👍The Dog Went Over the Mountain by Peter Zhuetlin - DEVOURED

When John Steinbeck decided to take a 10,000-mile trip around the United States with his wife’s dog Charley in 1960, he said he was doing it to reacquaint himself with the country. He believed that it was “criminal” to continue to write about an America that he didn’t really know anymore—he’d been living in New York and traveling mostly in Europe.  

When Peter Zheutlin decided to take a six-week trip with his dog, Albie, retracing Steinbeck’s journey—albeit backwards to accommodate the weather—he writes that he “wanted to take in the country one more time in a single big sweep, to regain a measure of its grandeur and breadth and to do so in the company of Albie, a genial and loving canine companion.”

Like Steinbeck, however, the frightening proximity of the end of his life drew him as well. He embarked from Boston “to once and for all, wrestle to the ground, or at least to a draw, a dread of mortality that has gnawed at me for as long as I can remember.” Albie, a rescue lab mix, was the perfect companion for such a trip because of his ability to be “very present in the moment,” Zheutlin writes. “I aspire to be more like Albie in that way and hoped that after spending several weeks on the road alone with him some of his sangfroid would rub off.”

What he finds as he travels, when possible, secondary roads away from the interstate highways, is both heartening and disheartening, and one of the joys of this book is his willingness to honestly record his reaction to both. (More on that in a moment.) Zheutlin’s trip—via BMW convertible with Massachusetts plates—starts in his home in New England, winds through the South to New Orleans, takes in parts of historic Route 66 in the Southwest, reaches into California and Oregon, and finishes in a mad, homesick dash across the northern tier of states.

The book is charming, in no small part because of Albie’s constant presence, and in some measure, it’s also enlightening. It’s full of interesting characters—some Zheutlin had already met and was revisiting, some whom he meets for the first time enroute. He is tolerant, giving even those he knows he’ll disagree with the chance to speak their mind and demonstrate their humanity. He lets them talk directly to us, often contributing his reaction to their words only after he’s moved on. The judgments we end up with are his, yes, but he gives everyone a say, and this is, after all, his book.

Steinbeck was foremost a novelist, and Zheutlin is a non-fiction writer (this is his seventh book) who is, therefore, understandably less inclined to take liberties with Albie’s cognitive abilities than Steinbeck did with Charley. While Steinbeck had frequent “conversations” with Charley as a way of communicating his thoughts to the reader, Zheutlin shares his thoughts with us directly. He frequently talks with Albie—as in “how are you doing back there?”—but he’s not a fool about Albie’s vocabulary, and is realistic about what Albie sees when they stop to take in the scenery. He recognizes that he and Albie are on entirely different trips: Zheutlin with knowledge of what they’re doing out on the road and when (and if) they’re going home; the affable and angelic Albie oblivious to the reason for it, and, Zheutlin admits, perhaps not enjoying it all that much. Albie is polite to strangers, tolerant of their constant movement and long drives, and respectful of whatever hotel room or friend’s accommodations Zheutlin places him in. He’s rewarded with plenty of treats (McDonald’s hamburgers and ice cream cones) and the chance to accompany Zheutlin into any establishment that will accept his presence. For all of those reasons, Zheutlin is compassionate and kind to his canine companion in a way that made me tear up at times. (Okay, I admit it: I’m a sucker for a rescue dog.)

There is another reason I appreciated this book: It can be dangerous for writers to be honest about what they see in America these days. People take offense, and although that has always been the case, now the offended are likely to blast the perpetrator on social media or dox a writer, researching and publishing private information over the Internet with an intent to harm. (Or writing a one- or two-star review on Amazon.) That’s what makes this book, to me refreshing. Zheutlin pulls no punches. He writes honestly about the ugliness of many of America’s fast-food and strip-mall lined thoroughfares. He reacts quickly and critically to Confederate flags and other signs of anachronistic attitudes, particularly in the South. He questions the quality of life in small, run-down, out-of-luck towns he passes (quickly) through, admitting occasionally that maybe he’d see something different if he stayed longer and sought out more of their residents. He may be at his most Pollyanna at those moments of fantasy, and I’m glad they don’t last long. I spent 12 years traveling rural America as a reporter, and I know plenty of dead places drained not only of humans, but many times also of humanity.

On the other hand, I share his estimation that most of those we disagree with politically and philosophically are still decent people you can share a breakfast or a beer with and come out richer and more broad-minded for it. Zheutlin appreciates kindness, open-mindedness, art, music, landscapes and conversation. He shares the best with us, as well as the worst, and if readers get nothing more from his investigation across America, it is a pleasant journey with two pleasant companions.

👍Born a Crime by Trevor Noah – READ

Known as the “most successful comedian in South Africa,” Trevor Noah released this book in hardcover in 2016, but the paperback has only been available this year.

Noah’s story is (kind of) a Horatio Alger, rags-to-riches tale of an impoverished boy who rises above his circumstances to become a TV celebrity in America. (He is the host of The Daily Show, once the domain of John Stewart.) But if you think a rags-to-riches trajectory need be a straight line from the bottom left corner to the top right, his memoir will disabuse you of that idea very quickly.

Noah’s book publicity reports Born a Crime is “always hilarious.” Even when taken with the grain of salt most publicity statements deserve, that’s still an overstatement. In many places, this book is sober, dark, eerie, sad, and thoughtful. It definitely did not have me “rolling on the floor in laughter,” as Trevor’s website promises.

But that doesn’t mean there aren’t some comedic moments and some funny tales. Noah doesn’t take himself seriously, and even if you’re not laughing at him, he seems at times to be laughing at himself, especially when he talks about his own awkwardness and naivete as a youngster. His attempts at dating and romance, in particular, are sweetly funny. His love and respect for his mother is apparent, and while his stories about her aren’t always funny, either, they will certainly make you feel good.

