THE HERO OF THIS BOOK by Elizabeth McCracken

Whether or not I like an author depends a lot on which of their books I read first.  In the case of Elizabeth McCracken, I loved The Giant’s House, but if I had read Niagara Falls All Over Again or Bowlaway first, I probably would not still be reading her books.  This book, however, is another winner for me.  Marketed as a novel, it’s mostly a memoir and totally a paean to the author’s beloved but now deceased mother.  The first-person narrator is in London visiting, contemplating and commenting on various sites she had visited with her mother or would have liked to.  Her mother had mobility issues her entire life, due to cerebral palsy—a diagnosis that the narrator/daughter was not aware of until she became an adult.  The prose here is smart, funny, and touching, but if you’re looking for a meaty plot, don’t expect to find one here.  The narrator also reflects on the craft of writing and insists that a character’s physical characteristics be described.  I couldn’t agree more.  I always find it frustrating if I cannot picture a character in my mind.  In this case, the author describes her mother quite vividly, including her diminutive stature and her eyebrows, “which were like nobody else’s.”  Oddly enough, I did not find the narrator’s mother to be all that endearing.  Even the narrator owns up to some of her mother’s faults.  Both of the narrator’s parents where hoarders, and her mother was unwilling to part with even one of four waffle irons that she never used.  The narrator admits that she and her mother were both terrible at managing money, but the narrator did discover after her mother’s death that her mother had financial resources that her mother never tapped, because she did not know they existed.  For someone obviously so intelligent, this lapse just baffles me.

TOM LAKE by Ann Patchett

Lara and her husband Joe own a Michigan cherry orchard, and all three of their adult daughters are at home helping out during the Covid lockdown.  It’s the perfect time for Lara to share the story of her brief career as an actress and her involvement with an actor named Peter Duke who became a movie star.  The rapt attention of her three daughters eggs Lara on, starting with her unplanned audition for the role of Emily in her high school’s production of Thornton Wilder’s play Our Town.  She goes on to play Emily in two other venues, and the final production is the one in which she meets Peter Duke, referred to simply as Duke throughout this book, who plays her father.  Lara so thoroughly embodies the Emily of the play, that the cast and crew call her Emily, which is also the name of her oldest daughter.  Two characters with essentially the same name occasionally caused me some mild confusion in distinguishing between the past and the present or the mother and the daughter, but not to a degree that detracted from my enjoyment of the story.  The real questions that we readers wanted answered were why she gave up acting, why did she break up with Duke, and how did she meet Joe.  The answers to all of these questions are unexpected.  This is just a delightful and beautifully written story of family and the regrettable mistakes we made when we were young.  Lara’s mistakes are myriad and embarrassing, often reflective of poor judgment, but they all lead to the contentment that she now enjoys.

TRUTH & BEAUTY by Ann Patchett

Lucy Grealy was an author and poet and a dear friend of Ann Patchett’s, ever since they were roommates at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop.  This homage to Lucy and to her friendship with Patchett is very readable but not quite riveting.  Lucy was a very needy person who just wanted to be loved, preferably by a man, despite the fact that she had tons of very devoted friends—both male and female.  As a child she developed cancer of the jaw, and her life was an endless series of surgeries intended to improve her appearance and her ability to eat and speak.  She achieved acclaim as a writer when she published Autobiography of a Face in 1994, but no surgeon was able to reconstruct her face satisfactorily.  She suffered mightily, even having her fibula removed so that it could be used to supplant her jaw bone, but the results were never as advertised.  My only complaint about this book is that Patchett never gave me reason to love Lucy, who reminds me so much of the character Jude in A Little Life.  I empathized with Lucy, but she squandered not only her friendships but also her talent and her financial gains.  Devotees like Patchett were constantly at her beck and call—financially, emotionally, and in person.  I just couldn’t figure out why, unless all her friends needed to be needed, and I don’t think that’s the case with Ann Patchett, at least.  Ann obviously genuinely loved Lucy, partly for her mind, I suppose.  One very telling incident in the book is where Lucy went on a date with George Stephanopoulos after he answered her personal ad in the New York Review of Books.  She did not seem disappointed at their failure to hit it off, but the question on all her friends’ minds was whether he knew in advance about her disfigured face.  She unraveled when someone actually asked her.

