Love in the Ruins, Percy

         One of the strangest books I’ve read in a while … a cross between Faulkner, JK O’Toole (A Confederacy of Dunces), and Kurt Vonnegut. Add perhaps a dash of Kafka.

         Set in a small bayou town in Louisiana, Thomas More (yes, that’s his name) tries to come to grips with a sort-of apocalypse raging around him, while sheltering his three lovers … who naturally don’t like each other very much. It gets weirder, including (trigger warning) un-PC racial stereotyping (written in 1971), a golf caddy turned revolutionary, and the often off his rocker “bad Catholic” protagonist himself being confined, off and on, to a mental institution.

         Walker Percy’s excellently written twists and turns range from the improbable to, well, recent fragmented national politics. The light tone, self-deprecation, and well-drawn cast of characters are worth the read.

House Lessons, Bauermeister

         There could scarcely be a more complete change of pace from Walker Percy than Erica Bauermeister’s love affair with a derelict old house on the Olympic Peninsula (Port Townsend). She and her husband bought it, then launched the renovation thinking they knew what they were getting into … like how easy that mountain hike looks until you’re still only halfway there and out of breath.

         Along the way, the couple learns more about foundations—the house and its “bones,” city rules and regulations, their marriage, their kids—and Ms. Bauermeister finally gets around to scratching a lifelong itch to become a writer. Along the way, her colorful telling may help you take stock of the home you currently live in and perhaps quell the grass-is-greener urge that comes along from time to time.

Brothers Sisters, deWitt 

         The characters are just plain weird. The Sisters brothers are a pair of hired killers, vintage the Gold Rush, trekking through gold country randomly killing folks. Not my usual genre, for sure. But, both in deWitt’s later novel, Paris Exit, and in this one, the main reason to keep reading is to find out what in the world his characters will say or do next.

         Oregon-based Patrick deWitt is a fabulous writer. Not a word is misplaced.

Any Human Heart, Boyd

         William Boyd has written an elegant “fictional biography” of a certain Logan Mountstuart. As far from Brothers Sisters as a book can be, the invented narrator’s story spans his eight decades on the planet - through marriages, affairs, success and poverty, intrigue, and two World Wars. He pulls no punches; the man was real and flawed, horny and brilliant, loving and spiteful. To add verisimilitude, the book includes a full-on index and a listing of other “works” by Logan Mountstuart.

         I loved Boyd’s writing: "the crash and hiss of the breakers as they curve in, flatten and explode on the sand." The language throughout is beautiful.

Agent Running in the Field, le Carré

            The brilliant John le Carré proves once again why he’s not only the master storyteller of espionage but why he set the mold that so many others have followed for decades. This novel is his last, published before his death this year.

            Reading le Carré is like sitting in a drawing room in front of a fire, sipping tea, and listening to him tell you a story. “Oh here’s an interesting thing that happened once upon a time.” It’s so easy, so comfortable, so gently suspenseful … even the spycraft isn’t confusing (a criticism by some folks of the ground-breaking The Spy Who Came in from the Cold and others). Add to this that the story’s set in 2018. Brexit, Trump, and the resulting confusion in both England and the US serve as backdrops … and for sure, display the author’s disgust.

            As a writer, I so envy the seeming ease with which he writes. I’m under no illusion that it’s effortless, but to make it seem so, that’s the magic.

            The novel is a fitting epitaph for a brilliant, even historic, author.

 Dead Souls, Gogol

            Classics are classics for a reason. (Austen, Dickens, Tolstoy, et al.) Plot, character development, similes and metaphors, scenery, suspense, not a misplaced word – and frosting on the cake, taking the reader to undiscovered places and people. All is on display in Nikolai Gogol's masterpiece.

            Don't be put off by unpronounceable Russian surnames, patronymics, diminutives – they're all navigable. The title is completely misleading; the story's a satire, a send-up of nineteenth century Russian nobility, government officials, landowners, even the miserable lot of the muziks (serfs). And poor Chichikov, the protagonist, is an aimless Don Quixote who's transparent scam gets him into and barely out of one predicament after another. The term "picaresque" is right on: "an episodic style of fiction dealing with the adventures of a rough and dishonest but appealing hero."

            While you're at it, do some research into Gogol's short, but famous life. When your hero and mentor is Pushkin, it’s a good start.