Much of the book, however, covers the very sobering reality of growing up somewhere between black and white in apartheid and post-apartheid South Africa, and it isn’t at all funny. Stories of his impoverished (eating caterpillars for subsistence) childhood, life in the ghettos of black homelands, life “in the hood,” a business venture built on music piracy, time in jail, and the day his mother was shot by his abusive stepfather are surprising and sometimes bizarre. Some of them make you uncomfortable. But despite their pathos, Noah never pities himself or makes excuses.

He does make excuses for others, with good reason. In a particularly enlightening chapter, he describes how much he learned by hanging out with Andrew, a good friend who was white. (With a black mother and white, European father, Noah was either described as “colored,” “white,” or “black” by his countrymen, depending on how their skin color compared with his.) Without his white friend’s help, Noah writes, “I never would have mastered the world of music piracy or lived a life of endless McDonald’s.” Andrew’s friendship gave him insight into how privileged people lived, worked, and studied, and when Andrew left for college, he gave Noah his CD writer.

“What he did, on a small scale, showed me how important it is to empower the dispossessed and the disenfranchised in the wake of oppression.” Noah continues: “People love to say, ‘Give a man a fish, and he’ll eat for a day. Teach a man to fish, and he’ll eat for a lifetime.’ What they don’t say is, ‘And it would be nice if you gave him a fishing rod.’” Later, in describing the vast unemployment and lack of opportunity for young men in post-apartheid South Africa, he brings his point home to the hood this way: “So for many young men in South Africa, freedom looks like this: Every morning they wake up, maybe their parents go to work or maybe not. Then they go outside and chill on the corner the whole day, talking shit. They’re free, they’ve been taught how to fish, but no one will give them a fishing rod.”

And, yes, there are plenty of words in this book that the FCC does not allow on network TV. But it’s a book for grownups, not children.

I highly recommend this book as a great primer for people (like me) who know little about life in South Africa during and after apartheid—especially life for non-whites. But don’t expect to roll on the floor laughing. 

👍Olive, Again by Elizabeth Strout – READ 

I may be the only fiction reader in America who did not read Olive Kitteridge. So, perhaps I am the only reviewer who will ever write about this book without coming to it with a pre-conceived notion of what it should be.

Publishing industry experts have told me that the average star-rating falls dramatically once a book receives a big award, and Olive Kitteridge is a perfect example. Although it won a Pulitzer Prize for Literature, only 50% of its reviews on Amazon give it five stars. Some suggest that reflects jealousy from other writers, but I believe that’s probably a function of the way big awards set unrealistic expectations.

In any case, I expected Olive, Again to be wonderful and in many (perhaps most) ways it is. I also expected it to be a fairly traditional novel, given the number of people I knew who professed to love the first Olive, and in some ways it was. In some ways it wasn’t. While the book moves chronologically through time (the appropriate flashbacks and backstory notwithstanding), it doesn’t rely so much on a plot as on character arcs. Also, not traditionally, the story is only sometimes about the protagonist. What is special about it is the prose. Impeccable. It often made me smile.

This “novel” is more a collection of short stories about people in the town of Crosby, Maine, where everyone, it seems, knows Olive. As a former schoolteacher, she knows nearly everyone in town as a former student or the parent of one. She has also lived in Crosby her entire adult life. Therefore, all the stories—including those that aren’t even tangentially about her—mention her at least once, which helps hold the “novel” together. These mentions also give us a different perspective on Olive’s personality. While we readers might enjoy Olive’s honesty, wit, and inability to deceive—even when it might make her more acceptable—others aren’t always fans of her out-spoken, blustery and crusty ways.

What Strout does well here is make the most of small moments and small interactions while credibly relaying the inner thoughts of the characters involved as they happen. She doesn’t overreach for conclusions or epiphanies, but comfortably and confidently lets the quotidian stand for the quotidian. We see a young teenager, just discovering her budding sexuality, oblige a silent, lusting old man by uncovering and touching herself in full view. The girl enjoys it, even while she senses it is wrong. She weighs the benefits (he gives her a few to 100 dollars each time) with the risks (who’s he going to tell?) and the downside (a bit of guilt and fear of getting caught). What we don’t get from Strout is some kind of moral conclusion, other than what some might read into the fact that the girl ends up hiding and then losing the money she earned. 

This view of life as a collection of small moments becomes the final statement in Olive’s life, as she contemplates her own death at and after a neighbor’s funeral: “But it was almost over, after all, her life. It swelled behind her like a sardine fishing net, all sorts of useless seaweed and broken bits of shells and the tiny, shining fish—all those hundreds of students she had taught, the girls and boys in high school she had passed in the corridor when she was a high school girl herself (many—most—would be dead by now), the billion streaks of emotion she’d had as she’d looked at sunrises, sunsets, the different hands of waitresses who had placed before her cups of coffee—All of it gone, or about to go.”

If there is a lesson intended here, and I’m not sure there is, it might be this: don’t expect too much of life. It is a series of moments that become random memories and may not add up to a whole lot. Take comfort in knowing that it’s not supposed to. Olive wraps it up thus: “I do not have a clue who I have been. Truthfully, I do not understand a thing.”

I recommend this book, and I can assure you, you do not have to read the first Olive first to enjoy it.

(My digital advance copy of Olive, Again was provided by the publisher through NetGalley.)

👍The Other Americans by Laila Lalami – READ 

A hit-and-run driver hits Driss, a Moroccan immigrant, as he is walking to his car after closing his restaurant on a highway in the high desert above Palm Springs, CA. Is it murder or was it an accident?

That question drives the plot of Lalami’s excellent novel, which explores the loneliness of our modern America and the racial and ethnic prejudices that keep Americans apart.

Written from the point of view of nine characters, the story mainly revolves around Nora and Jeremy. Nora is a first-generation American, whose musical and intellectual pursuits are underappreciated by her family, revealed by their constant complaint that she has her “head in the clouds.” At the news of her father’s death, she returns home to the desert from San Francisco, where she is struggling to establish a career in composing. Jeremy, who spent five years in Iraq, knew Nora in high school, but as a chubby and ill-socialized youngster, he kept his admiration under wraps. Nora and Jeremy become lovers soon after she returns to the desert, but her main preoccupation is to find out who killed her father and whether it was a murder.

