunge of 1929 and winds up unimaginably wealthy. Perhaps more interestingly, though, it refers to the ways in which reality often conforms to the person who owns its narrative. As the financier in question, Andrew Bevel, tells his secretary-cum-ghost-writer: "My job is about being right. Always. If I'm ever wrong, I must make use of all my means and resources to bend and align reality according to my mistake so that it ceases to be a mistake." And as the father of ghost-writer Ida Perenza claims, "History itself is just a fiction -- a fiction with an army. And reality? Reality is a fiction with an unlimited budget. That's what it is. And how is reality funded? With yet another fiction: money. Money at the core of it all. An illusion we've all agreed to support. Unanimously."

As if to prove this point, Diaz starts the novel with a novel-within-a-novel called Bonds, which tells the story of a Bevel-like financier, his rise to enormous wealth, and the mental decline that ultimately results in the death of his wife. I was fully prepared for the next section of the book to pick up where the last left off. Instead the reader is given My Life by Andrew Bevel, which is confusing, not only because it is unfinished, but also because much of it seems to echo Bonds. The two are connected in the third portion of the book, in which Ida looks back at her time working for Bevel. Turns out, Bevel's autobiography is a response to Bonds, which he found inaccurate and appalling. And it is at this point that I caught on to what the author was doing -- 193 pages in. I felt a little foolish until I read this review on NPR, the author of which felt similarly. Then there is the final section of the book, transcribed diaries of Bevel's wife that call into question who was responsible for the Bevel fortune. The diaries seem to claim it was she who developed the investing strategy that led to the wealth. Then again, she writes them in the days before succumbing to cancer, when she is regularly on morphine.

So, who to "trust"? I don't know, but I do know this was an engrossing read. After reading part one of the novel, I was beginning to wonder why the book had been long listed for the Booker Prize. But the narrative shifts made it clear. It is the rare book that keeps you engaged in the plot while also raising thought-provoking questions along the way.