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There There by Tommy Orange
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I expected a novel of the contemporary Native American experience, and I got that and much more in There There. Orange’s debut is a story told through a rotating cast of characters who reveal the urban Native American experience with complexity and honesty. Each one introduces him or herself, sometimes providing a little backstory, and then gradually the strands gather momentum as we move toward the powwow that represents something different for each individual. There’s real human emotion on every page, and I felt myself connected to the plight of each one—even the quote-unquote bad guys. Orange writes with confidence, and if I had a complaint it’s that the novel was over so soon. I could have stayed in this world longer.

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Putin Country is a collection of essays focusing on various aspects of life in contemporary Chelyabinsk, a city that sits over a thousand miles east of Moscow. Garrels began reporting from there in the 90s, shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and she uses her experience over the last 25 years to observe the state of Russia that’s far removed from the international headlines. One could imagine a Russian journalist settling in Ames, Iowa, to attempt a reciprocal bit of reporting.

The collection reads much like the written form of a radio report. The essays focus topically on the health system, journalism, nuclear waste, environment, schools, LGBT-issues, and several other points of interest. Throughout she tells the stories of real people, which helps to ground the collection and make the writing vivid. But my complaint is that the book seems to skate over the surface of the conditions it depicts. I wanted Garrels to connect the dots more, and draw lines back to Putin and Moscow, but that wasn’t her focus in this collection. I’ve been told Masha Gessen’s The Future is History may be more what I’m looking for.

Complaints aside, Putin Country is a good introduction for anyone unfamiliar with life in modern Russia—a bleak portrait from a difficult place.

What an unexpected pleasure this collection turned out to be. I hadn’t read Mattison before (or heard of her, that I recall), and chose this book for the cover. I was hoping to find a story or two that held my attention, but In Case We’re Separated turned out to be a collection of fiction where the sum feels greater than the parts. Each one of these stories is a gem, with characters that come to life on the page and details that turn our attention toward the humane moments of life. With little fanfare, these stories dive deep into the everyday and bring back a refreshing take on the timelessness of family. And even more, the connections don’t feel easily coincidental (one of my frequent gripes with linked stories), but rather like hard-won victories. A collection to be savored and enjoyed.

Nobody’s Fool by Richard Russo
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This was my first time reading Russo, which I’ve felt I ought to do for a while. And now, unfortunately, I feel a little less compelled.

There’s very little wrong with the novel, although I take issue with the way women are often depicted as either objects of desire or old battle-axes, with the exception of Mrs. Peoples. Russo’s prose is the kind of writing that I slide right into and feel at home, happy to be carried along by a master storyteller with a sense of humor and an eye for the absurd in small-town America.

But if there’s little wrong with the novel, I also think there’s little right with the novel, in the sense that there’s not much to challenge or push the form or the reader. So, fine. Maybe that’s not the book Russo wanted to write. In the end, Nobody’s Fool felt like a cozy, something I looked forward to reading as a way to distract me from day-to-day life. Not bad, but not terribly good either. I guess it’s a little like betting the triple at the OTB and winning only the 1st and 2nd race.

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The Burning Girl by Claire Messud
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I was drawn immediately in by the mood of tragedy, or disaster, that hangs over the opening pages. But then began to lose interest as the story seemed to follow the familiar pattern of two fast friends who gradually lose interest in their friendship. The element that held Julia and Cassie together seems inexplicable in this story, especially to Julia, but maybe also to the author. I was reminded (for a few pages) of the young friendship in My Brilliant Friend and the way attraction can be difficult to explain and how friends can do terrible things to each other. But The Burning Girl skates over the surface of these deeper dynamics, and I found myself wondering about the narrator, Julia, and why she’s telling us the story. How is it that she’s the one true memory keeper for Cassie? Is she just an observer, or in some way implicated?

By the end, I was brought back into the story by the focus on the terrible weight placed on girls as they move toward being women. But I feel like there’s something just a bit out of reach with the story, some element of Julia’s self-knowledge that’s missing from the page.