The family was the target of anti-immigrant/anti-Muslim hatred years before Driss was killed, when the family restaurant was torched in a never-solved hate crime. The unmoored attitude of Driss’s wife, Maryam, who wishes to return to Morocco in spite of the death threats that drove them to America, is echoed in Efraín, a Mexican immigrant without papers, who witnesses the hit-and-run, but doesn’t report it for fear of deportation.

We get first-person points of view from those five characters, plus those of Coleman, the African-American detective investigating the death; the aging Anderson, whose bowling alley sits next to Driss’s restaurant and who has had disagreements with him over parking and signage; Anderson’s son, A.J., a bully whose life has been as tough as well; and, only briefly, Salma, Nora’s sister with her own secret problems. The effect of all of these voices (which all sound eerily alike, given their divergent origins, ethnicities and ages) is a full picture of all the lives at stake in the story.

In allowing so many people to speak, Lalami gives us insight into each character’s interior struggle as they desperately seek to connect with their community and with other people. With quick, but effective, evocation of their individual backstories, she makes even the worst of the characters sympathetic. Making a bully and a racial bigot sympathetic is a trick I’m not sure I, as a novelist, have ever been able to pull off, even though I may have wanted to.

The ending is satisfying, if a bit too good to be true, and a few loose ends are left hanging (what happens to Efraín after he comes forward? what happens to Salma?) but I recommend this book wholeheartedly, and look forward to reading what Lalami writes next.

😒Once More We Saw Stars – READ 

Many readers are going to love this book. I don’t doubt it. It is well-written and emotionally honest. For those who have lost a child it may well be cathartic. I’m certain it was for the author. 

You can probably sense that I wasn’t as crazy about it as the rest of the world. Of the 157 consumer reviews on Amazon, 89% are five-star. Only five are one-star, and two of those because he makes a negative comment about Trump. (Get over it, folks. A lot of people don’t like him.)

First, my positive reaction: The ability to write so honestly and evocatively about the emotional turmoil of a tragic event like this is truly a gift. Perhaps the author’s experience writing about the arts has taught him how to reach deep inside himself for visceral and multi-sensory responses. Or perhaps he’s just naturally talented that way. His prose is perfect. Just perfect. No other adjectives or adverbs necessary.

Now, the negative: After the first section, which tells the story of the accident that killed Greene’s two-year-old daughter and his (and his wife’s) decision to turn off the life-support systems and donate organs, the book falls down a rabbit hole. To be more precise: Greene and his wife fall down a rabbit hole. Their years-long efforts to find some kind of spiritual escape from the reality of death, and find something that would make sense of this senseless tragedy delivers them into the hands of faith-healers, shamans, and those who say they communicate with the dead. And even if he briefly doubts these miracles at first, Greene retains no skepticism about any of this.

I understand that it is difficult to make sense of a tragic death like this. I lost a very close loved one recently (a suicide, already two years ago), and I am still barely able to talk about it without breaking down emotionally. My mind runs back to that horrible phone call every time I lie down to sleep. I struggle through the guilt, the magical thinking, the self-loathing that follows a needless, sometimes random death.

Perhaps I am too much of a scientist at heart for this book. Too much of his story describes his attempts to connect with her in some afterlife incarnation, or find a spiritual purpose in the tragedy. I kept hoping Greene would come to his senses and reject what I would call hooey. I wanted him to get his feet back on the ground and survive his daughter’s death with grace. In the end, he and his wife do make concrete progress in moving on without leaving her behind—which perhaps is the only real answer any of us has to the death of someone we love.

I recommend this book only with this caveat: It will be appreciated most by those who have experienced such a tragedy and who might be willing to indulge in Greene’s kind of metaphysical experimentation. Also, for writers who are struggling to put their real emotions down on the page—there’s something to be learned here. Otherwise, probably not.

😒Mrs. Everything – READ 

I was tempted, as I sat down to write this review, to look at other reviews that have been written about this book to see why so many reviewers liked it. Although its current heavily discounted price and its very short tenure on the NYT list may indicate otherwise, it was well-received as a break-through for author, Weiner, best known as an early practitioner of chick-lit.

I resisted the temptation to peek at what others had written because I want to be honest with you and not be swayed by others’ opinions. I didn’t like it. I’m sorry I wasted my time and money with it.

I had read a couple of earlier Weiner novels, both of which seemed shallow and naïve, so I was reluctant to read this one. But then I read Hungry Heart, the author’s memoir about trying to control her weight to meet societal expectations, and I found it engrossing and insightful. So, I thought:  Give this new novel a try. I bought it at the not-discounted price of $28 at one of my favorite independent bookstores, which means I invested big in this open-mindedness.

(There are spoilers in this review. Skip to the last paragraph if you wish to avoid them.) The novel tells the story of two sisters who are as different as sisters often are: one an independent, rebellious tomboy; the other a pretty, prim and obedient sweetie. The tomboy has many lesbian affairs, some quite serious, until she gets married, which she chooses in order to quit having to fight her way through life. The sweetie goes to college, becomes a renegade who gets to travel and experiment with rebellion in the way her tomboy sister wanted to, but eventually settles into a commune and into marriage as well.  There’s a lot more “this happens, then this happens” to these stories, as the 464-page length of this novel may indicate.

The problem with this novel started for me right at the beginning. Her scene setting is obvious, laborious, and clumsy. Not only is Weiner’s prose here not nearly as polished and pleasurable as it was in her memoir (this happens, then this happens, then this happens…), but the first chapters of the novel are as full of clichés as anything I have read from a major publishing house in years.

The tomboy, Jo, of course, chooses “dungarees” over dresses, prefers to swing from tree branches rather than play with dolls, and determines she is a lesbian by the time she’s in junior high and starts to experiment with her sexuality. I know many lesbians, and not a one of them fits this stereotype. I'm sure some do, but it bothered me that Weiner chose this set of characteristics instead of allowing Jo's sexuality to be expressed with fewer clichés. Her eventual marriage makes her dependent on her undependable husband, and she chafes against her life until he leaves her for her best friend, and she returns to the love of her life. The prim and proper sister, Bethie, takes her rebellion into drugs and counterculture, and suffers abuses at the hands of men, presumably because she’s so pretty and feminine. She ends up successful and childless, not dependent on men, but happy to be married to one.