Being Wrong, Shulz

            Kathryn Shulz, New Yorker writer, tackles the dichotomy between thinking we’re right, but more often than not being proved wrong. “We learn from our mistakes” is a simplistic way of acknowledging how often down through history, mankind has gotten things wrong – flat earth, wacko “medicines,” dictatorships, witness mid-identification, and on and on – even after the Enlightenment and the scientific method began to set somethings straight.

            What is just as alarming is our reluctance to admit our wrongness and our feeble, often laughable, excuses – often refusing to accept what’s been proven.

            Ms. Shulz is an excellent journalist, and the examples she cites again and again are fascinating (albeit, often tragic). I won’t try to list them. Read this eminently readable book … and ponder the state of discourse in the US these days. (She published the book in 2010.)

The Glass Hotel, Mandel

            It’s seldom that I read a book straight through. My first excuse is that I’m a very slow reader. A second reason is that as a wannabe writer myself, I pay close attention to words, descriptions, character development, and of course plot. Emily St. John Mandel’s newest novel grabbed me and held on. I ate it up.

            Loosely based on the financial and personal misery that Bernie Madoff and his Ponzi scheme inflicted, Ms. Mandel’s plot focuses primarily on a woman (improbably named Vincent) raised in part at an exclusive hotel on the northernmost tip of Vancouver Island. In the course of the novel, she becomes the companion (but not wife) of the novel’s bad guy, Jonathan Alkaitis. Happenstance connections abound, but none of it feels contrived. The plot flows despite time jumps and backstories. (Mandel confesses that at one point she had in mind the structure of Cloud, Atlas, but abandoned it as not workable. I did get that feeling.)

            The writing is so good that at one point, I noticed I’d stopped breathing and had to set the book down for a few moments. This is not to say it’s a thriller, or scary, just suspenseful – suspense due to caring about the well-drawn main characters. The scenes are captivating: gorgeous natural surroundings, shipboard on a merchant vessel, cocktail parties, rock band dives, living the moneyed life. And here is where I feel Mandel is superior: she invests each incident, chapter, character with a realism that made me feel she must have experienced the events herself. Her descriptions of the fallout from the Ponzi scheme’s collapse … well, no spoiler here.

            Ms. Mandel is simply a very talented writer. Her previous book, Station Eleven, was a finalist for the National Book Award as well as for the PEN/Faulkner Award, and is expected to be presented as an HBO miniseries, possibly a movie. (The subject is a pandemic!)

            If I have any complaint, and it’s quibbling I admit, I lost track of which minor characters are which. There are also two places where it’s unclear who the narrator is. (Other readers have raised this point on Goodreads.)

            One final comment, a favorable one: Vincent is much more than “eye candy” for an absurdly rich market manipulator. She’s an independent, fully developed character who, start to finish, plots her own path. I found myself wishing I’d have known her.

Chances Are … , Russo

            Richard Russo is one of my favorite authors. No surprise then that I greatly enjoyed his latest book which spoke to, well, my “generation.” Three college chums now in their 60s, reconnoiter at the Martha’s Vineyard home belonging to a recently deceased mother of one of them. The son’s task is to decide whether or not to sell the place (he lives in the Midwest). So, it seems a good idea to enlist the advice of two of his mates who once upon a time celebrated there many years before, right after their college graduation.

            The lads have not been close but have kept in touch off and on during the different paths their lives have taken. It’s too good an invitation … lured in great part by memories of a fourth member of their close-knit friendship, the free and wild girl (Jacy) they all lusted after. So, back in time we and they go to the 70s; hashing at a college sorority, singing along with Johnny Mathis and Grace Slick, and critically, anticipating the Viet Nam draft lottery. Then, back and forth to a much different world (Obama’s in office; Trump’s on the horizon) and the mystery of what happened to Jacy who’s disappeared.

            I must confess to the enjoyment of reliving parts of my own life back in the day. But Russo is such an easy, accomplished storyteller, I recommend the book to anyone. People’s lives change, take different paths. We seldom know the backstories of even close friends. Add to this, Russo’s sly humor, his inoffensive cynicism, and an unfolding mystery.

            I happily add this book to Nobody’s Fool, Empire Falls, and The Straight Man in the Russo chronicles.

Juliette, Naked   Hornby

            Juliette joins About a Boy, High Fidelity, and Funny Girl, as Nick Hornby’s fun reads. The same understated humor, direct-hit personality quirks, and (reasonable) plot make his books perfect for thoughtful, if escapist reads.