OUR MISSING HEARTS by Celeste Ng

This book's political angle hits uncomfortably close to home.  The Crisis, a period of economic collapse, yielded way to a dystopian, fascist, xenophobic society with a Stepford tinge to it.  I would say that this book is prescient with its glimpse of what could be coming, but some aspects of it are already here, such as the removal of banned books from school libraries.  The right-wing extremist government described here has discovered that the most effective way to scare people into doing its bidding is to threaten to take away their children.  Sound familiar?  Parents who don’t parrot the government line will have their children placed in foster homes, and countless children have been relocated, thanks to a government-sanctioned vigilante system.  Twelve-year-old Noah Gardner, nicknamed Bird, would be in danger of being removed if his mother hadn’t fled and gone into hiding after a line from one of her poems became the rallying cry for subversives.  This book works well when it is firing a warning shot about what could be ahead for this country, but other aspects of the plot seem a little too convenient.  For example, Bird’s mother acquires the assistance of an old friend who happens to be extremely wealthy with access to some sophisticated technology, and the reunion of Bird with an old school friend in a completely different city struck me as an unlikely coincidence.  The small cast of characters gives the book an intimacy that contrasts with the global issues this book raises, and the plot moves along nicely, except for a section in which Bird’s mother goes into way too much descriptive detail of the Crisis.  I could have skipped that section and not missed out on anything.

UTOPIA AVENUE by David Mitchell

Utopia Avenue is the name of a very talented eclectic band assembled in England in the 1960s.  The backdrop of this musical era helps make this a nostalgia trip worth taking.  Griff, the drummer, is the only member of the band who does not sing or write, but he endures a tragic event that threatens to derail his career.  Jasper, the superb lead guitarist, has spent time in a mental health facility because of noises in his head that disrupt his life.  Dean is the bass player who left home as a teenager after his father burned his guitar and treasured memorabilia.  The keyboardist is a woman nicknamed Elf, who is not elfin but had moderate success previously in a folk duo.  I loved all four of these musicians, as well as their manager, Levon, but the plot drags at times, despite the sprinkling of cameo appearances by Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, John Lennon, David Bowie, and a bunch of others.  And let’s face it, this is a very long book that leans heavily on character development.  Dean is the closest to being a stereotypical rock star, and, although both he and Elf probably would have a shot at a solo career, the band members are very supportive of one another.  They become a close-knit family, despite the fact that, except for Jasper and Dean, they were strangers before they came together as a band.  Some healthy competition among them serves as an impetus for each of them to perform at their optimum level.  The biggest squabble among them is deciding whose single they will release first—Jasper’s, Dean’s, or Elf’s.  Ultimately, they roll the dice—literally.

SLADE HOUSE by David Mitchell

As ghost stories go, this one is not particularly gruesome or even scary, but it’s a good one nonetheless, and actually, it’s more of a haunted house story.  Every nine years a small iron door on a narrow street leads to a mansion occupied by a brother and sister who need to consume the soul of another person in order to maintain their immortality.  The intrepid but unwise people who enter the mansion are seeking those who have come before them and disappeared, but their curiosity or quest for closure seems to outweigh their good sense.  Part of the problem, of course, is that most of these seekers doubt that paranormal entities even exist and therefore lack the wariness that might protect them.  Plus, sometimes one of the sibling villains will inhabit a host’s body and masquerade as a helpful guide when in fact they are luring their unsuspecting prey into a trap.  Since each character, except the siblings, is a fleeting entity, I would say that this book is definitely not a character study, but David Mitchell’s writing never disappoints, even with the somewhat repetitive plot.  Each time a new victim starts up the Slade House stairs, I wanted to shout, “No, no, no, don’t go,” but each time some temptation eggs them on.  I have read that this novel is a sequel to The Bone Clocks, but since I do not remember that novel at all, I can assure you that this novel’s supernatural storyline stands on its own quite well, without the prequel.  It may not be a Mitchell’s masterpiece, but I certainly enjoyed the ride.

BLACK SWAN GREEN by David Mitchell

Jason Taylor is the smart, funny, and especially endearing first-person narrator of this gem, which takes place in a small English town in the 1980s.  Jason has a stammer, which is different from a stutter, according to Jason, and it plagues his thirteen-year-old life almost as much as the bullies at school.  And if these problems weren’t torture enough, his parents’ marriage is on the rocks, and his sister is leaving for college.  (The prospect of a broken home is never really funny, but Jason’s mom hilariously punishes his father for his infidelity with an expensive project that backfires.)  Jason’s numerous adventures fill the pages of this novel, the most telling of which, I think, is when he finds the lost wallet of his primary nemesis.  Another good one is his race through a backyard gauntlet which he has to negotiate in order to join a vaunted school gang, and this obstacle course seems to be a metaphor for the many pitfalls of adolescence which he has to weave his way through on a daily basis.  Jason strives for acceptance into a peer group that is obviously not worthy of him, but, along the way, he learns some valuable life lessons about love, death, bigotry, and honesty—to name a few.  We also discover late in the novel that the burden of guilt weighs him down, even though he really bears no responsibility for the tragedy in question.  In other words, he holds himself to too high a standard at times, and he’s a sensitive kid, writing poetry under a pseudonym in order to avoid ridicule.  My only complaint, and it’s a minor one, is that Jason’s narration is full of contractions, even double contractions, such as “shouldn’t’ve,” that are difficult to read.  I think the author intends for these contractions to lend authenticity to Jason’s voice, but that authenticity would be easier to listen to than to read, and I think Jason would be just as authentic on the page without this distraction.