I was amazed at the level of misogamy expressed here by Weiner through her characters. There is one good husband and one good father represented in 464 pages, but the rest of the men:  either “off with their heads” or meh. It’s a good thing that the children born to one of the protagonists are all girls, or Weiner would be trashing those offspring as well. I was disappointed by the cliché of the lesbian character – she’s tall, athletic, and cuts her hair short, as if there is one set of genes endemic to all gay women that brings out these characteristics. In fact, the entire book is full of tropes, from infidel and demanding husbands to athletic lesbians to unhappy housewives to spoiled children to consciousness-raising groupies. I couldn’t help but roll my eyes, and by the time I finished this over-long collection of tropes, my eyes were sore from it.

I might be the only reviewer in America who didn’t like Mrs. Everything, but, honestly, I do not recommend this book. 

👍This America: The Case for the Nation by Jill Lepore – READ 

Jill Lepore’s credentials are longer than this brief book. A professor of American history at Harvard and a staff reporter for The New Yorker, she has been a finalist for the National Book Award, and has authored 10 laudable books. Reading This America, which is essentially a long essay, slapped me in the face for how little I know and understand about the philosophical and historical roots to our nation’s concept of democracy and country.

Lepore’s concern is the illiberal nationalism that arose in America following the Civil War, and its threats to our sense of nation since then. She examines through history the difference between a liberal nationalism—which embraces all the country’s citizens, religions and ethnicities and is based on a common understanding of ideals—and Trump’s version of nationalism, which is based on intolerance and a myth of common origins. The battle over immigration, which has raged for more than a century and a half, has its roots in differing views of what makes a nation, and in widely divergent views of nationalism and globalism.

Despite the long history of intolerance and prejudice in America, Lepore is optimistic that a case can be made for America as a nation, if we return to our principles of equality and justice, and begin looking forward, not backward, again. Although it comprises only 138 pages of manuscript, it is dense and academic, not a quick read by any stretch, and once I finished reading it, I realized I have to go back to the beginning and start over. I may do that several times, because as difficult as it is to absorb all the history and wisdom herein, I know that it is really, really important. The fate of our nation depends on our understanding of what has happened to our American, democratic ideals, and how they have been corrupted by the selfish and the bigoted. 

😒Genesis: The Deep Origin of Societies by E.O. Wilson – READ 

I am a fan of evolutionary studies and human genetic history, particularly books that increase our understanding of what has made humans human, and how natural selection and adaptation has delivered us to our current, precarious state as a species on the brink of bringing about our own extinction.

This thin book aspires to explain altruism as an adaptation that led to the expansion and ascension of our species. For scientists who study the genetic and environmental constraints that conspired to create the surviving animals—including humans—on earth, this is undoubtedly a clear-headed and well-argued exploration of the benefits of the evolution of altruism in animal societies. However, I found myself mired in what I found to be a boring discussion of bugs and beetles and rats and shrimp up right up until the final chapter. Then, I was disappointed in the short, shallow and extrapolatory exploration of human altruism in the balance.

I look back to the thrill I had when I first read Melvin Konner’s The Tangled Wing, which in 1986 turned my head around and ignited my interest in the environmental and biological constraints on human evolution and survival, and wish I could find something close to as insightful and exciting 33 years later. Genesis is not it.

👍Revolutionaries by Joshua Furst – READ 

When I finished reading this captivating, well-researched, and at times unsettling novel, I wondered what Abbie Hoffman’s real-life son, america (with a small first “a), thought about it. Then I wondered what his fellow “revolutionaries” thought of it, and then I decided, what difference does it make? This book is not sold as a biography or a history of the radical movements of the 1960s, it is a novel, and like all art, its worth and truthfulness is in the eyes of the beholder.

Revolutionaries is a fictionalized version of the elder Hoffman’s life told through the eyes of his son, Freedom Synder, a fictionalized america. Like Hoffman, Lenny Snyder is a founder of the Yippies, a Chicago Eight defendant, a leader of the anti-war movement, and the orchestrator of demonstrations both violent and theatrical.

I am too young (barely) to remember much of the Yippies and the radical movements of the 1960s. I was only 15 when Woodstock impressed on most Americans an indelible image of hippies, flower children, radicals, and rock and roll. I was also sequestered in the middle of the country, in a tiny farm town. In high school, as the editor of our school newspaper (printed and overseen by the town’s conservative weekly newspaper editor), I wrote an editorial arguing for the right to wear blue jeans to school. It was one of the most radical things any kid or young adult had ever done in that town. You get the idea.

So, living inside Joshua Furst’s fictional account of one family’s life at the center of the chaos, the excitement, the optimism and the cynicism of the radicals of the movement was eye-opening and slightly unnerving. The novel starts with a couple of short chapters told from the middle-aged “Fred”—short for Freedom—and quickly turns back the clock. We hear from a two-year-old in short, episodic bursts of text (too full of insight and judgment for a real two-year-old), and then follow him as he grows up in the shadow of his father, raised by a woman who was by all practical accounts, a poverty-stricken single mother.

The weakness of the novel—and I think it is major and serious one—is the narration by a youngster who is incredibly (literally incredible) precocious as both a child and a teenager, and who remembers things no one his age could have. His impressions and his reflections are all adult, and disconcertingly so. At one point in the novel, Furst tries to cover for this in “recalling” a meeting between his mother, Lenny and their lawyer:

“That’s what I remember. Being bored. Getting frustrated by the endless details. Struggling to follow them. Lost in their meaning. I remember certain repeated words and their inflections. Entrapment. Criminal conspiracy. Prove it. Evidence. Bleecker Street. Wiretaps. COINTELPRO. Extralegal. COINTELPRO. NYPD. COINTELPRO. They’re still at it. They say they’re not, but they are. Prove it. Skepticism rising off of everyone.”