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The Humans by Matt Haig
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This novel takes the fish-out-of-water concept to a whole new level. An unnamed alien on assignment inhabits the body of a Cambridge mathematician to save the universe from the possibility that humans will gain access to powerful knowledge that will threaten the peaceful stability of said universe. That sentence is dry. This novel is not. A sly sense of humor inhabits our narrator’s observations, which are essentially notes for the entities back on its home planet. Along the way we get to see ourselves from the outside in, and our narrator also slowly modifies some of his initial judgments. In fact, nearly all of them.

My complaints are petty. 1) the ostensible purpose for this novel dissolves halfway through, and then The Humans becomes just a regular novel. 2) in becoming a regular novel, one feels the tug on the heartstrings a bit much. But all in all, still very enjoyable, and genuinely laugh-out-loud funny (it’s true).

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White Teeth by Zadie Smith
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I first read White Teeth somewhere around 2005, and 13 years later it still holds up. Crackling wit, vivid descriptions, and characters that come to life. Smith nails dialogue as if she were transcribing conversations between the most interesting people in the room, and her narration is operating at full authorial confidence. This time around my favorite parts of the story were watching Archie and Samad bumble into middle-age, and Clara and Alsana sagely put up with them. I realize that means I’m old. Children spin out of these relationships, and though the novel takes a slightly preposterous turn to bring them all back together in the end, the conclusion nonetheless delivers the satisfying one-two punch of a real ending (and even managed to surprise me in my second reading).

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T Singer by Dag Solstad
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I spent the first twenty pages trying to understand why anyone would want to write, much less read, a novel like T Singer. Having finished it, I’m not certain I know why Solstad set out to write a book like this, but I feel more enthusiastic about the reasons for reading it.

Singer is a man beset by anxiety, constantly reviewing his motivations and decisions. His chief ambition seems to be avoiding attention, and in pursuit of anonymity he takes a job as a librarian in small Notodden. For a time, he achieves his goal, but then he happens to fall in love, bringing to an end his days of solitude and anonymity. But his relationship creates ever more complex chains of motivations and consequences, through which Singer must learn to navigate.

Granted, it’s not a fast-paced story (though I was surprised by the occasional appearance of characters like Adam Eyde, Ingemann, and others, who manage to lift the story out of its sluggish pace), but Singer’s anxiety is contagious and soon I found myself thinking about moments from my life where I’d said or done things that I regretted now. In his own peculiar way, Singer manages to elicit both sympathy and enmity, and becomes a kind of regrettable (or regretting?) everyman that looks a little too much like myself.

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The Age of Caesar: Five Roman Lives by Plutarch
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The Romans—they’re just like us! Okay, not really. But you don’t have to dig deep to find the family resemblance.

This collection of five of Plutarch’s Lives includes Pompey, Caesar, Brutus, Antony, and Cicero, with many lines threading between each of these. Plutarch is entertaining and funny, insightful and critical, and through the seemingly endless descriptions of wars and battles, we gain access to a period of history when the people wanted security and prosperity, the noblemen wanted to maintain systems that ensured them access to incredible wealth, and the leaders were willing to strike deals and scheme betrayals if only to gain one more day of supreme power. There are occasional moments of nobility and honor, but more often these Lives reveal the ways that arrogance and paranoia work in concert to raise up strong men and also to ensure their downfall. An enlightening read.

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On a Day Like This by Peter Stamm
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I’m a fan of Peter Stamm’s short stories (especially the collection, We’re Flying), and thought I’d try some longer fiction. This novel reads quickly and feels almost like a long short story. Andreas, a teacher of German in a school outside Paris, is floating through his life when he’s caught unaware by a medical diagnosis. Fearful of the results, he opts to sever his connections with the school and his life, and sets himself off on a course of reckoning with a past that’s never been far from his thoughts.

The story’s clear and engaging, though it feels a little monotone. It’s hard to tell whether that’s Andreas bleeding into the narrative or just Stamm’s writing style in a longer piece. I certainly felt infuriated by Andreas at points, which I think we’re meant to do, but it’s hard to get too excited about a middle-aged man waffling over the decision to live his life or not. The cover flap describes him as an anti-hero, and therein lies the key, I suppose. I’ll have to give another Stamm novel a try next.

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