            No point in outlining the plot (Okay: A reclusive rock star, the subject of a small coterie of obsessive wonky Internet slaves, is introduced into the lives of one of said wonks and his tired-of-it wife.)

            Alert: The first couple of chapters about the wonk and his mate are a bit dry, but when Tucker Crowe is revealed, the story takes off.

            On to How To Be Good and A Long Way Down.

Dissolution, Sansom

            Matthew Shardlake, lawyer and a trusted “councilor” of Thomas Cromwell, is sent to investigate the murder of his predecessor who was charged with overseeing the eventual dissolution of the Monastery of St. Donatus near Scarnsea in the south of England. “Dissolution” was the euphemism used in the reign of Henry VIII to piece-by-piece disassemble the Catholic religion in England.

            C.J. Sansom’s rendering of the chaos, chicanery, evil, and downright blood-thirstiness of Tudor England is vivid and historically true. Catholics on the run, Anne Boleyn’s beheading (third wife Jane Seymour has just died), and overseeing it all is the ruthless Cromwell at the height of his powers.

            Sansom was trained as a lawyer and practiced law before turning to writing full-time. He is an award-winner and much published. His scholarship is prodigious. So is the novel’s suspense as his hunchback protagonist and young associate try to follow the skein of clues throughout a typically secretive Benedictine order.

            My fascination with English history, in particular the troubled 16th Century, is all wrapped up in a tasty, well-written mystery. What’s not to like! And Dissolution is a great accessory to Hilary Mantel’s Cromwell novels.

Run River, Didion

            I cannot be objective about my enjoyment of this book. As a fellow Sacramentan (and Berkeley-ite, albeit a decade apart), she had me hooked with every reference to a scene from my childhood: the Sacramento River, the State Capitol and legislature, the Senator Hotel, Del Paso Country Club, hop fields, heat. Of course, Joan Didion needs no acclamation from me. Her literary trajectory and her books (as recently as the memoirs of her husband and daughter) are well-known.

            One of her earliest works, Run River tells the story of the slow descent of a pair of intertwined Valley families. Yet, though the outcome seems destined from the start, Didion’s writing style keeps the pace up, keeps a brave face on, keeps one dazzling sentence after another. The people are real, and yet even a murder is understated–like told via a rearview mirror, it seemed. It’s easy to see how her style became iconic for many writers in the Sixties, and has been adopted by many another author ever since.

            Okay, I said I’m not being objective. But as pure, read-it-till-your-eyes-are-tired, fiction, this book can’t be beat.

The Club, Damrosch

            Not a beach read by any stretch, but I stuck with it; subtitle, Johnson, Boswell, and the Friends Who Shaped an Age.

            The “club” was a tavern in London where a Who’s Who of historic personalities met to talk and drink. In addition to the two eponymous men in the title, the “friends” included Joshua Reynolds, Edmund Burke, Adam Smith, Edward Gibbon, and Oliver Goldsmith … among others. Remarkable!

            Acclaimed Harvard professor, Leo Damrosch (no obligatory CV apparently needed in the book for this renowned pedant) takes his time with biographies, historic footnotes, friends and foes, black-and-white and color pictures to memorialize an eclectic, long-standing meeting of minds, literally. In its twenty years of existence, the club included upward of fifty personages–some we remember, others Who?

            Samuel Johnson and his famous biographer James Boswell are the pivots around whom the book revolves. Their friendship (more a mentor/adoring protégée relationship) would have left its mark on history by itself via the Life of Johnson. Add in a foremost portraitist of his time, the inventor of economics, an historical member of Parliament and writer, and the author of the Rise and Fall; throw in David Garrick, pre-eminent actor of his time and the man who revived theater in London, and you’d think Providence had planned it.

            The book is long, but worth it. Plenty of warts, missteps, feuds, jealousy among these otherwise typical eighteenth-century fellows keeps it lively. Both Boswell and Johnson might not be invited back to our house after one or two dinner parties, but, their foibles and outsized personalities make for good reading.

            My only complaint is that there was not enough actual “Johnson.” How did his Dictionary make his name, and why is his name today synonymous with English literature? Damrosch includes plenty of quotes and anecdotes, but I came away wanting to know more. Perhaps, even reading his work. What a concept!