He remembered COINTELPRO? Criminal conspiracy? Extralegal? A four-year-old could note “skepticism rising off of everyone?” Really? Does anyone believe this?

On the other hand, the author doesn’t romanticize the movement (even though he does apparently hold romantic notions about “normal” family life, which, of course, is what young Fred longs for but doesn’t experience.) Furst’s prose is fast-paced and evocative. His scenes are impressively constructed with the kind of detail that indicates a significant amount of research that went into the project.

In the end, the novel leaves us with a cynical view of politics and a deep ennui promulgated by the suggestion that the 1960s movements amounted to nothing more than a loud, distracting mistake by some drug-addled and troubled, however talented, people. But perhaps Furst wasn’t trying to find a point in the messiness of the time, or help us find a way out of our current political morass. Perhaps he simply wanted to tell a story of a boy and his famous, confounding, manic-depressive father. That he does, and he does that well.

👍Bunny by Mona Awad – READ 

There have been times in my life when I considered applying for an MFA program; I grew up in Iowa, so that would have been my choice. The expense, the tough application process, and the need to earn a living were all partly responsible for my decision not to do it.  But the real reason I didn’t go through with it was the horror stories I heard from graduates of the programs. These aren’t your average critique groups; having your prose “workshopped” in an MFA program is apparently brutal.

The horror of the MFA workshop is the subject of Bunny, Mona Awad’s second novel, which depicts the brutality of the workshop itself and the class divides that poison the experience for the less-than-1%ers who get accepted at the most elite programs in the country. Awad got her MFA at Brown, and although her fictional program is set at the fictional Warren University, it’s clear that she’s herein exorcising pain from her own experience. The novel’s horror is at first unsettling and confusing (many consumer reviewers on Amazon were so horrified or confused they couldn’t finish the book) until you realize that it’s all a metaphor for the workshop itself. Very little really happens here in real life; some of the main characters aren’t even real. The horror on the page is a metaphor for the experience of having your work torn apart, for the literary extremes required by “break-out” fiction, and for “killing your darlings” as creative writing professors demand. Relax. No bunnies are slaughtered or men are actually murdered (their heads blowing up) during this year of Samantha’s MFA stint, although some prose and egos definitely are.

The novel opens as Samantha returns to the second year of the program, expecting the worst. A poorly defined and uncomfortable relationship with her faculty advisor causes part of her anxiety. But the real challenge to her equilibrium comes from the four rich girls who comprise the other four-fifths of their workshop, and whose appearance and behavior wreak of wealth and privilege. Sam managed to get into the program only by dint of scholarships and grants, and her insecurities about her socio-economic standing make her the perfect target for the horror that comes at the hands of her workshop-mates. The four rich girls call each other “Bunny” (“I love you, Bunny. I love you, too, Bunny.”) and Samantha is stalked by animal-bunnies that talk to her and pop up from behind bushes around campus. Sam despises the rich-girl “bunnies,” but once she’s invited to join their “smut party,” she’s hooked on the excitement of being accepted into their cult. She sets aside her crude Goth friend, Ava, in favor of the “bunnies,” and things get weirder and uglier and bloodier as she’s initiated into their rites. In the end, she comes back to earth, the novel comes back to earth, and the reader realizes who’s real and who’s not in this strange, dark world.

Professional reviewers and other novelists have waxed ecstatically about Bunny, but sales numbers, the heavily discounted price on Amazon, and wildly mixed consumer reviews indicate it but isn’t for everyone. Caveat emptor: I believe only those who have gone to or aspired to go to an MFA program (i.e., reviewers) will appreciate it. 

👍The Death and Life of Aida Hermandez by Aaron Bobrow-Strain – DEVOURED 

Aida, her mother, and her sisters face joblessness, economic insecurity, and abuse by men on both sides of the border. Trapped into accepting a dangerous job in Agua Prieta by single motherhood and poverty, Aida is stabbed repeatedly in a late-night attack by a stranger, leading to her brief “death” and her last trip across the border into the U.S. for emergency medical attention.

Over the twenty-five first years of her life, the period covered in this narrative, Aida makes mistakes—many mistakes, some minor, some major—all piling up to form a mountain of physical, emotional, and legal challenges that threaten her quest for legal residency and portend a life-long battle with chronic PTSD.  The book is in part a narrative about Aida, her family, and her friends—people stuck on one side or the other of the border by virtue of their place of birth. It’s in part a narrative about the exponential growth in this nation’s border-control industry and the counter-intuitive decisions that have exasperated rather than resolved the issue of immigration over our southern border.

In a back-of-the-book essay, “About This Book,” the author, a professor of politics at Whitman College in Walla Walla, WA, which he credits with providing support for the research and completion of his book, makes the point of his book explicit: border policy isn’t “broken,” as is so-often stated. Instead, it is working well for many: politicians, private corrections firms that run detention centers like prisons, smugglers, law-enforcement job-seekers, and government contractors—even Western Union—all of whom profit from a system that stigmatizes, punishes, and destroys people based on their birthplace, their geographic and career ambitions, their big and little (but human) errors.

This is a big book—a book that pulls more weight than its relatively modest 340 pages of narrative (not counting back-of-the book material) might suggest. First, Aida’s story is complicated—the kind of story that would lead many authors or journalists to abandon the project and look for a simpler, more completely sympathetic protagonist. Many of Aida’s troubles are self-inflicted, but others are the result of circumstances out of her control. Once they begin to add up, it’s hard to tell one kind from the other.

The book is chock-full of detail and history about our complicated, expensive, ever-expanding, and often counterintuitive and irrational border-control agencies, laws, and systems. It records the decline of Douglas, a once-vibrant, multi-cultural border town where Mexican men and women made decent wages and felt safe raising their families. The town’s major industry today is border “security” and most of its residents are transient law-enforcement employees with no connection to the community. Finally, it’s a story about battered women and families—a subject which the author didn’t know he would have to address in such detail until Aida’s story made it clear how integral abuse is to much of what happens to women at the border.

The subject matter is so big, in fact, that at times I found myself checking how much of the book I’d read, compared with how much I had left to read, as if I were back in school and the book was a class assignment, wondering how much more I could stuff into my head without losing the string of the narrative.

That is not criticism. The author’s ambition is admirable, and his book illustrates how much the media over-simplifies and dumbs-down both the stories of migrants’ journeys and our border policy in covering the “crisis at the border.” Even multi-page articles in the New York Times—for example, a recent one that followed a migrant family from the border through several states—can’t do these stories justice. Don’t get me wrong: I also understand how the limits of media resources and the average readers’ patience make the kind of examination this book undertakes impossible.

So, bravo for Bobrow-Strain for taking up the slack, and for his publishers for accepting this hefty manuscript for publication. I heartily recommend his book for anyone who wants more than a superficial understanding of what has really happened at our border, and how we have ended up with a bloated anti-immigration industry that, by 2012, was costing us more than “the FBI, the DEA, Secret Service, ATF, and the U.S. Marshals Service combined, with enough left over to run all of the country’s national parks for a year.” One can only imagine how much more it is costing today in both budget and ruined lives. 

😒White Elephant by Julie Langsdorf – READ 

The two teenagers and two young children who fill out the nuclear families are narcissistic and irrepressible as any children, but here, annoyingly so. The more sympathetic of the teenagers, we’re told at the beginning, is troubled by global warming, immigration, and other worthy preoccupations, but she spends the entire novel trying to be as “cool” as the rich neighbor girl and primping to secure the attention of the “cute” teenage boy (also annoying) who constantly tosses his hair. In the end, a serendipitous house fire miraculously brings the town back together, rids it of the big-house scourge, and redeems the snotty bad girl who should never have escaped redemption.

The novel could possibly have been rescued by a more controlled point of view, or even a single relatable narrator. The author’s head-hopping from paragraph to paragraph, person to person leaves the impression that no one in this suburb ever thinks about anything other than an immediate carnal need (hungry? horny? jealous? uncaffienated? humiliated? angry?) for than a nanosecond. Further, the woman whose third-person voice introduces the narrative is one of the least interesting and shallowest of a cast of such weak characters. Far better to start with a clear sketch of a strong lead protagonist, giving readers a chance to ground their compassion in a person that may lead them to some reward in a transformation, or at least a tiny understanding of a human condition.

A mid-life, suburban, materialistic variant of snarky chick lit, this novel doesn’t deliver on its promise of hilarity or anti-materialism. Well before halfway through it, I realized, “I really don’t like this at all.” I wondered why I was finishing it and concluded: “Because I need to write a review to keep others from wasting their money on this galling waste of paper.” 

😒The Mars Room by Rachel Kushner – READ/SKIMMED 

By which, I mean, this thing is depressing.

Now, many books can be depressing and still deliver a message or say something important about justice, injustice, humanity, inhumanity, love, hate, etc. from a point of view that we haven’t experienced in our own lives. Books should open us up to real, darker worlds and other people’s sorrows, challenges and failures. They can build empathy and encourage remediation.

The Mars Room certainly brings the reader into a world that most people who can read and can afford to buy a book probably have not been in, at least for long. Snarky, slum-dwelling Romy is on her way to a women’s prison in California for two life sentences-plus. She killed a stalker, who probably deserved some severe punishment—probably just short of a death sentence—because she couldn’t get rid of him otherwise and in some vague sense, feared for the safety of her son. With inadequate counsel in an overworked and corrupt justice system, her inevitable path to prison only reflects all of the other inevitabilities in her life: disappointing relationships with men and women, drug addiction that provides transient relief, a life of petty crime that her single mother trained her for, and a precocious child she can’t adequately support. Quite interesting from my standpoint as a writer who tries to create at least semi-sympathetic—or at least relatable—characters, Kushner doesn’t even try to make us like Romy. It’s as if Romy doesn’t care what people think of her, and neither does Kushner. Understandable, perhaps, but empty.

You get that in the first half of the book. You also get a smattering of other characters, most similarly desperate and none more likeable, all in a similar trap of their own bad behavior conflated with uneven portions with that same corrupt justice system. They have suffered abuse and like to abuse. Most have (or had) drug problems. Their experiences with sex (most of them not consensual and a significant portion of them largely one-handed and drawn out) are uniformly unpleasant. In the end, a reader is left with a number of incomplete story lines, tales of truncated relationships, a bereft feeling of nothing having happened that really matters to anyone but the deplorable characters involved, and a sense that Kushner never really had a resolution to any of this in mind when she started the book. It was as if she didn’t care enough about her main characters to create a narrative arc for them.

The book received hundreds of accolades in the media and powerful book-review publications, uneven reviews on public review sites, a few impressive awards, and general critical praise from the literary community. Nearly everyone praises her writing for good reason; she is a master wordsmith and world-builder in the vein of Denis Johnson. But writing a book that has value, particularly in this edge-of-a-precipice time, also demands telling a story that provides us with some meaning, some context and some understanding of how we might all get out of this. This book doesn’t even prove that she can tell a story. 

👍Between You and Me by Mary Norris – DEVOURED 

Between You and Me is part memoir, part confessional, and part grammar lesson, sweetened up by Norris’ pencil-sharp wit and self-deprecation. A long-time copyeditor at The New Yorker, she makes a bit of fun of her employer’s refusal to change its rules with the times, introduces us to the characters she works with and has worked with, explores the idiosyncrasies of some very famous writers who have contributed to the magazine, and throws in a bitsy grammar lesson every now and then. But with the sugar that helps the medicine go down, I promise even those lessons are entertaining.

Norris’ digestible—even enjoyable—grammar lessons are neither pedantic nor preachy. I have tried over the years to explain the difference between “that” and “which” to probably hundreds of students. From now on, I’ll just suggest they read her chapter on the subject, “That Witch!” It explains the rules much better than I ever could have. Likewise, her chapters on commas, (“Comma, Comma, Comma, Comma Chameleon”) hypens, dashes, and apostrophes. For fun, I’ll suggest they read her hilarious (and I don’t use that word lightly) chapter on how The New Yorker’s policy on profanity has changed over time, in which she proves that, while she may be a nerd, she’s certainly no prude.

With a wide curiosity and the intellectual power to make her discoveries relevant and interesting, Norris has only recently started writing for the general public. Between You and Me is her first published book. Her second, published in 2019, is about everything Greek (Greek to Me: Adventures of a Comma Queen), and I intend to read it soon. It’s too bad she didn’t start writing sooner (my guess she’s in her mid-60s), as she’s a gift that I would like to keep giving for a very long time. 

👍Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman – READ 

But very quickly, the story took a turn toward the mundane: a lonely, interesting, socially challenged woman’s problems are fixed when she becomes “normal.”

In the beginning, Eleanor Oliphant behaves like she has Asperger’s, exhibiting an inability to understand people around her, what they say, or the things that interest them, and as such, she is the butt of office jokes and not invited to parties. Apparently good at her accounting job (and focused!), she is appreciated by her bosses, but due to her poor social skills, she’s not rewarded for it. Traumatized by a childhood tragedy that is unveiled little by little throughout the novel, Eleanor thinks her life is “completely fine,” although we can tell that it is not: she’s totally alone, binge drinks, and spends her weekends watching the BBC and waiting for Monday to come around again. Worse, she’s still trying to please “mummy.”

A sudden and naïve crush on a local rock star and the arrival of Raymond, a new IT employee at the firm, set the novel in motion and begin to transform her “completely fine” life. When Raymond and Eleanor stop to help an elderly man who falls on the street, Eleanor is thrust into a swirl of social activities that gradually teach her how to interact with people and get her out of her unhealthy work/TV/vodka routine.

At first, I was happy for Eleanor, thinking that this new understanding and comfort with the rest of society might cheer her up and enrich her life. But quickly, her metamorphosis starts to take on the character of imitating other “normal” women around her than becoming a happier, but still interesting Eleanor. She starts to dress more fashionably—new shoes, pants, coat, purse, dresses. She starts to wear make-up. She gets a new, flattering hairdo. She stops binge drinking. She learns to say appropriate things in public settings and to withhold her once prescient if unappreciated opinions. She makes friend after friend. She gets promoted at work.

Eleanor has a few set-backs, and, in the climactic last chapters, has a near-fatal bout of overdrinking. But Raymond and a therapist eventually bring her back on the path to normal. (The therapists’ visits are both tedious and predictable, lacking in charm or wit, and are perhaps the weakest scenes in the novel.) In the end, we get the story’s big reveal; whether you’ve read The Woman in the Window or not, you will have already guessed what it is.

As disappointing as Eleanor’s transformation was to me, Honeyman’s prose is wonderful. I was pulled along by her talent more than the narrative arc. In the end, I wished she’d given us the old Eleanor back—perhaps a little happier, perhaps with a friend, but with her quirky personality and wit intact. 

👍Circe by Madeline Miller – DEVOURED 

What has drawn me in is the page-turning quality of Miller’s writing. Yes, she knows the classics (her BA and MA are in classics), but she also knows hatred, love, fear, loneliness, passion, hunger, and the strength it takes to marshal the forces to manage them all, whether goddess or mortal. The truths that come to Circe as she learns what it means to be mortal—and eventually chooses it—put every self-help book on every library and bookstore shelf to shame. These lessons don’t come as quotable aphorisms that might caption a poster of a soaring eagle or erupting volcano, but as slow revelations about how humans connect with each other, for good and for evil, for now and for eternity, because of their mortality.

Many of the ancient stories retold in this novel are familiar to us, if only vaguely, but the author infuses them with living humans/gods that we can understand and relate to in a way that I never could with Homer’s hero/villain Odysseus, for one. By stepping away from the epic battles and monsters that dominate the ancient mythology, and entering the mind and body and garden of Circe, Miller has made the stories relevant to those of us whose battles aren’t fought with magic and swords, but with daily compromises and small emotional losses and victories. Further, the natural rhythm of the author’s voice (what? complete sentences?) make this novel more accessible than many that purport to describe the real world we live in. A reader can settle into this story from the first page as the quotidian detail of Circe tending her gardens, mixing her potions, and walking around her island with her lion and wolves are rendered without literary artifice.

I highly recommend Circe, regardless of your interest in mythology. If you’re interested in what makes humans tick, this book is for you.

👍Little Faith by Nickolas Butler – DEVOURED 

Reading that wise lesson, written with all the humility and good sense we hope our husbands possess after “decades of marriage,” reminded me how powerful it is when a great writer creates a character so human, flawed and loving that it gives us a new perspective on very old realities—in this case a decades-long marriage and the heartbreaking work of being a grandparent.

Butler’s story is about Lyle, a grandfather who tries to protect his precious, precocious grandson, Isaac, from a holy-roller preacher whom his mother has fallen in love with, at the same time that he is struggling with his own loss of faith. A classic clash between a high-dollar evangelical religious cult run by a charismatic and narcissistic pastor, and the quiet, pragmatic religion of rural America forms the central tension of the novel. Lyle’s life-long friends—a pastor, a similarly retired co-worker, and a couple who owns an apple orchard that soaks up some of Lyle’s post-retirement excess time—provide sounding boards for Lyle’s concerns about Isaac’s health, the bizarre behavior of his hyper-religious daughter, and the scary power of the handsome, well-spoken preacher who has won over a congregation by the power of his personality. Lyle’s interactions with his friends are quotidian, yet infused with empathy, reason, and sincerity; devoid of cynicism, rancor and pretension. Yet despite its calm delivery, both Lyle’s pain and his benevolence will haunt you long after you’ve finished its tear-inducing last pages.

The impetus for his novel, Butler tells us in an author’s note at the end, was the death of an 11-year-old girl in Wisconsin (the author’s home state) from complications of undiagnosed juvenile diabetes that went untreated as her family prayed for her recovery instead of seeking modern medical care. Like hers, Isaac’s story will break your heart at the same time that the love that radiates from this beautiful novel will help it mend.

👍Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens– DEVOURED 

Yet, I waited many weeks to read it because so many synopses I had read didn’t captivate me, which just proves that some books thrive in spite of their marketing, rather than because of it. The short descriptions stressed the “strangeness” of the “Marsh Girl,” as Kya is known to the townsfolk in nearby, tiny, backwater Barkley Cove, and the conservative community’s view of this remarkable woman, even though the book is written from the perspective of Kya’s beautiful world, looking inward and out, not the town, looking in. Also, many critics glossed over the beauty of this story or its writing, some even comparing this book with Barbara Kingsolver’s novels, which frankly is an insult to Delia Owens. Both her action and scene-setting passages have much more momentum than Kingsolver’s often laborious, tedious and pretentious writing.

Kya grows up alone in the marsh of the Carolina coast, abandoned by her dysfunctional family, and teaches herself how to survive. Tate, a sensitive, less-isolated young man, is drawn to her and befriends her in spite of the town’s disapproval. They share a love of nature and the way it accommodates the joys of solitude, learning and reflection. He teaches her to read, and from there, she blossoms, but after Tate leaves her for an academic career, she is charged with and tried for the murder of the town bully.

This is Ms. Owens’ debut as a novelist, which is surprising, given how beautifully she has mastered the elements of character, plot, tension, setting and arc of the form. How does anyone write such a beautiful masterpiece right out of the box? Her previous books—"three internationally bestselling nonfiction books about her life as a wildlife scientist in Africa,” as the book jacket relates—obviously indicate how she mastered nature writing, however.

In spite of the joy with which I consumed this book, I had three little reservations. First, the amount of head-hopping—switches in viewpoint from one person to another—within scenes indicated perhaps too little attention form her editor. Second, I am not a fan of courtroom drama, and the one here just seems to prolong the denouement without adding anything to our knowledge of what happened. Third, the very last few sentences of the book seemed unnecessary. We really don’t need—or maybe even want—to know who really killed the town bully to enjoy this novel.

All that said, the two days I spent in a lodge in the Black Hills, waiting for the rain to stop, reading this novel were among the most pleasant I can remember for a long time. This book was engrossing in the way nothing has been for me since A Gentleman in Moscow, the last novel I can say I found impossible to put down until I had blown through its last pages.

👍Commander in Cheat by Rick Reilly – DEVOURED 

But I say “very few” instead of “none” because Commander in Cheat may be one book that could change a Trump supporter’s mind about Trump—if they can get past the title and the unflattering (but frequently published) photo of him on the front. Because golf is largely a rich (yes, some poor people play golf, including me) man’s (yes, 6 million women play golf, including me) sport, country clubs around the world are largely Republican bastions (except for mine, again). But Republican or not, if a person plays golf, and if she loves it, she can’t help but hate what Donald Trump has done to the sport.

I would never have guessed this book would be written by Rick Reilly, a veteran golf reporter whose own novels about golf are so sexist they compelled me to write my own two golf novels with strong female (not the bar-cart girl) protagonists. But he won me over with this book, which reads more like a cri-de-coeur of a man trying to save golf for the world than one obsessed with politics. “We were just getting past the stereotype of golf being a game for fat, blowhard, rich white guys playing on fenced-off courses while people of color push lawnmowers behind them—and along comes Trump,” he writes in his sum-it-all up final chapter titled “The Stain.”

Commander in Cheat covers a lot of territory, from the way Trump cheats on the course to the way he cheats in business; from the way he bullies caddies and playing partners to the way he bullies countries and governments; from the way he lies about his golf courses to the way he lies about his affairs with porn stars; from the way he ignores the rules and etiquettes most golfers hold sacred to the way he ignored Puerto Rico’s hurricane devastation. I’m certain that the book won’t change the minds of his staunchest political supporters—who include his “inside caddy”—his social media manager—and his “outside caddy”—the guy who carries his golf clubs to and from his cart (Donald never walks). But it might reach across the aisle to some of those who hate cheating in golf enough to start to question the man who’s made cheating great again.  

👍A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles – DEVOURED 

👍Brass by Xhenet Aliu – DEVOURED 

👍Mama's Last Hug by Frans de Waal – DEVOURED 

     I read Frans de Waal’s The Bonobo and the Atheist when it was published in 2013. I found its central argument compelling: that morality and moral behavior don’t rise from religion, but are inherent in humans and in many of our vertebrate relatives. And in reading it, I discovered a primatologist who can make his science accessible to non-scientists and wears his heart on his sleeve while doing so. His is not dry, unaffected prose!

     Mama’s Last Hug is even more evocative and convincing as it argues for better treatment of all animals (even if we continue to eat them) on the basis of our shared emotions, sentience, and mental states. He describes in detail and in storytelling fashion (both) how research has shown that animals—in particular our closest relatives, the great apes—share our experiences of humor, empathy, sympathy, disgust, shame, and guilt; our reasons for and tendencies for murder and war; and our sense of fairness and illusion of free will. In chapters that explore each of these shared emotions, he is careful to not step over the line and propose we know what animals are “feeling,” while making a convincing argument that we can tell they have emotions because they react to them in the very physiological and behavioral ways humans do. He’s clearly frustrated and impatient with those psychologists and ethologists who continue to opine that animals only react to stimuli from instinct and don’t experience true emotion. Anyone who has ever had a pet—whether parrot, rat, dog, cat, chimpanzee, or duck—knows better, but often without proffering any evidence, many animal researchers refuse to acknowledge the obvious and provable.

     In a world where we are assaulted daily by declarations of American exceptionalism—proven or not—de Waal’s exploration of the fallacy of “human exceptionalism” is fascinating and enlightening and perhaps allegorical. While some readers may reject the notion of a book of science that lends some insight into our poisoned politics, I found his willingness to extend some of his analysis of emotion into the political realm a relief. The more we understand where hate, jealousy and tribalism come from, the better we can fix things. 

👍Educated by Tara Westover – DEVOURED 

👍Maid by Stephanie Land – READ